From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Fri Jan 12 2001 - 21:33:41 MST
John Marlow wrote:
>
> **True enough--but their ancestors did. And you feel
> no obligation to refrain from killing them--much less
> to look after them--because their ancestors wrote your
> source code.
That's *right*. An AI, even a Friendly AI, feels no obligation because
*we* wrote the source code. Not unless someone puts it there, and while
there will someday be AIs that are good drinking companions and fit
participants in the human drama, and these AIs may wax sentimental about
their creators, the Friendly AIs come *first* - the Sysop, or the
Guardians.
An AI can be Friendly because there's nothing there except what you put
there, what you share with the AI. The task is nontrivial because you
don't always know what it is you're putting there, but that blank slate,
that vast silent space, is what makes the task possible.
I don't want to sound like it's a question of coercion. The paradigm of
Friendly AI is to create unity between the will of the Friendly AI and the
decisions of an idealized human altruist. It is not a question of
control. You have to identify with the Friendly AI you build, because a
human thinks about controlling different humans, wheedling or coercing the
Other, but the only time we *build* a mind is when we build ourselves.
The Friendly AI I want to build is the same being I would make myself into
if that were only way to get a Sysop (a Guardian AI, if you prefer). A
Sysop might not turn out to be a real person, and I'd back myself up first
if I could - but a Sysop is a valid thing for a mind to be, a valid state
for a mind to occupy, a valid part of the world, not a slave or someone
we've tricked into servitude.
You keep trying to understand AI in human terms. Everything that you use
to model other minds is specialized on understanding humans, and an AI
isn't human. A Friendly AI isn't Friendly to us because *we* built it; it
would be just as Friendly if the identical source code materialized from
thin air, and will go on to be just as Friendly to aliens if a
pre-Singularity civilization is ever found orbiting another star. That
lack of sentiment doesn't make it dangerous. My benevolence towards other
sentient beings isn't conditional on their having created me; why would I
want to build a conditionally Friendly AI?
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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