these sorts of techniques have been applied for decades and have never achieved anything close to human level AI
We also didn’t have the vast amounts of compute that we have today.
other parts of Bostrom’s argument rely upon much broader conceptions of intelligence that would entail the AI having common sense.
My claim is that you can write a program that “knows” about common sense, but still chooses actions by maximizing a function, in which case it’s going to interpret that function literally and not through the lens of common sense. There is currently no way that the “choose actions” part gets routed through the “common sense” part the way it does in humans. I definitely agree that we should try to build an AI system which does interpret goals using common sense—but we don’t know how to do that yet, and that is one of the approaches that AI safety is considering.
I agree with the prediction that AGI systems will interpret goals with common sense, but that’s because I expect that we humans will put in the work to figure out how to build such systems, not because any AGI system that has the ability to use common sense will necessarily apply that ability to interpreting its goals.
If we found out today that someone created our world + evolution in order to create organisms that maximize reproductive fitness, I don’t think we’d start interpreting our sex drive using “common sense” and stop using birth control so that we more effectively achieved the original goal we were meant to perform.
We also didn’t have the vast amounts of compute that we have today.
My claim is that you can write a program that “knows” about common sense, but still chooses actions by maximizing a function, in which case it’s going to interpret that function literally and not through the lens of common sense. There is currently no way that the “choose actions” part gets routed through the “common sense” part the way it does in humans. I definitely agree that we should try to build an AI system which does interpret goals using common sense—but we don’t know how to do that yet, and that is one of the approaches that AI safety is considering.
I agree with the prediction that AGI systems will interpret goals with common sense, but that’s because I expect that we humans will put in the work to figure out how to build such systems, not because any AGI system that has the ability to use common sense will necessarily apply that ability to interpreting its goals.
If we found out today that someone created our world + evolution in order to create organisms that maximize reproductive fitness, I don’t think we’d start interpreting our sex drive using “common sense” and stop using birth control so that we more effectively achieved the original goal we were meant to perform.