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mrob • yesterday at 6:05 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

>What's your basis for thinking ASI will kill all biological life

I think it's likely to do that because any unbounded goal that doesn't explicitly protect biological life (and we have no idea how to actually define such a stipulation) is best solved by killing all biological life. This is an obvious consequence of unbounded goals consuming unbounded resources, conflicting with biological life needing resources to sustain itself.

>how do you think it's going to happen?

I can speculate (e.g. we're nowhere close to the maximum killing power of drones), but I don't know because I only have human intelligence. An ASI is by definition smarter than me and surely capable of coming up with better ideas. But I do know that it's not going to do anything that would make a good sci-fi plot, because those always give the humans a chance to win, which would be stupid. Everything will seem to be going great and then everybody suddenly and unexpectedly dies.


Replies

throw1012x • yesterday at 7:09 PM

> I think it's likely to do that because any unbounded goal that doesn't explicitly protect biological life ... is best solved by killing all biological life.

That sounds like a real hassle. Isn't it best solved by wireheading (subverting one's own sensors or reward system), which is much less of a hassle and can get one's utility function as high as desired?

That could be prevented by engineering hard limits that can't be circumvented by the AI. But that sounds very close to the same "do what I mean" problem as "do this but don't actually kill us or drug us".

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Jtsummers • yesterday at 6:08 PM

> unbounded goals consuming unbounded resources

What resources are unbounded? There are limits to growth in the real world, how are these ASIs going to escape physical reality?

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