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Comment by simple-thoughts | Hacker News Reader

The ai safety arguments rely on something called the “orthoganality thesis” which is a huge, unintuitive assumption. In real life, intelligence is associated with picking better goals. Generally, an entity with higher intelligence will pick different goals than a being with lower intelligence.

The orthoganility thesis is an unproven assumption that intelligence and goals are not corellated, meaning an intelligent being can pursue stupid goals. States like that, it’s obviously wrong and laughable. But by using complex language, EA cultists hide the ridiculous assumptions their system has so that they can maintain their feelings of superiority while gaining real power that enables them to abuse others.

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No goals are intrinsically stupid. The only reason that you might think some particular goal is stupid is that it goes against your goals.

You could conceive of a super intelligent AI that came into existence with the goal of terminating itself. That would be an "stupid goal" from our perspective, since we have the goal of self-preservation really ingrained in our brains.

But for a being that self-termination is the absolute best thing ever, it's not stupid. It makes perfect sense, since, well, that it's goal. It doesn't care about self-preservation, it doesn't care about becoming more intelligent/rich/powerful, other than as an instrumental goal to help achieve self-termination, if it's not able to do so in its current state.

And most importantly, no amount of getting more intelligent would change this fundamental goal, just as humans getting more intelligent has not overridden our fundamental goals of "breathe, feed, have sex". It may have given us other goals as well, but those are very much still there.

Not only that, but we've managed to subvert our reward functions in exactly the way AI safety people fear. Evolution tried to get us to reproduce as much as possible, and we came up with ways to get the reward without producing offspring.

That’s a pretty naive understanding of sex. In human history sex has often played as important a role in bonding, community, and social hierarchy as it has in child production. These things are beneficial for survival. It’s very common for evolution to result in redirected drives.

> It’s very common for evolution to result in redirected drives.

Yes, that's pretty much the point.

And most likely, humans will have a pretty naive understanding of whatever motivates a superintelligent AI.

I’m not sure what you mean by “stupid” but it’s definitely not the colloquial meaning. A human seeking suicide is not stupid. In fact humans often do seek suicide because humans are playing social games where the maximizing move is to commit suicide. Supporting these people requires changing their context so that they have a wider and better variety of options available.

This is just a specific example of why I reject the orthogonality thesis. You change the context, you educate the agent, you change the goals of the agent. I do not agree that humans only chase “breathe feed sex” and while I do believe many stupid behaviors do come from evolutionary history, It’s plainly obvious that education, training, and genes play a role in self restraint and goal redirection.

What do you mean by stupid? I used that word only because you used it first.

And I agree that humans do not only chase "breath feed sex", as I explicitly said that in my comment. We have other goals as well. But those are very much still there.

>In real life, intelligence is associated with picking better goals.

"Better" according to what metric?

It may be the case that there is a tendency for high-intelligence humans to pick "more enlightened" goals. Perhaps there is a natural "enlightened goals" attractor for our species.

However I don't think we can extrapolate from that to a fundamentally alien AI.

I think even if this statistical tendency exists, it has clear counterexamples -- consider that 2 genius chess players may have opposite goals, of beating one another. And we shouldn't bet the future of humanity on this statistical tendency extrapolating outside of the original distribution of human species.

Here are some intuition pumps on how diverse goals can be even across intelligent species:

* Orcas killing sharks for their livers: https://www.livescience.com/2-orcas-slaughter-19-sharks-in-a... I don't believe dolphins show the same level of violence, even though both are smart cetaceans

* Intelligent dogs bred to be responsive and attentive to human needs -- unlike close cousins like the wolf

* Chimpanzees and bonobos are both related to humans, both highly intelligent, but with very different culture and goals https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6Ko0Hzi47U

> “Better” by what metrics?

As soon as you phrase goal selection in terms of metrics, you’re assuming that goal selection is based on some other goal - that is you’re already assuming the orthoganality thesis. Your logic is fully circular.

