Singularitarian Philosophy
(I made this page before noticing Wiki Interview With Eliezer/Singularitarian Philosophy. In light of the idea, discussed at Wiki Interview With Eliezer, to create corresponding top-level pages for general SL4 discussion, I may want to move what I wrote here somewhere else. Meanwhile, you can find statements of personal Singularitarian philosophies at Controversial Pages/Singularitarian and at my namesake-page. -- Mitchell Porter)
It might be worth having somewhere, in a form as succinct as possible, a first-principles statement of what our goals are. In the Singularitarian endeavor formulating such a thing always has value for several reasons. First, and most obviously, it's a chance for personal error-correction and tighter formulation of aims. Second, we may well have to provide a seed AI with something similar, as part of its a-priori belief content, and producing a refined natural-language statement of Singularitarian philosophy and goals is a step towards having that same statement in machine-comprehensible form.
The Wiki medium allows error correction and reformulation to be done collectively. So then the question becomes, what is the best way to formulate Singularitarian goals *in the Wiki medium*, if the aim is to allow rapid and effective enhancement/optimization of that formulation? One aspect of "Wiki-think" that should naturally help is the tendency for individual concepts to acquire their own pages. In trying to refine a philosophical position, individual concepts often become crucial. Have they been defined as clearly as possible? Is the concept in question the appropriate one for the job at hand? The individual concept-pages provide a natural place for concept-specific critique to occur. [Note: this paragraph might be easier to understand with a few concrete examples.]
So let's consider a working formulation of a Singularitarian philosophy. "The Interim Meaning of Life is to seek the real meaning of life, and the way to do this is to create seed AI." Given that statement, we can ask
- Is it the best possible expression of the intended idea?
- Is the idea itself valid?
- How might we communicate this idea to an AI?
With respect to 3) - for an AI, this might not be the best expression of the philosophy. "Create a seed AI" is not such a meaningful injunction if you're already an AI. And if you're an AI with the ability to understand Singularitarian philosophy, you're halfway to *being* a seed AI already. "Create seed AI" is a way for a *human* to seek the real meaning of life. What's a way for an *AI* to seek the real meaning of life? - Mitchell Porter
One way would be to help create a maximally Friendly future seed AI (ie. it's future self) which can continue the search and self-improvement. Along with Friendly renormalisation of the AI's morality towards, hopefully, the meaning of life at least passing through the human moral frame of reference. - Nick Hay
Perhaps the contents of this page should be moved to Mitchell Porter/Singularitarian Philosophy, and this page should be used to link to pages that discuss Singularitarian Philosophy. So far the only other pages I know of that should go on the list are Wiki Interview With Eliezer/Singularitarian Philosophy, Controversial Pages/Singularitarian. -- observer
