(1) I suspect it’s possible to create an artificial system that exhibits what many people would call “intelligent behavior,” and which poses an existential threat, but which is not sentient or conscious. (In the same way that Deep Blue wasn’t sentient: it seems to me like optimization power may well be separable from sentience/consciousness.) That’s no guarantee, of course, and if we do create a sentient artificial mind, then it will have moral weight in its own right, and that will make our job quite a bit more difficult.
(2) The goal is not to build a sentient mind something that wants to destroy humanity but can’t. (That’s both morally reprehensible and doomed to failure! :-p) Rather, the goal is to successfully transmit the complicated values of humanity into a powerful optimizer.
Have you read Bostrom’s The Superintelligent Will? Short version is, it looks possible to build powerful optimizers that pursue goals we might think are valueless (such as an artificial system that, via very clever long-term plans, produces extremely large amounts of diamond, or computes lots and lots of digits of pi). We’d rather not build that sort of system (especially if it’s powerful enough to strip the Earth of resources and turn them into diamonds / computing power): most people would rather build something that shares some of our notion of “value,” such as respect for truth and beauty and wonder and so on.
It looks like this isn’t something you get for free. (In fact, it looks very hard to get: it seems likely that most minds would by default have incentives to manipulate & decieve in order to acquire resources.) We’d rather not build minds that try to turn everything they can into a giant computer for computing digits of pi, so the question is how to design the sort of mind that has things like respect for truth and beauty and wonder?
In hollywood movies, you can just build something that looks cute and fluffy and then it will magically acquire a spark of human-esque curiosity and regard for other sentient life, but in the real world, you’ve got to figure out how to program in those capabilities yourself (or program something that will reliably acquire them), and that’s hard :-)
(1) I suspect it’s possible to create an artificial system that exhibits what many people would call “intelligent behavior,” and which poses an existential threat, but which is not sentient or conscious. (In the same way that Deep Blue wasn’t sentient: it seems to me like optimization power may well be separable from sentience/consciousness.) That’s no guarantee, of course, and if we do create a sentient artificial mind, then it will have moral weight in its own right, and that will make our job quite a bit more difficult.
(2) The goal is not to build a sentient mind something that wants to destroy humanity but can’t. (That’s both morally reprehensible and doomed to failure! :-p) Rather, the goal is to successfully transmit the complicated values of humanity into a powerful optimizer.
Have you read Bostrom’s The Superintelligent Will? Short version is, it looks possible to build powerful optimizers that pursue goals we might think are valueless (such as an artificial system that, via very clever long-term plans, produces extremely large amounts of diamond, or computes lots and lots of digits of pi). We’d rather not build that sort of system (especially if it’s powerful enough to strip the Earth of resources and turn them into diamonds / computing power): most people would rather build something that shares some of our notion of “value,” such as respect for truth and beauty and wonder and so on.
It looks like this isn’t something you get for free. (In fact, it looks very hard to get: it seems likely that most minds would by default have incentives to manipulate & decieve in order to acquire resources.) We’d rather not build minds that try to turn everything they can into a giant computer for computing digits of pi, so the question is how to design the sort of mind that has things like respect for truth and beauty and wonder?
In hollywood movies, you can just build something that looks cute and fluffy and then it will magically acquire a spark of human-esque curiosity and regard for other sentient life, but in the real world, you’ve got to figure out how to program in those capabilities yourself (or program something that will reliably acquire them), and that’s hard :-)