(no title)
ShredKazoo | 3 years ago
"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
simple-thoughts|3 years ago
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.