Just because it doesn't do exactly what you want doesn't mean it is going to fail in some utterly spectacular way.
I certainly agree, and I am not even sure what the official SI position is on the probability of such failure. I know that Eliezer in hist writing does give the impression that any mistake will mean certain doom, which I believe to be an exaggeration. But failure of this kind is fundamentally unpredictable, and if a low probability even kills you, you are still dead, and I think that it is high enough that the Friendly AI type effort would not be wasted.
(ultimately, for solutions to systems of equations)
That is true in the trivial sense that everything can be described as equations, but when thinking how computation process actually happens this becomes almost meaningless. If the system is not constructed as a search problem over high dimensional spaces, then in particular its failure modes cannot be usefully thought about in such terms, even if it is fundamentally isomorphic to such a search.
that'll be a piece of software created with very well defined model of changes to itself
Or it will be created by intuitively assembling random components and seeing what happens. In which case there is no guarantee what it will actually do to its own model or even to what it is actually solving for. Convincing AI researches to only allow an AI to self modify when it is stable under self modification is a significant part of the Friendly AI effort.
Everyone wants artificial rainman.
There are very few statements that are true about "everyone" and I am very confident that this is not one of them. Even if most people with actual means to build one want specialized and/or tool AIs, you only need one unfriendly-successful AGI project to potentially cause a lot of damage. This is especially true as both hardware costs fall and more AI knowledge is developed and published, lowering the entry costs.
I don't see why expect general intelligence to suddenly overtake specialized intelligences;
To be dangerous AGI doesn't have to overtake specialized intelligences, it has to overtake humans. Existence of specialized AIs is either irrelevant or increases the risks from AGI, since they would be available to both, and presumably AGIs would have lower interfacing costs.
I certainly agree, and I am not even sure what the official SI position is on the probability of such failure. I know that Eliezer in hist writing does give the impression that any mistake will mean certain doom, which I believe to be an exaggeration. But failure of this kind is fundamentally unpredictable, and if a low probability even kills you, you are still dead, and I think that it is high enough that the Friendly AI type effort would not be wasted.
Unpredictable is a subjective quality. It'd look much better if the people speaking of unpredictabili... (read more)
In the comments on this post (which in retrospect I feel was not very clearly written), someone linked me to a post Eliezer wrote five years ago, "The Hidden Complexity of Wishes." After reading it, I think I've figured out why the term "Friendly AI" is used so inconsistently.
This post explicitly lays out a view that seems to be implicit in, but not entirely clear from, many of of Eliezer's other writings. That view is this:
Even if Eliezer is right about that, I think that view of his has led to confusing usage of the term "Friendly AI." If you accept Eliezer's view, it may seem to make sense to not worry to much about whether by "Friendly AI" you mean:
A utopia-making machine (the AI "to whom you can safely say, 'I wish for you to do what I should wish for.'") Or:
A non-doomsday machine (a doomsday machine being the AI "for which no wish is safe.")
And it would make sense not to worry too much about that distinction, if you were talking only to people who also believe those two concepts are very nearly co-extensive for powerful AI. But failing to make that distinction is obviously going to be confusing when you're talking to people who don't think that. It will make it harder to communicate both your ideas and your reasons for holding those ideas to them.
One solution would be to more frequently link people back to "The Hidden Complexity of Wishes" (or other writing by Eliezer that makes similar points--what else would be suitable?) But while it's a good post and Eliezer makes some very good points with the "Outcome Pump" thought-experiment, the argument isn't entirely convincing.
As Eliezer himself has argued at great length, (see also section 6.1 of this paper) humans' own understanding of our values is far from perfect. None of us are, right now, qualified to design a utopia. But we do have some understanding of our own values; we can identify some things that would be improvements over our current situation while marking other scenarios as "this would be a disaster." It seems like there might be a point in the future where we can design an AI whose understanding of human values is similarly serviceable but no better than that.
Maybe I'm wrong about that. But if I am, until there's a better easy to read explanation of why I'm wrong for everybody to link to, it would be helpful to have different terms for (1) and (2) above. Perhaps call them "utopia AI" and "safe AI," respectively?