candice schuster wrote:
Ok Richard, let's talk about your scenario...define 'Mad', 'Irrational'
and 'Improbable scenario' ?
Let's look at some of Charles Darwin's and Richard Dawkins theories as
some examples in this improbable scenario. Ever heard of a Meme ? or
the Memetic Theory ? I would like to say that based on these and the
very probable scenario of AI combined with cognitive thought processes
the chances of 'survival of the fittest' starts to look very rosy
indeed. Remember it's one Superpower against another, whether that be
man against man or country against country.
Furthermore you need to look at the bigger picture...the ultimate goal
here is as A. Yost mentioned, dollar signs and Super Power for the
organisations involved.
Candice
Yup, know all about memes.
Suppose that the first AGI is completely friendly (grant me that
assumption), and that it is encouraged to quickly self-improve until it
can think at a thousand times human speed.
It says: "In order to ensure that the world stays safe, I need to take
action now to modify all the other AGI projects on the planet, to make
sure that they all have exactly the same motivation system that I have,
and to ensure that no further developments in the future will lead to
any unfriendly, malevolent systems. I have the technology to do this
quietly, and peacefully, without harming the knowledge of these other
systems (to the extent that they have knowledge or self-awareness at
all). Would you like me to go ahead and do this?"
If you say "yes", nothing much will appear to happen, but from that
point on all the rest of the AGI systems in the world will act, in
effect, as one large friendly system.
Now, here is the response to your specific question: from that point
on, there is not one, single aspect of evolutionary systems that applies
any more. There are no darwinian pressures, no gene reassortment, no
meme propagation, no commercial pressures, no genotype/phenotype
distinctions, nothing. Every single aspect of the huge mechanism that
we call "evolution" or "survival of the fittest" does not apply. All of
that stuff that has been going on with the bits of DNA competing with
one another to make higher and higher organisms to serves their needs --
all completely and utterly irrelevant to the further development of AGI
systems.
So, you can cite evolutionary pressures, but you have to be very precise
about what context your are imagining them to be operating in: after
the first AGI is created, it all becomes irrelevant.
Before the first AGI is created, there are still some pressures, but I
have given some reasons (in a separate post) why we coould still be in a
situation where most of those pressures are either nullified or simply
will not have any time to operate.
Granted, there are assumptions in this scenario .... but we should be
talking about those assumptions explicitly, and in enormous detail,
rather than trying to shoot down ideas about the future by simply citing
the pressures of evolution or commercial competition. When we discuss
the underlying details we determine whether or not any of those
"evolutionary" considerations even have a chance of playing a role, so
we cannot shoot down the arguments by using the idea of evolution as a
weapon.
Richard Loosemore.
P.S. Sorry that I seemed so testy last night: should have been more
diplomatic to both yourself and A Yost. I had just spent a few days
going over basic arguments that are decades old, for the Nth time, for
the benefit of people who had not seen them before, and the shear
pointlessness of the effort just started to me.
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