----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, March 03, 2003 9:09
AM
Subject: RE: [agi] One super-smart AGI vs
more, dumber AGIs???
Hi,
I
don't see that you've made a convincing argument that a society of AI's is
safer than an individual AI. Certainly among human societies, the only
analogue we have, society-level violence and madness seems even MORE common
than individual-level violence and madness. Often societies can make
intrinsically peaceful humans turn violent, through social pressure, it
seems. Yeah, you can try to influence an AGI society not to go that way,
but you can also influence an individual AGI mind not to go that
way...
And:
A society of AGI's that frequently engages in mind-merges with each other is
neither a society nor an individual, it's something inbetween, a new kind of
mind. This is an exciting prospect which has been discussed before...
but it doesn't seem to me to solve the Friendliness
problem.
--
Ben G
Ben,
> would you rather have one person with an IQ of
200, or 4 people with
> IQ's of 50? Ten computers of intelligence N, or
one computer with
> intelligence 10*N ? Sure, the intelligence of
the ten computers of
> intelligence N will be a little smarter than N,
all together, because
> of cooperative effects.... But how much
more? You can say that true
> intelligence can only develop thru
socialization with peers -- but
> why? How do you know that will be true
for AI's as well as humans?
> I'm not so sure....
I don't think
we are faced with an either or situation in the case of AGIs. I think AGIs
will be able to create pooled intelligence with an efficiency that far
exceeds what humans can accomplish by group-work.
I can see no
reason why a community of AGIs wouldn't be able to link brains and pool some
of the computing power of the platforms that each one manages - so by
agreement with a groups of AGIs, one AGI might be given the right to use
some of the computer hardware that is normally used by the other AGIs.
This of course is the idea behind the United Devices grid
computing.
Plus the
efficiency and potency of what can be passed between AGI minds is likely to
be significantly greater than what can be passed between human
minds.
And as with
humans, pooling brains with several different
perspectives and specialisations is likely to
yield significant gains in intelligence over the simple sum of the
parts.
So my guess
is that the pursuit of the "safety in numbers" strategy is not likely to
result in a very large penalty in lost intelligence.
And even if
their was a large intelligence loss due to dividing up the available
computing power bewteen multiple AGIs, I'd rather have less AGI intelligence, that was
much safer, than more intellegence that was much less
safe.
Cheers,
Philip