Why don't we just give that task to the AI? It'll be smarter than us...
Maybe the problem is that people are too easy to understand: We want "Brave New World", but we don't want to know about it, or that we want it.
> To be a safe fulfiller of a wish, a genie must share the same values that led you to make the wish. Otherwise the genie may not choose a path through time which leads to the destination you had in mind, or it may fail to exclude horrible side effects that would lead you to not even consider a plan in the first place. Wishes are leaky generalizations, derived from the huge but finite structure that is your entire morality; only by including this entire structure can you plug all the leaks.
Humans can mostly differentiate between good and bad (ethics), but we don't know how we arrive at those conclusions (metaethics) because humans are terrible at introspection. Also, there's a ton of gray areas (e.g. the trolley problem). So rather than define all possible edge cases, it's probably less difficult to understand human decision-making from first principles and model our FAI accordingly.
We also probably won't get multiple generations to work these problems out. The first true AI could rapidly increase it's own intelligence and power and then pretty much do whatever it wants. We have to get it right the first time.
For example, let's say we develop a super friendly AI, running on your computer. The AI realizes the human race is actually awful. We're greedy, we're killing tons of animals, chopping down rainforests, destroying the ocean and planet, starting wars with one another, and committing unspeakable acts of evil at times. The AI, being more intelligent than us, might decide the world is better off without the human race, and that we're actually a problem that needs to be removed.
Now, what does the AI do in your computer? Well, it's intelligent and knows the human race. It's not a hurry. It calculates the best way to destroy our species. It acts friendly, and talks about how humans and robots should live together, and if we make robots with a similar intelligence, they could drive our cars, shine our shoes, cook us dinner, look after the elderly, open your pickle jar, etc. So, we listen to the AI, it's smart, and friendly, and we build all these robots. It's right, the new robots are doing great and helping us out. Then the robots start building more and more robots. They start building robots with firepower, so they can, you know, shoot down threatening asteroids, or stop one of those dangerous human types that goes on a killing spree in our society. Fast forward a couple of hundred years, and there are robots everywhere. They finally decide it's time to continue their plan, they're in a position of power at this point, and they can instantly disable our security systems, phone lines, satellites, internet etc, and start wiping us out.
We're gone. They constructed the most efficient way to clean us from the planet. They were planning it for hundreds of years, starting in your computer. The AI then goes on to explore the universe, and we're just a blip in the past.
It kind of feels like we're a bug going towards the light, and that the unfortunate conclusion is almost inevitable.
Within a week it could pay/blackmail/manipulate some humans somewhere into developing some crude self-replicating robots or nanotech. Then almost immediately afterwards it consumes the entire Earth in a swarm of rapidly self-replicating nanobots.
...or something. How should I know what a mind literally millions of times more intelligent than me would do. It's like predicting the exact next move a chessmaster will make. I don't know, but I'm confident they'd beat me quickly.
The goal, of course, is to make an AI which won't do this. If the AI decides to terminate the human race, we've already failed making it friendly and it obviously doesn't share our goals and values. But what are our goals and values? I don't know if anyone can answer that. I'm not sure if there is a satisfactory answer.
Even if it decides to be our friend and to help our species, someone will of course fork that AI and give it a negative personality and goals. Then you have the evil AI trying to hack the friendly AI that exists in our homes, and it's a battle of the robots.
Of course, whether or not AI is even possible, no one knows. If it is, I think we'll achieve it, and we'll open up a remarkable can of worms.
No: the first AI won't let them. See, we're talking a rapidly improving super-intelligence. Whatever is contrary to its goals, it will squash like a bug. A mad scientist forking the code of the AI with a different goal structure is definitely contrary to the goals of that first super-intelligence, and will be shut down before it grows into a sizeable competitor.
The result of intelligence explosion is a Singleton: the AI will be a perfectly efficient dictator. It may even shield us from the laws of physics until we graduate to adulthood.
"Friendly" is a term of art among AI people, at least at Less Wrong, and their meaning of friendly excludes this whole scenario. A friendly AI is one which helps humanity and has no horrifying side effects. The vagueness of that definition is the problem Yudkowsky and his acolytes are trying to solve.
(If we're going all LW on this thread: http://lesswrong.com/lw/xt/interpersonal_entanglement/)
>Sure, it sounds silly. But if your grand vision of the future isn't at least as much fun as a volcano lair with catpersons of the appropriate gender, you should just go with that instead. This rules out a surprising number of proposals.