Excluding a superintelligent AGI that has qualia and can form its own (possibly perverse) goals, why wouldn’t we be able to stop any paperclip maximizer whatsoever by the simple addition of the stipulation “and do so without killing or harming or even jeopardizing a single living human being on earth” to its specified goal? Wouldn’t this stipulation trivially force the paperclip maximizer not to turn humans into paperclips either directly or indirectly? There is no goal or subgoal (or is there?) that with the addition of that stipulation is dangerous to humans — by definition. If we create a paperclip maximizer, the only thing we need to do to keep it aligned, then, is to always add to its specified goals that or a similar stipulation. Of course, this would require self-control. But it would be in the interest of all researchers not to fail to include the stipulation, since their very lives would depend on it; and this is true even if (unbeknownst to us) only 1 out of, say, every 100 requested goals would make the paperclip maximizer turn everyone into paperclips.
It is definitely advisable to build a paper-clip maximiser that also needs to respect a whole bunch of additional stipulations about not harming people. The worry among many alignment researchers is that it might be very difficult to make these stipulations robust enough to deliver the level of safety we ideally want, especially in the case of AGIs that might get hugely intelligent or hugely powerful. As we are talking about not-yet-invented AGI technology, nobody really knows how easy or hard it will be to build robust-enough stipulations into it. It m... (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.
Stampy's Interactive AGI Safety FAQ
Additionally, this will serve as a way to spread the project Rob Miles' volunteer team[1] has been working on: Stampy - which will be (once we've got considerably more content) a single point of access into AGI 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 to Stampy 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[2] 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.
PS: Based on feedback that Stampy will be not serious enough for serious people we built an alternate skin for the frontend which is more professional: Alignment.Wiki. We're likely to move one more time to aisafety.info, feedback welcome.
Guidelines for Questioners:
Guidelines for Answerers:
Finally: Please think very carefully before downvoting any questions, remember this is the place to ask stupid questions!
If you'd like to join, head over to Rob's Discord and introduce yourself!
Via the feedback form.