I hesitated on how to frame the deep ecology thing, because I think it’s entirely possible that it ends up locked in. I think my thought was something like the following. If AGI gets the values of its builders and then never modifies it, in the current race, it’s unlikely that AGI would lock in deep ecology values: these don’t seem massive in Chinese labs (could be wrong), and people in AI labs in the West are not hardcore ecologists, for the most part, because of political divisions.[1]
I do agree that AI systems could populate other worlds with animals for other reasons. Logically, we can’t cover all of the reasons why systems that we don’t know anything about would do something. The same applies to future humans.
(More broadly, I deliberately under-hedged all of the above. I don’t think we have any action-guidance on AGIxAnimals)
I hesitated on how to frame the deep ecology thing, because I think it’s entirely possible that it ends up locked in. I think my thought was something like the following. If AGI gets the values of its builders and then never modifies it, in the current race, it’s unlikely that AGI would lock in deep ecology values: these don’t seem massive in Chinese labs (could be wrong), and people in AI labs in the West are not hardcore ecologists, for the most part, because of political divisions.[1]
I do agree that AI systems could populate other worlds with animals for other reasons. Logically, we can’t cover all of the reasons why systems that we don’t know anything about would do something. The same applies to future humans.
(More broadly, I deliberately under-hedged all of the above. I don’t think we have any action-guidance on AGIxAnimals)
Maybe it’s good that environmentalists hate AI so much, because it ensures that people in labs are less likely to be friendly to pro-ecology views?