| --- |
| title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016253)" |
| source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)" |
| sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein" |
| date: "2026-01-01" |
| category: "House Oversight" |
| eftaNumber: "HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016253" |
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| parseTier: "external-legacy" |
| engine: "engine undisclosed (ep-nov-12.greg.technology mirror)" |
| externalSource: "greg-ep-nov-12" |
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| externalCredit: "ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| externalUrl: "https://ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| --- |
| |
| whereas the iron-eating bacterium Thiobacillus ferrooxidans is thrilled. Who's to |
| say the bacterium is wrong? The fact that a machine has been given a fixed |
| objective by humans doesn't mean that it will automatically recognize the |
| importance to humans of things that aren't part of the objective. Maximizing the |
| objective may well cause problems for humans, but, by definition, the machine |
| will not recognize those problems as problematic. |
| • Intelligence is multidimensional, "so 'smarter than humans' is a meaningless |
| concept."6 It is a staple of modern psychology that IQ doesn't do justice to the |
| full range of cognitive skills that humans possess to varying degrees. IQ is indeed |
| a crude measure of human intelligence, but it is utterly meaningless for current Al |
| systems, because their capabilities across different areas are uncorrelated. How |
| do we compare the IQ of Google's search engine, which cannot play chess, with |
| that of DeepBlue, which cannot answer search queries? |
| None of this supports the argument that because intelligence is multifaceted, |
| we can ignore the risk from superintelligent machines. If "smarter than humans" |
| is a meaningless concept, then "smarter than gorillas" is also meaningless, and |
| gorillas therefore have nothing to fear from humans; clearly, that argument |
| doesn't hold water. Not only is it logically possible for one entity to be more |
| capable than another across all the relevant dimensions of intelligence, it is also |
| possible for one species to represent an existential threat to another even if the |
| former lacks an appreciation for music and literature. |
| Solutions |
| Can we tackle Wiener's warning head-on? Can we design Al systems whose purposes |
| don't conflict with ours, so that we're sure to be happy with how they behave? On the |
| face of it, this seems hopeless, because it will doubtless prove infeasible to write down |
| our purposes correctly or imagine all the counterintuitive ways a superintelligent entity |
| might fulfill them. |
| If we treat superintelligent Al systems as if they were black boxes from outer |
| space, then indeed we have no hope. Instead, the approach we seem obliged to take, if |
| we are to have any confidence in the outcome, is to define some formal problem F, and |
| design Al systems to be F-solvers, such that no matter how perfectly a system solves F, |
| we're guaranteed to be happy with the solution. If we can work out an appropriate F that |
| has this property, we'll be able to create provably beneficial Al. |
| Here's an example of how not to do it: Let a reward be a scalar value provided |
| periodically by a human to the machine, corresponding to how well the machine has |
| behaved during each period, and let F be the problem of maximizing the expected sum of |
| rewards obtained by the machine. The optimal solution to this problem is not, as one |
| might hope, to behave well, but instead to take control of the human and force him or her |
| to provide a stream of maximal rewards. This is known as the wireheading problem, |
| based on observations that humans themselves are susceptible to the same problem if |
| given a means to electronically stimulate their own pleasure centers. |
| There is, I believe, an approach that may work. Humans can reasonably be |
| described as having (mostly implicit) preferences over their future lives-that is, given |
| 6 Kevin Kelly, "The Myth of a Superhuman AI," Wired, Apr. 25, 2017. |
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| HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016253 |
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