One thing that’s interesting to note about all of the examples you picked - every single one of those species shows cooperative behaviors. They share many other behaviors that are more similar than they are different. To reject the orthoganality thesis it’s sufficient to show that there is an empirical general association between intelligence and certain goals - then we can extrapolate an AI although of course it will function differently and may have many unusual behaviors will tend to follow those goals more directly. For instance intelligence is associated with : cooperation, empathy, inter and intra species communication, curiosity, etc. all of the species you mentioned exhibit these more than less intelligent species. Meanwhile something like “hunting to eat” is observed across the intelligence spectrum.

I've known lots of intelligent people who pursue stupid goals.

I maybe agree with you that there's an this belief that a maximally intelligent creature will blindly follow maximally obviously stupid goals, and that belief is under-argued, but your phrasing above isn't the slam dunk argument that you seem to believe.

Remember the term here is “associated”. If you spend a lot of time with people from diverse mental backgrounds, which is much harder to do than you might think, you’ll easily see that people who lack education, common sense, or the necessary context to be intelligent to pick much worse goals than people who aren’t in that position. Of course none of us humans are particularly intelligent, and all of us are stupid. Being a human is not intrinsically about intelligence - being a human is about being a social mammal. It’s funny seeing how rationalists often fail to exercise while emphasizing their own rationality - a perfect contradiction demonstrated by the difference between imagination and bodily realities.

> The orthoganility thesis is an unproven assumption that intelligence and goals are not corellated, meaning an intelligent being can pursue stupid goals. States like that, it’s obviously wrong and laughable.

To me it's obviously wrong when stated that way because 'stupid' is not an appropriate metric for goals. We may consider goals good or bad within our value system, but that has little do to with 'stupid' or 'intelligent.' e.g. a body builder may have a goal to get as ripped as possible, a VC to make as much money as possible, an ascetic to deny the flesh as much as possible. Which of these are stupid or intelligent goals? I don't think that's a question that makes sense.

We may consider the goals of the Athenians (to expand their power) "worse" than the goals of the Melians (to be left alone)[0], but I don't see how they were "stupider."

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Melos#The_Melian_Dial...

> The orthogonality thesis is an unproven assumption

A safety mindset would suggest that rather than disregarding it until proven true, we should worry about it until proven false.

> meaning an intelligent being can pursue stupid goals.

It would pursue very intelligent instrumental goals, but the terminal goal is a free variable and I don't think there exists any measure by which terminal goals can be considered smart or stupid. It would be whatever is implied by its programming.

> States like that, it’s obviously wrong and laughable.

Perhaps not so obviously wrong nor so laughable as you think?

This “safety mindset” is the same as Pascal’s wager and has the same flaws.

There’s no clear delineation in real entities between instrumental and terminal goals.

Yeah if you’re talking to a brainwashed religious fanatic, definitely it can seem counterintuitive to the doctrines they believe.

> There’s no clear delineation in real entities between instrumental and terminal goals.

In healthy individuals, yes there absolutely is. Terminal goals are the ones you pursue for their own sake; instrumental goals are the ones you pursue as part of a plan to pursue a terminal goal, or another instrumental goal which connects to a terminal goal. Most people go to work in the morning not as a terminal goal, but as an instrumental goal; employment is in service of another instrumental goal of earning money; earning money is in service of a terminal goal of not starving to death. This is not exactly controversial stuff here. Some people do get so focused on an instrumental goal like "earning money" that they develop tunnel-vision and forget what terminal goal that money was originally in service of, but that's something most of them will eventually realize and then write a self-help book about.

Anyway, it takes intelligence to decide what your instrumental goals should be, such as whether there's perhaps a cleverer way to make money than by going to work for your boss each morning, but there's no way in which intelligence will help you choose your terminal goals. For the most part they aren't something you can even consciously choose.

Yes, you can stretch your model to try to explain why humans go to work.

