Rereading this part of the Sequences makes me wonder if an AI could make use of a kind of reCAPTCHA approach for sussing out some of these Magical Categories. It certainly would slow up the AI a lot, but could generate a lot of examples and classifications.
I doubt this would be a very efficient solution, but now I'm pretty amused by the prospect of trying to post a blog comment and getting a normal CAPTCHA plus something like this:
Bob receives regular does of soma, which makes him report high subjective satisfaction. His lifespan is not shortened. Bob is no longer chooses to leave his house. Is Bob truly happy (Y/N)?
The amount of time it would take to get a reasonable dataset would likely exceed the projected lifespan of the universe, I imagine.
Today's post, Magical Categories was originally published on 24 August 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
We underestimate the complexity of our own unnatural categories. This doesn't work when you're trying to build a FAI.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Unnatural Categories, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.