Re: Why would AI want to be friendly?

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Sep 30 2000 - 09:29:58 MDT


Emlyn wrote:
>
> I guess AI will have to make a judgement call. That's the truly dangerous
> part.

It would be the truly dangerous part if we were dealing with corruptible
humans. The whole principle here is that the AI doesn't *want* to disobey the
spirit of the rules.

    "Don't try to be strict, the way you would be with an untrustworthy
     human. Don't worry about "loopholes". If you've succeeded worth
     a damn, your AI is Friendly enough not to *want* to exploit
     loopholes. If the Friendly action is a loophole, then "closing the
     loophole" means *you have told the AI to be unFriendly*, and that's
     much worse."

As for that odd scenario you posted earlier, curiosity - however necessary or
unnecessary to a functioning mind - is a perfectly reasonable subgoal of
Friendliness, and therefore doesn't *need* to have independent motive force.

-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence



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