What if superintelligent AI didn’t care about humans? Does intelligence necessitate care? Probably not.While I find it hard to imagine care in the absence of cognitive capacity, I can’t see anything that guarantees all cognitively apt agents will harbour care. How, if at all possible, can we from our current position assess the likelihood that…
In AI safety, direct specification refers to the attempt to program specific goals, rules, or behaviours directly into an AI system. AI trained to optimise values may over-optimise those we specify at the expense of real value we don’t specify. Political or market dynamics incentivise racing to powerful AI – the race dynamics come with…
In interesting article I read today was ‘Meta’s AI guru LeCun: Most of today’s AI approaches will never lead to true intelligence‘ by Tiernan Ray. Though I think the title is a bit misleading with it’s reference to ‘true intelligence’. The article uses ‘human level intelligence’ as it’s framing, though the space of possible intelligence…
If you are a Negative Utilitarian (NU) you are morally obliged to wipe out all existence for the sake of a pin prick, but if you are a Classical Utilitarian (CU) you are morally obliged to accept trade-offs between suffering and bliss as long as the bliss outweighs the suffering. NU doesn’t accept trade-offs, it’s…
James Hughes is the ED of IEET – He discusses the Russia/Ukraine conflict in relation to the history of NATO and Russia, the social democratic project. He then discusses global catastrophic risks of nuclear and biotech and the problems surrounding fake news. Audio:
Feral cats kill about 1 million native animals per day in ecosystems which didn’t evolve to cope with cats. How should we deal with the problem of feral cats? I hear a lot of ‘kill ’em all’ [1]. When in HK I noticed a lot of cats with one ear slightly smaller.. then found out…
An interesting new series ‘The Age of A.I.’ narrated by Robert Downey Jr. – this first episode looks at how AI’s interact with humans ‘Affective Computing’ using object recognition, NLP attempting to simulate human emotion, digital avatars which work like agents for us – similar to John M. Smart’s idea of a digital twin (I…
Intelligence is powerful – since natural selection stumbled on intelligence, organisms have developed increasingly complex modes of survival and reproduction. What evolution didn’t know, was that it’s dominant position in shaping life on earth would be superseded by intelligence. Intelligence can make sense of evolution by natural selection, it can make sense of the environments…
Remembering Lee Smolin’s theory of the dynamical evolution of the universe where through a form of natural selection, black holes spawn new universes, I thought that if a superintelligent civilization understood its mechanics, they may try to control it, and engineer or bias the physics in the spawned universe – and possibly migrate to this…
Is democracy loosing its credibility, will it cede to dictatorship? Will AI out-compete us in all areas of economic usefulness – making us the future useless class? It’s difficult to get around the bottlenecks of networking and coordination in distributed democracies. In the past quite naturally distributed systems being scattered are more redundant wer in…