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Comment by barking_biscuit | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty easy to build AGI if you relax Asimov's laws of robotics. If you make machines that are allowed to harm people they can effectively build up all the intelligence they need by the following algorithm "mimic others and don't die". Isn't that more or less what humans do? It seems odd we'd expect a general intelligence to come out of something that didn't itself have a general existence. That general existence includes making mistakes in order to learn from experience and making mistakes sometimes entails accidentally harming others. Sometimes it involves coming to an erroneous conclusion that causes that intelligence to deliberately harm others which then gets reprimanded and other agents learn from that.

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nothing about asimov's laws have anything to do with intelligence, or even robotics. they came from some strange paranoid "robots harming humans obsession. They aren't even remotely implementable in any possible way.

Anything intelligent (meaning universally effective) is harmful unless perfectly aligned with humans (hard to get).

Even humans (being barely intelligent, weak) are harmful to other humans (look at elites around the world: wars, coups, assassinatios, propaganda, etc).

Unless there is a fundamental barrier that handicaps intelligence at the human level (highly unlikely), AGI will eventually leave people far behind and destroy us in the process (like we destroy an ant hill, to build whatever we need for reasons incomprehensible to ants).

I guess robots that can kill people on their own "will" would be perceived by humans as having chaotic behavior , and wouldn't be of much use to us. So why build it?

Anyway I think robots or other devices can't have will either way. For example if someone plants land mine and years later this land mine kills someone. It is not land mine's will. But of person who planted it. You can't sue land mine.

That John Smith left his paperclip maximizer running will be cold comfort while we're all getting reconfigured into paperclips by a particularly deviously formulated by AI bacterium.

Sometimes, there are good reasons to just not build a thing. Takes a while for the idea to become apparent, but once you start thinking in terms of actually being responsible for second order and higher outcomes, it becomes much easier.

But it's cultural dogma that Businesspeople aren't responsible for any externalities related to their endeavours. I don't see how that's going to change anytime soon. Move fast and break things!

Take heart, though; the paperclip maximizer will probably just "want" us to watch ads and buy shit. A slow death, via titrated amounts of The Entertainment from Infinite Jest. At least it won't hurt too much.

You need to insert a limited lifespan alongside "don't die"... and maybe also reproduce as much as possible

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