Re: Why would AI want to be friendly?

From: J. R. Molloy (jr@shasta.com)
Date: Tue Sep 05 2000 - 21:51:34 MDT


Why would AIs want to be friendly?
Because if cognitive scientists can make one AI, they can make millions
(billions) of them, simply by copying them. When developers have sufficient
numbers of intelligent agents, they simply let the IAs compete for the right to
reproduce. These evolvable agents then do their own genetic programming. The
friendliest AIs get to reproduce, the rest get terminated. The socialization of
AIs would be a snap compared to the socialization of human children.
By the time the AIs evolve to above-human-intelligence, they would be far more
trustworthy than any human, due to many generations of culling the herd of AIs.
Think of AI as a huge population of intelligent agents rather than as a single
entity, and the problem of making them friendly disappears. All you have to do
is discard any artificially intelligent individuals which show symptoms of
unfriendliness, and you end up with very friendly, docile, and helpful agents
all very intent on breeding themselves into friendly, docile, and helpful SIs.

AFAIK, Asimov never considered the possibility of genetic programming and
evolvable machines which could compete against each other to reach higher levels
of IQ. With thousands (or millions and billions) of artificially intelligent
agents battling each other to reproduce, all humans would need to do is to cull
the herd, so to speak. Any unfriendly AI agents (unlike human children) could
simply be terminated. This would result in a population of AIs with docility and
compliance as part of their genetic code. Moravec's Mind Children could
obviously number in the millions from the start, because as soon as one is
developed, it could be duplicated ad infinitum. With an unlimited supply of
genetically programmed AIs, their evolution could be guided and directed as
experimenters see fit. The socialization of AI would consequently be far easier
than the socialization of humans.

--J. R.

"I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the
past." --Thomas Jefferson



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