Summary of my preferred mind-uploading protocol
(Current abbreviated rephrasing of my views on how a person could survive a process of mind uploading, originally shared online in early 2000s)
In case humans face a future where mind uploading is possible, I suggest the only safe way to transition from organic substrate to inorganic one is to do it gradually to preserve a single instance of the person's awareness at all times. This could be done by gradually replacing organic brain elements with inorganic functional equivalents. I am not a collection of memories and facts, I am an instance of awareness that is generated by a brain process, an uninterrupted instance of a particular energy configuration expressed in time and space. This is why I would not consider myself to be alive once that instance ended, even if another instance with the same energy configuration were to be reproduced somewhere else and especially when two instances of the same energy configuration coexisted.
The simplest way to distinguish between a copy and an original is to find at least one thing that distinguishes one instance of something from the other. If such a thing is found, then two things are not equivalent to each other. Many people believe that a person would survive if the original died if recorded data while that person was alive allowed to recreate the same type of person in the future. People believe that preserving the type of the original person is enough to call it survival. Some even claim that preservation of someone's "legacy" qualifies as survival. In my view true survival is preservation of the original instance of person's awareness, the ability to continue to perceive and experience reality. Even if two instances of the same type of person existed, acting in sync, which would be indistinguishable to a third party observer, it'd still be easy to find at least one thing that distinguished one from the other, in this case their location. If original instance of that person dies, it dies irreversibly, meaning, the original instance of person's awareness no longer experiences the reality.
Sufficiently good way to preserve original instance of person's awareness would be through gradual uploading, either by replacing the organic brain elements with inorganic ones or by augmenting the brain with external hardware capable of continuing that person's awareness, then gradually shutting down the no longer necessary organic brain components that used to run that instance. In both cases, a single instance of person's awareness would be preserved during the migration from biological substrate to non-biological one.
2023: Even closer to the end.
When I joined Eliezer's sl4 forum over 20 years ago, I was hopeful Eliezer and his ultra-smart colleagues would solve Friendly AI before researchers figure out AGI. I thought they'd find a way to mathematically prove Friendliness that would be stable through recursive self-improvement. I threw out some ideas at the time to help but obviously nobody listened, then reposted these ideas on this blog years later. It's 20 years later and it looks like AGI is closer than ever. I think around 2007, I realized that the problem of what's now known as AI Alignment is likely too hard to solve for humans and that the default scenario would be companies, in pursuit of profit and fame, would eventually find themselves in insane arms race to develop the most capable AI to chase profits, disregarding Alignment, which, of course, would lead to the end of humanity. So, around 2007, I simply abandoned hope and started living my life as a "normie" the best I could, far away from transhumanist forums, trying to complete the few bucket list items that I could, knowing the end was inevitable. Well, it's 2023 now and recent developments in generative AI suggest there's less time than I thought we had. I honestly thought few years ago that we still had 10-20 years before AGI, perhaps enough for something like Nauralink to bootstrap an ethical human(s) for intelligence amplification so it could work on AI Alignment, but now it looks like synthetic AGI is coming within few years at most. It's too late to do anything about it. Society is too dumb to understand the implications of this technology and will not pause its development. So it's full steam ahead into oblivion. Only a miracle could save us at this point. But miracles are very low probability events.
Labels: ai, alignment, chatGPT, eliezer, singularity
Designing Good AI
(Post draft from September 2011)
Even though Good AI won't explicitly serve humanity, thus more immune to human content viruses than friendly AI, in order to build it we have to start somewhere, and because of lack of other options, the seed of goodness destined to be planted at the heart of AI's moral code has to have human origin. Ideally, an AI should have at least a human-level understanding of what good is before it's ready to make the very first revision of its code; even though it won't have a complete understanding, it should at least receive the maximum possible level of that understanding that humans could convey. Probably the most important design idea is to keep AI's intelligence in the service of good, not the other way around where AI decides to increase intelligence in order to increase its understanding of what good is; AI should begin forming technical plans to get smarter only after it it reaches maximum possible level of understanding of good afforded by the current level of intelligence. It is only when AI exhausts all other ways to increase its comprehension of good that it is forced to revise its code--and amplify its own intelligence--in order to increase its capacity to implement and understand it better.
Making a human serve as a seed of goodness is much more complete solution than trying to distill our human knowledge of what good is into declarative statements and hoping AI will understand their intended meaning. It has to be a dialog. It would be silly to expect to teach AI about good and press OK button to start a process of AI revising its code when we feel like we have nothing else to add. AI has to demonstrate that it has as firm a grasp on the concept of good as a good human does. But wouldn't it be unsafe to raise AI to a human-level of smartness so that we could engage it in two-way discussions about the nature of good, and risk it being smart enough to upgrade its own code? There's always a risk but it can be minimized to almost zero if we could fully exploit the fact that intelligence is not the same as knowledge and that higher intelligence doesn't automatically imply higher knowledge. Even AI that's a lot smarter than humans would not be able to revise its code if it knew nothing about programming and its own design. The same is true of humans now. Some of us would love to upgrade our smartness, but we have no access to our own code nor to the knowledge about how we could do it even if we did possess that access. Imagine how horrific the world would be if everyone had the means and ability to make himself just smarter, and not necessarily also morally better. But we could make AI progress toward infinite smartness necessarily tied to its ascend to infinite goodness, or rather intelligence progress as merely a consequence of its main mission: becoming Better. Before AI gets significantly smarter than humans (but not when it's just a bit smarter), its programmers and teachers will be able to maintain complete control as long as they won't provide resources for AI to learn about computer science and its own designs. Instead, the sole focus of a young AI's education should be the nature of good. The initial goal is for AI to graduate as a best possible philosopher and humanitarian, not as an expert programmer and AI researcher. At first, only humans will be in charge of making changes to AI's code that will result in intelligence amplification until our AI will demonstrate sufficient understanding of good through a dialog with the teachers. The Singularity will probably not begin when AI necessarily becomes smarter than humans, but when humans decide it'll be safe to open the spigot of knowledge of CS and AI's designs for AI's consumption. But then, hopefully, our AI will not only be smarter than us, but also Better than us and I don't think as humans we could improve on that.