In reality, people do not need to go to work to “not starve to death” as you say. There are a myriad of ways to survive without working a daily job.

Humans have to be socialized and trained to work a 9 to 5 job - there’s an entire education system structured to help create humans who view that as an acceptable goal.

No what you are saying may not be controversial in your little community but the AI panic is mostly isolated to a small community in a small corner of the USA.

Between "I go to the grocery store because I've been socialized and trained that going to the grocery store regularly is a Good Thing, and I have adopted it as a terminal goal to which I know I should dedicate efforts", vs "I go to the grocery store because I'm out of carrots, my dinner recipe calls for carrots, and I think I can get some there", the latter model is not the one that strikes me as being stretched to explain human behaviour.

As for there being "a myriad of ways to survive without working a daily job", congratulations! Your intelligence has allowed you to identify alternative instrumental goals that provide a path to your terminal goal; now you can rank them and choose the best option. You can also grow carrots in the garden or ask your neighbour if they have any, or ask your spouse to pick some up on the way home. Your intelligence will do the work and find a way. But your intelligence isn't what will guide you toward preferring carrot soup over parsnip soup, and preferring parsnip soup over fasting.

I'm not American and not in the USA, btw.

You’re arguing again from a position that assumes that entities have clearly defined terminal versus instrumental goals - which is precisely the position I reject. For instance in your example of “terminal goal is groceries” versus “terminal goal is hunger” neither of these describe how actual humans make decisions. Instead there’s a process, part biological and part environmental. The human checks the fridge then thinks “oh I feel hungry”. Is hunger the terminal goal or the fridge? That question doesn’t even make sense - it’s an interaction between the agent and the environment. Do Pavlov’s dogs have a terminal goal of “salivating to bells” or “salivating to food”? Again the question doesn’t make sense- the agent has built a habit from within a certain environment and the salivating is not goal directed. That’s why training works for dogs, and putting the fridge out of site reduces hunger in humans.

Think more carefully about the implications of multiple ways to survive here. Why do people pick one over the other? In a terminal/instrumental goal model, agents would pick the instrumental route that maximizes the return on the terminal goal. In reality we see that instead humans adopt habits, processes, and heuristics that guide them through daily life even when those do not lead to any specific goal.

Yeah, that's because re-evaluating your entire life plan and belief structure every second is expensive, and heuristics are cheap. People certainly have flaws in their thinking, which is why we fall prey to pyramid schemes, gambling, responding to pointless comment chains on HN, and so on. I don't disagree with this, and again, it's why we publish so many self-help books. But I believe it's our weakness and stupidity, not our superior intelligence and clear thinking, that traps us in bad habits.

So remind me of your original point? I believe you said it's "obviously wrong and laughable" that "an intelligent being can pursue stupid goals". Now here you are trying to convince me that humans are the ones who, like Pavlov's dogs, "pursue habits, processes, and heuristics that guide them through daily life even when those do not lead to any specific goal". Even when those habits involve repeatedly re-opening a fridge that you already know has no carrots in it, or salivating at a bell when you already know no food is coming.

So I'm confused how that proves your point about AGI. If I accept your view, it seems that if an AGI does merely no better than a human on this metric, I should anticipate all sorts of strange and irrational behaviour, including the pursuit of goals that would appear stupid, such as addiction to a reward channel. That does not seem to undermine the orthogonality thesis.

And the smarter the AGI gets, presumable the less it should lean on Pavlovian heuristics and the more it should make use of clear thought, which puts it more in my camp.

So that would apparently put the lower bound at "the AGI takes unexpected and irrational actions because it's not a rational agent and doesn't think coherently", and the upper bound at "the AGI takes unexpected and dangerous actions as rational steps toward an unaligned terminal goal".

I'm not sure where in this chain of thought it becomes laughably obvious that intelligence and goals are correlated, such that an AGI's increasing intelligence will tend it toward actions that we humans approve of, because anything else would be a "stupid goal"?

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