The Great Debate

Anissimov weighs in on the general back and forth over FAI.

The CEV

For the record, I’m attempting to read the Coherent Extrapolated Volition so when I critique supporters of friendly AI dictatorships, that’s one less qualifier they can throw at my arguments. I really, really don’t like how Eliezer S. Yudkowsky writes – he manages to be simultaneously overly simplistic and sesquipedalian – and that he hasn’t cited any previous philosophers makes me exceedingly nervous. I may be wrong, I may be biased, I may not be smart enough to understand the CEV. But I’m going to push through and read the whole thing and try to come up with a response. Maybe it will be one of agreement, but I somehow doubt it. Michael Anissimov’s summary and other commentary on the CEV are helping to clarify things, and he’s a smart, reasonable dude, so I’m going to defer to his interpretations until I either agree or can disprove them. Wish me luck.

Insect AI & Cyborg Astronauts

Discovery News has two interesting articles. First, insect AI:

But a small organism doesn’t have so many cells to control and can fit some very elaborate mental circuitry in a pinhead-sized brain.

Several hundred neurons give the ability to count. A few thousand create sentient, and perhaps even sapient, thought. If that’s really the case, then it seems that we’re barking up the wrong tree with cognitive computing concepts and AI projects.

Instead of trying to simulate huge numbers of neurons, then bragging about it as a step towards emulating real brainpower, we should focus on those individual circuits and model the brains of insects rather than mammals.

Second, cyborg astronauts. The pros are interesting, but the hearing the cons aired are a breath of fresh air:

Of course there’s a catch. Each of the procedures that would make all this possible would be a) incredibly invasive, b) exorbitantly expensive and c) require decades of highly focused research projects to make it all possible. While the benefits to those who suffered serious trauma to the brain, limbs and spine, or suffering from organ failure would be immense, there may be some serious pause about healthy individuals undergoing this sort of modification for the sake of traveling to other worlds. People who may never walk again without a prosthetic spine or mechanical legs would certainly volunteer for such procedures because being confined to a bed or a wheelchair for the rest of their lives is a far higher cost than the risks involved with the surgery.

AI Special Pleading

Special pleading, along with feigned neutrality, is one of the most infuriating symptoms of faulty rhetoric one can utilize in an argument. Special pleading comes in multiple forms, but the most common is that of claiming a superior framework which is proven to be superior by its own internal criterion. Vulgar Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis both resort to this tactic by using lines like, “that you would argue against the Revolution is proof you are bourgeoisie and do not understand” or “your denial is proof of your repressed desires.” The point is that any criticism can be fallaciously transformed into proof of the originally claim or be fallaciously disregarded because the critic is inherently limited by his or her own paradigm.

Kaj Sotala, Roko Mijic, and Michael Annissimov all use special pleading when critiquing James Hughes piece “Liberal Democracy vs Technocratic Absolutism.” The central rebuttal for all of them can be paraphrased as “your critiques of Communism, dictatorships, and other authoritarian governments make sense for humans, but don’t apply to friendly AI because friendly AI is different than human systems and is genuinely selfless.” Hughes hears echoes of Marxist-Leninist thought in that point. Some thinkers, including the allegedly brilliant philosopher Slavoj Zizek, continue to defend Marxism using special pleading. Instead of claiming Communism isn’t based in humans, they clame Stalin and the USSR were not pure Communism, and therefore were doomed to failure because of the corrupting element of capitalism. Thus, thanks to special pleading, Stalin is not proof that Communism and authoritarianism are dangerous and bad, but that capitalism is bad and corrupts the pure motives of Communism.

The problem is that, like Communism, friendly AI, even if derived through the process described by the CEV, will ultimately fail. The reason democracy works even remotely better than authoritarian systems is because it openly admits and aims to minimize the faults in the system. These faults include both the “programming,” that is, the legislation and philosophy underpinning it, and the agents of the system, humans. Democracy, Communism, and, yes, AI based technocratic authoritarianism, are all human systems. They will be imperfect. Democracy, of the three, is the only one that sees itself as imperfect and prone to mistakes and failure. Therein lies the inherent benefits of democracy – it is a radically reflexive system.

As a final point, I think it is very interesting that those who support friendly super-AI don’t see the AI coming to the conclusion that nearly all forms of government, particularly those of an authoritarian breed, are faulty and instead advocating anarchy or a form of hyper-limited government. That the AI would want to govern at all is a further assumption I don’t understand. Assuming it’s an AI, it should be volitional, which would make forcing it to govern a restriction in its will or it would make it a program, not a genuine AI. There are just too many problems here.

Roko Mijic on “The Friendly AI Problem”

Good stuff from Mijic. He’s quite a good presenter, I’m impressed!

h/t Anissimov

Unplugged

Wayne Stayskal

Kasparov and A.I.

Garry Kasparov, the famed chess master who was defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue, on chess, A.I., and the human mind. I was caught in particular by this creative idea:

In what Rasskin-Gutman explains as Moravec’s Paradox, in chess, as in so many things, what computers are good at is where humans are weak, and vice versa. This gave me an idea for an experiment. What if instead of human versus machine we played as partners? My brainchild saw the light of day in a match in 1998 in León, Spain, and we called it “Advanced Chess.” Each player had a PC at hand running the chess software of his choice during the game. The idea was to create the highest level of chess ever played, a synthesis of the best of man and machine.

["The Chess Master and the Computer" - NY Review of Books, h/t MR]