Re: The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect

From: Andrew Clough (aclough@mit.edu)
Date: Thu Feb 27 2003 - 16:23:06 MST

  • Next message: Adrian Tymes: "Re: NASA: Forget Space-- Go Deep"

    At 01:20 PM 2/27/2003 -0500, you wrote:
    >On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 02:15:38PM +0100, Anders Sandberg wrote:
    > > I think the important point about the story was that it showed how
    > > "friendliness" can go wrong, not in the traditional "evil AI goes on
    > > rampage across the world" sense or the equally tranditional "nice AI
    > > creates an utopia but humans have no meaning without struggle" (which
    > > it mimicks on the surface). Here the issue is that it is a too rigid
    > > friendliness: yes, it will protect people and give them what they
    > > want, but in an inflexible way.
    >
    >I think the problem is not rigidity. The problem is that the SI is not
    >really an SI. It's not especially intelligent. It can be fooled by
    >unaugmented humans, and it doesn't seem capable of augmenting human
    >intelligence (the story doesn't explicitly say this, but it's implied
    >because nobody in the story asks for augmented intelligence or encounters
    >anyone with augmented intelligence). What kind of an SI would have
    >unintentionally almost allowed somebody to die from rabies?

    I was actually able to find a passage which explains why augmentation is
    impossible. In the second chapter, right before the singularity, Lawrence
    enters this into his creation: "Force Association: Interpreting the
    contents of a human being's mind in order to understand or predict its
    behavior shall be a violation of the First Law of severity two." This seems
    to pretty much prevent the enhancement of humans by the budding SI.

    The author goes into a bit of depth on exactly how the creator did so badly
    in making his SI:

      http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime-intellect/mopising.html

    In short, the fictional programmer hadn't read anything by Eliezer on how
    to do it right.

    Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. Don't assign
    to stupidity what might be due to ignorance. And try not to assume you
    opponent is the ignorant one-until you can show it isn't you.
    -M.N. Plano



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Feb 27 2003 - 16:31:01 MST