Re: What are we going to wish for?

Tim Tyler <seemysig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
casey wrote:
On Apr 1, 8:22 pm, Tim Tyler <seemy...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Basic evolutionary biology suggests we were "built" to
create more copies of our genes - and that happiness is
just one of many carrots.

Happiness is the feeling we get when we perceive things
are getting better and unhappiness is the feeling we get
when things are getting worse.

Even if happiness /were/ our goal, how to define it for
an AI?

The same way as it is for us. If things are getting better
for the AI it would feel happy and if things were getting
worse it would feel unhappy.

For the AI?!?

I thought the idea was for it to maximise *human* happiness.

That would be the way would build them. We would build them such that
maximizing human happiness is what they would need to do to maximize their
own happiness.

IMO, that is not what's going to happen. Instead, we
will see AIs built to maximise individual corporate
or governmental goals - not those of individual humans,
or of the whole of humanity.

Corporations are already AIs. They are functioning reinforcement learning
systems motivated to maximize reward as measured by the flow of the
abstract measure of reward we built them to maximize - money. In a
functioning capitalistic society they make themselves happy by making their
customers happy, and in the end, this makes all the individual humans
happy. We are all linked together through the large external reward system
of money.

But these giant and very smart and very powerful AIs only work for us as
long as we keep control of them - as long as we keep control of their
rewards. If we loose control of them, we become slaves to them, instead
of them being slaves to us. Some people think that since humans are the
prime engine of the corporations (currently - won't be true after we invent
strong AI), that the corporations won't ultimately take over. But that's
wrong. Humans are easily manipulated by our reward systems and the
corporation is more than willing to force it's employees to do whatever the
corporation needs to have done - including making the CEO care more about
the needs of the corporation than about the needs of other humans by paying
him so much he can't resist doing anything else.

That chain of control which keeps humans in control currently works by
putting humans at the top of the control chain, each with an equal control
of the government with our equal votes. The government itself is a big
self-serving AI which we must control, but we use it to control the other
giant AIs we have already created called the corporations. At the same
time, we use capitalism as the reward system to regulate the behavior of
the corporations and we control them, by how we vote for them - aka how we
spend our money. But we use our control of the government as "free money"
which we spend to make sure we all have equal power to regulate what it
does, and with that ultimate measure of equal human happiness, we use that
keep the capitalistic reward system functioning.

If corporate goals, the monopolies and mergers
commision may find themselves with some work to do.

If governmental goals, the rest of the world had
better watch out.

Well, advancing technology will both allow, and force, the world to merge
together under larger systems of government until we reach the point of a
true world government. The development of AI will certainly help allow and
force that to happen. At which time, the AIs will become slaves to the
needs of the government, which will be controlled by the humans of the
world.

As I have suggested before, but I don't think you fully grasped, (because
you accused me of wanting to get rid of capitalism when that's not my
intent at all), I believe we will merge our "voting" and "money spending"
into a single system of control where we all get an equal vote in the form
a fixed amount of money per person to spend (aka vote) on what we want the
government (run by AIs) to do for us.

The current form of capitalism only works as long as humans are a key part
of the system doing all the production of goods and services. But as AIs
get to the point of being as intelligent as any human, we will find
ourselves in a situation where we are no longer a key part of the system.
This will create growing amounts of inequity between humans because our
wealth and power under the current system won't be a function of what we do
but will be a function of what we own and control. Our time and labor will
be worth less and less as technology advances creating an every growing
divide between the super rich and the super poor. Hard work will have less
and less to do with getting the "good life". Who you know, and what you
own (or what your family owns) will be the only key to happiness. The
families and groups that own all the AIs will end up controlling the world
and unlike now, they will have no need for laborers to build their big
homes and keep them fed and take care of them because they will have AIs to
do all that for them.

But I don't think the world is going to let that happen, and the result is
that our governments will supply increasing higher levels of service to us
all and less will be done by the capitalistic systems directly. But this
will create inefficiencies which will be resolved by a transformation of
government services into a capitalistic system where people get to "vote"
on what services they get with some form of "money" (call them government
vouchers if you like?). So the production system is still regulated and
optimized by the flow of rewards (capitalism), but no humans aren't doing
the production - they are just telling the machine (aka the government)
what they want done.

In either case, we had best hope the organisation
in question knows how to properly phrase wishes -
so that the AI doesn't too carelessly slurp up
the solar system and turn it into utility - while
its creators are screaming "No! that's not what
I /meant/ to ask for!"

:)

We prevent that from happening by never letting go of the flow of rewards.
We don't have to "put our order in" now, and never ask again. We ask and
vote on what we want every time we give them a reward - ever time we "pay"
them to do something for us.

And one of the things we will always spend a lot of our "money" on, is to
make sure we never lose control of their rewards. We will monitor what
happens, and we will ask the AIs to build AIs to monitor other AIs and
report to us. We will build AI police forces which police the activity of
the other AIs (if that is needed). Whatever is needed to keep a leash on
the AIs, we will do.

Long before humanity loses control of the whole system, we will see what
happens when we lose control of an individual AI (and it goes off killing
humans for example). These will be the test cases that will let us know
what to watch out for in the long run.

--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@xxxxxxxx http://NewsReader.Com/
.

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