I am not a MIRI employee, and this comment should not be interpreted as a response from MIRI, but I wanted to throw my two cents in about this topic.
I think that creating a friendly AI to specifically advance human values would actually turn out okay for animals. Such a human-friendly AI should optimize for everything humans care about, not just the quality of humans’ subjective experience. Many humans care a significant amount about the welfare of non-human animals. A human-friendly AI would thus care about animal welfare by proxy through the values of humans. As far as I am aware, there is not a significant number of humans who specifically want animals to suffer. It is extremely common for humans to want things (like food with the taste and texture of bacon) that currently can currently be produced most efficiently at significant expense to non-human animals. However, it seems unlikely that a friendly AI would not be able to find an efficient way of producing bacon that does not involve actual pigs.
If many people intrinsically value the proliferation of natural Darwinian ecosystems, and the fact that animals in such ecosystems suffer significantly would not change their mind, then that could happen. If it’s just that many people think it would be better for there to be more such ecosystems because they falsely believe that wild animals experience little suffering, and would prefer otherwise if their empirical beliefs were correct, then a human-friendly AI should not bring many such ecosystems into existence.
So you claim that you have values related to animals that most people don’t have and you want your eccentric values to be overrepresented in the AI?
I’m asking unironically (personally I also care about wild animal suffering but I also suspect that most people would care about if they spent sufficient time thinking about it and looking at the evidence).
I am not a MIRI employee, and this comment should not be interpreted as a response from MIRI, but I wanted to throw my two cents in about this topic.
I think that creating a friendly AI to specifically advance human values would actually turn out okay for animals. Such a human-friendly AI should optimize for everything humans care about, not just the quality of humans’ subjective experience. Many humans care a significant amount about the welfare of non-human animals. A human-friendly AI would thus care about animal welfare by proxy through the values of humans. As far as I am aware, there is not a significant number of humans who specifically want animals to suffer. It is extremely common for humans to want things (like food with the taste and texture of bacon) that currently can currently be produced most efficiently at significant expense to non-human animals. However, it seems unlikely that a friendly AI would not be able to find an efficient way of producing bacon that does not involve actual pigs.
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If many people intrinsically value the proliferation of natural Darwinian ecosystems, and the fact that animals in such ecosystems suffer significantly would not change their mind, then that could happen. If it’s just that many people think it would be better for there to be more such ecosystems because they falsely believe that wild animals experience little suffering, and would prefer otherwise if their empirical beliefs were correct, then a human-friendly AI should not bring many such ecosystems into existence.
So you claim that you have values related to animals that most people don’t have and you want your eccentric values to be overrepresented in the AI?
I’m asking unironically (personally I also care about wild animal suffering but I also suspect that most people would care about if they spent sufficient time thinking about it and looking at the evidence).