Re: Arbitrarily decide who benefits (was Re: Bounded population)

From: Stuart Armstrong (dragondreaming@googlemail.com)
Date: Wed Apr 16 2008 - 15:12:55 MDT


>Otherwise it's arbitrary and there will probably be a
>tedious and depressing political battle over it.

I hope there will be! What the moral system of the AI is will be vital
to the whole future of humanity. How to make the decision?

Schematically:

1) The decision is made by the programmers.
2) The decision is made by a small group of people with their own
interest in mind.
3) The decision is made by a small group of altruistic people.
4) The decision is made by some sort of democratic process, strongly
guided by those with a good understanding of the issues.
5) The decision is made by some sort of pure democratic process.

My top choice is 4; I even prefer it to 3 (since the small group of
altruistic people may just not know about issues relevant to many
people). In that case there will be "a tedious and depressing
political battle over it". And many things I would want to see will
not come to pass...

>I'm interested in answers to the question "What do we want the AI to do?".

That's almost an afterthought, to the much more pressing question:
what would we want the AI not to do? Pick a couple of nice results -
immortality, world peace, uploading, ultra-enhanced intelligence or
empathy - and they could be added to what a supreme AI could do for us
easily.

Much more interesting to my mind, is the question: "what do we want an
AI of large but not crushing intelligence to do?"

Stuart



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