| --- |
| title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016302)" |
| source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)" |
| sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein" |
| date: "2026-01-01" |
| category: "House Oversight" |
| eftaNumber: "HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016302" |
| ocrPages: 1 |
| ocrChars: 3901 |
| ocrElapsed: 0.0 |
| parseTier: "external-legacy" |
| engine: "engine undisclosed (ep-nov-12.greg.technology mirror)" |
| externalSource: "greg-ep-nov-12" |
| externalLicense: "not granted" |
| externalCredit: "ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| externalUrl: "https://ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| --- |
| |
| change, and in which no stepwise, hierarchical, or abstract reasoning is necessary. Many |
| of the successes come not from a better understanding of the workings of intelligence but |
| from the brute-force power of faster chips and Bigger Data, which allow the programs to |
| be trained on millions of examples and generalize to similar new ones. Each system is an |
| idiot savant, with little ability to leap to problems it was not set up to solve, and a brittle |
| mastery of those it was. And to state the obvious, none of these programs has made a |
| move toward taking over the lab or enslaving its programmers. |
| Even if an artificial intelligence system tried to exercise a will to power, without |
| the cooperation of humans it would remain an impotent brain in a vat. A superintelligent |
| system, in its drive for self-improvement, would somehow have to build the faster |
| processors that it would run on, the infrastructure that feeds it, and the robotic effectors |
| that connect it to the world-all impossible unless its human victims worked to give it |
| control of vast portions of the engineered world. Of course, one can always imagine a |
| Doomsday Computer that 1s malevolent, universally empowered, always on, and |
| tamperproof. The way to deal with this threat is straightforward: Don't build one. |
| What about the newer Al threat, the value-alignment problem, foreshadowed in |
| Wiener's allusions to stories of the Monkey's Paw, the genie, and King Midas, in which a |
| wisher rues the unforeseen side effects of his wish? The fear is that we might give an Al |
| system a goal and then helplessly stand by as it relentlessly and literal-mindedly |
| implemented its interpretation of that goal, the rest of our interests be damned. If we |
| gave an Al the goal of maintaining the water level behind a dam, it might flood a town, |
| not caring about the people who drowned. If we gave it the goal of making paper clips, it |
| might turn all the matter in the reachable universe into paper clips, including our |
| possessions and bodies. If we asked it to maximize human happiness, it might implant us |
| all with intravenous dopamine drips, or rewire our brains so we were happiest sitting in |
| jars, or, if it had been trained on the concept of happiness with pictures of smiling faces, |
| tile the galaxy with trillions of nanoscopic pictures of smiley-faces. |
| Fortunately, these scenarios are self-refuting. They depend on the premises that |
| (1) humans are so gifted that they can design an omniscient and omnipotent Al, yet so |
| idiotic that they would give it control of the universe without testing how it works; and |
| (2) the Al would be so brilliant that it could figure out how to transmute elements and |
| rewire brains, yet so imbecilic that it would wreak havoc based on elementary blunders of |
| misunderstanding. The ability to choose an action that best satisfies conflicting goals is |
| not an add-on to intelligence that engineers might forget to install and test; it is |
| intelligence. So is the ability to interpret the intentions of a language user in context. |
| When we put aside fantasies like digital megalomania, instant omniscience, and |
| perfect knowledge and control of every particle in the universe, artificial intelligence is |
| like any other technology. It is developed incrementally, designed to satisfy multiple |
| conditions, tested before it is implemented, and constantly tweaked for efficacy and |
| safety. |
| The last criterion is particularly significant. The culture of safety in advanced |
| societies is an example of the humanizing norms and feedback channels that Wiener |
| invoked as a potent causal force and advocated as a bulwark against the authoritarian or |
| exploitative implementation of technology. Whereas at the turn of the 20th century |
| Western societies tolerated shocking rates of mutilation and death in industrial, domestic, |
| and transportation accidents, over the course of the century the value of human life |
| 82 |
| HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016302 |
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