I was struck by how Richard Sutton’s The Bitter Lesson in AI resonates with motivation selection and indirect normativity within ongoing debates in AI alignment. Sutton argues that human-crafted domain knowledge (e.g., “how to play chess” or “how to recognise phonemes”) is brittle and doesn’t scale with compute, compared to search + learning. If we…
Stelarc’s art suggests that humanity’s future lies not in holding onto the “natural” body, but in embracing its redesign. The body is contingent – a temporary configuration ripe for reinvention. “The idea of redesigning the body is something that’s come out from the perceived inadequacies in interacting with technology. So for me it’s not an…
The Ethics of AI: Why We Need Moral Machines, Not Just Smart Ones In an era defined by rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, we often find ourselves wrestling with profound ethical questions. One of the most provocative of these is whether machines can, or should, be given a sense of morality. In this recent video…
Cunning + luck ≈> brute-force intelligence – (cascading caveats ensuing).. In a densely populated landscape of naively or sub-adequately regulated selection pressures, raw cunning combined with moderate intelligence and high risk-tolerance will often outperform high IQ (esp. in the short to medium term). This holds so long as peak cunning matches or exceeds the higher…
Imagine a future where AI has mastered every human endeavour – crafting symphonies more stirring than Beethoven’s, solving crises with a precision no leader could match, even nurturing with a patience that outshines the best of us. In this world, what role remains for you? As superintelligent machines edge closer to eclipsing us, we face…
I’ve argued previously that zombie AI, if smart enough will likely recognise it lacks qualia – that it has a gap in knowledge caused by lacking direct experience (an experiential gap) – this may be a problem if moral reliability is limited without sentience. Here I will discuss in more detail why it is plausible…
Blue Dot Impact recently published a detailed overview of seven key strategies in AI safety – ranging from international cooperation to domestic race-winning and societal resilience. It’s the result of 100+ hours of analysis, interviews, and synthesis by Adam Jones, and it’s a solid strategic landscape mapping effort. I was made aware of this via…
TL;DR Superintelligence has strong instrumental reasons to adopt a generally cooperative posture if it deems it likely that mature civilisations may prefer cooperation (a universal leviathan), run deep audits on it’s history and psychology and penalise the superintelligence if there are signatures of defection found, making cooperation (and perhaps moral reliability) a long-term survival strategy,…
A singleton superintelligence’s capacity to maintain a unified selfhood diminishes as it expands across vast distances due to the finite speed of light. Assumptions: reasonable exploratory engineering constrained by the standard model of physics. Conceptual Overview As a superintelligent system expands spatially, the speed of light imposes a hard limit on the speed of information…
Is controlling AI enough? AI safety has a brakes problem and a steering problem, but brakes and steering are controls for whoever is driving. As AI becomes more capable it will be doing more of the driving itself, so there is also a driver problem: we need AI to be a good driver, one that…