Re: What are "AGI-first'ers" expecting AGI will teach us about FAI?

From: Samantha Atkins (sjatkins@gmail.com)
Date: Sun Apr 13 2008 - 01:41:13 MDT


Rolf Nelson wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 6:02 PM, Ben Goertzel <ben@goertzel.org> wrote:
>
>> The fact that AGi ethics is incredibly badly understood right now, and
>> the only clear route to understand it better is to make more empirical
>> progress toward AGI. I find it unlikely that dramatic advances in AGI
>> ethical theory are going to be made in a vacuum, separate from
>> coupled advances in AGI practice. I know some others disagree on
>> this.
>>
>
> For any of the many people who agree with Ben's sentiment:
>
> Large numbers of people have made various AI advances in the past. In
> none of these cases, to my knowledge, have FAI people said, "a-ha,
> that's one of the pieces of data I was waiting for, this advances FAI
> theory."
Because FAI was and is completely and utterly irrelevant to the level of
AI to date.

> Why would we expect this to change in the future? At the very
> least, doesn't this show that even if FAI advances require AGI
> advances, the "bottleneck" is that there are too few people working on
> deriving FAI from existing AGI, rather than too few people working on
> existing AGI?
>
There isn't enough progress in current AGI to derive any FAI from. So
why should any people be doing needlessly attempting such a thing?

> Are there specific facts about AGI that you're waiting to find out,
> such that if the result of a pending experiment is A, then successful
> FAI theory lies in one direction, but if the result is B, then
> successful FAI theory lies in a different direction? If so, what are
> such facts?
>
>
FAI isn't relevant if AGI does not exist.

> At what point will you know that AGI has advanced enough that FAI can proceed?
>
>
When it actually begins remotely to matter in that we have AGI that is
even at the level of a dog much less capable of doing us significant
harm. But it isn't a question of whether FAI can proceed but of
whether it is relevant and whether it can make any real progress.

> For SIAI specifically: how is OpenCog going to be "coupled" to
> "dramatic advances in AGI ethical theory"?
>

AGI ethical theory? What a fine intellectual abstraction. But that
seems to be all it is at this point.

- samantha



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