Thank you for making these threads. I have been reading LW off and on for several years and this will be my first post.
My question: Is purposely leaning into creating a human wire-header an easier alignment target to hit than the more commonly touted goal of creating an aligned superintelligence that prevents the emergence of other potentially dangerous superintelligence, yet somehow reliably leaves humanity mostly in the driver's seat?
If the current forecast on aligning superintelligent AI is so dire, is there a point where it would make sense to just settle for ceding control and steering towards creating a superintelligence very likely to engage in wire heading humans (or post-humans)? I'm imagining the AI being tasked with tiling the universe with as many conscious entities as possible, with each experiencing as much pleasure as possible, and maybe with a bias towards maximizing pleasure over number of conscious entities as those goals constrain each other. I don't want to handwave this as being easy, I'm just curious if there's been much though to removing the constraint of "don't wirehead humans."
Background on me: One of my main departures from what I've come across so far is that I don't share as much concern about hedonism or wire heading. It seems to me a superintelligence would grasp that humans in their current form require things like novelty, purpose, and belonging and wouldn't just naively pump humans--as they currently are--full of drugs and call it a day. I don't see why these "higher values" couldn't be simulated or stimulated too. If I learned my current life was a simulation, but one that was being managed by an incredibly successful AI that could reliably keep the simulation running unperturbed, I would not want to exit my current life in order to seize more control in the "real world."
Honestly, if an AI could replace humans with verifiably conscious simple entities engineered to experience greater satisfaction than current humans and without ever feeling boredom, I'm hard pressed to thing of anything more deserving of the universe's resources.
The main concern I have with this so far is that the goal of "maximizing pleasure" could be very close in idea-space to "maximizing suffering," but it's still really hard for me to see a superintelligence cable of becoming a singleton making such an error or why it would deliberately switch to maximizing suffering.
It would depend a lot on the implementation details. Also on whether it's possible. The basic wireheader seems simpler, in that it doesn't need to factor in humanities stupid ideas.
Adding in extra details, like that it has to pretty much make a virtual heaven for people, makes it a lot harder than just pumping them with morphine.
maximizing pleasure is very close in idea space to max suffering, because both do pretty much the same, but with opposite signs (yes, this is a travesty of an oversimplification, but you get the idea). The most common raised proble... (read more)
tl;dr: Ask questions about AGI Safety as comments on this post, including ones you might otherwise worry seem dumb!
Asking beginner-level questions can be intimidating, but everyone starts out not knowing anything. If we want more people in the world who understand AGI safety, we need a place where it's accepted and encouraged to ask about the basics.
We'll be putting up monthly FAQ posts as a safe space for people to ask all the possibly-dumb questions that may have been bothering them about the whole AGI Safety discussion, but which until now they didn't feel able to ask.
It's okay to ask uninformed questions, and not worry about having done a careful search before asking.
AISafety.info - Interactive FAQ
Additionally, this will serve as a way to spread the project Rob Miles' volunteer team[1] has been working on: Stampy and his professional-looking face aisafety.info. Once we've got considerably more content[2] this will provide a single point of access into AI Safety, in the form of a comprehensive interactive FAQ with lots of links to the ecosystem. We'll be using questions and answers from this thread for Stampy (under these copyright rules), so please only post if you're okay with that! You can help by adding other people's questions and answers or getting involved in other ways!
We're not at the "send this to all your friends" stage yet, we're just ready to onboard a bunch of editors who will help us get to that stage :)
stamp maximizationAGI Safety!We welcome feedback[3] and questions on the UI/UX, policies, etc. around Stampy, as well as pull requests to his codebase. You are encouraged to add other people's answers from this thread to Stampy if you think they're good, and collaboratively improve the content that's already on our wiki.
We've got a lot more to write before he's ready for prime time, but we think Stampy can become an excellent resource for everyone from skeptical newcomers, through people who want to learn more, right up to people who are convinced and want to know how they can best help with their skillsets.
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