All of Michele Campolo's Comments + Replies

Hey! I've had a look at some parts of this post, don't know where the sequence is going exactly, but I thought that you might be interested in some parts of this post I've written. Below I give some info about how it relates to ideas you've touched on:

This view has the advantage, for philosophers, of making no empirical predictions (for example, about the degree to which different rational agents will converge in their moral views)

I am not sure about the views of the average non-naturalist realist, but in my post (under Moral realism and anti-realism, in t... (read more)

Thank you!

Yes I am considering both options. For the next two months I'll focus on job and grant applications, then I'll reevaluate what to do depending on the results.

Hey, I just wanted to thank you for writing this!

I'm looking forward to reading future posts in the series; actually, I think it would be great to have series like this one for each major cause area.

Yes I'd like to read a clearer explanation. You can leave the link here in a comment or write me a private message.

Hey!

Thanks for the suggestion. I've read part of the Wikipedia page on Jungian archetypes, but my background is not in psychology and it was not clear to me. The advantage of just saying that our thoughts can be abstract (point 1) is that pretty much everyone understands the meaning of that, while I am not sure this is true if we start  introducing concepts like Jungian archetypes and the collective unconscious.

I agree with you that the AI (and AI safety) community doesn't seem to care much about Jungian archetypes. It might be that AI people get the idea anyway, maybe they just express it in different terms (e.g. they talk about the influence of culture on human values, instead of archetypes).  

Thank you!

Maybe "only person in the world" is a bit excessive :)

As far as I know, no one else in AI safety is directly working on it. There is some research in the field of machine ethics, about Artificial Moral Agents, that has a similar motivation or objective. My guess is that, overall, very few people are working on this.

What you wrote about the central claim is more or less correct: I actually made only an existential claim about a single aligned agent, because the description I gave is sketchy and really far from the more precise algorithmic level of description. This single agent probably belongs to a class of other aligned agents, but it seems difficult to guess how large this class is.

That is also why I have not given a guarantee that all agents of a certain kind will be aligned.

Regarding the orthogonality thesis, you might find 1.2 in Bostrom's 2012 paper interesting... (read more)