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LoquaciousAntipodean OP t1_j5j8f73 wrote

Reply to comment by superluminary in The 'alignment problem' is fundamentally an issue of human nature, not AI engineering. by LoquaciousAntipodean

Counter, counter arguments:

1: Psychopaths are severely maladaptive and very rare; our social superorganism works very hard to identify and build caution against them

2: Most wild cats are not very social animals, and are not particularly 'intelligent'. Domestication has enforced a kind of 'neotenous' permanent youth-of-mind upon cats; they get their weird, malformed social behaviours from humans enforcing kitten-dependency mindset upon them, and have a hell of a lot of vestigial solitary-carnivore instincts that they still are driven by

3: Dolphins ain't shit. 😂 Humans have regularly chopped off the heads of other humans and used them as sport-balls, sometimes even on horseback, which is a whole extra level of twisted. It's still 'playing' though, even if it is maladaptive and awful looking back with the benefit of hindsight and our now-larger accretion of collective social external intelligence as a superorganism.

I see no reason why AI would need to go through a 'phase' of being so unsophisticated, surely we as humans can give them at least a little bit of a head start, with the lessons we have learned and encoded into our stories. I hope so, at least.

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superluminary t1_j5j98es wrote

  1. Psychopathy is genetic, it’s an excellent adaptation for certain circumstances. Game theory dictates that it has to be a minority phenotype, but it’s there for a reason.

  2. Wild cats are not social animals. AIs are also not social animals. Cat play is basically hunt practice, get an animal and then practice bringing it down over and over. Rough and tumble play fulfils the same role. Bold of you to assume than an AI would never consider you suitable sport.

  3. Did you ever read Lord of the Flies?

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LoquaciousAntipodean OP t1_j5j9tmt wrote

1: Downs syndrome is genetic, too. That doesn't make it an 'excellent adaptation' any more than any other. Evolution doesn't assign 'values' like that; it's only about utility.

2: AI are social minds, extremely so, exclusively so, that's what makes them so weird. They are all social, and no individual. Have you not been paying attention?

3: Yes, it's a parable about the way people can rush to naiive judgements when they are acting in a 'juvenile' state of mind. But actual young human boys are nothing like that at all; have you ever heard the story of the six Tongan boys, who got shipwrecked and isolated for 15 months?

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