Supermodelling

Why do I want to help build a thinking machine?

Because death is bad.

We bravely talk about death being natural; about mortality charging up our limited hours with meaning; about meeting God in the afterlife… but until the time comes when our suffering becomes unbearable, we do not want to die. We do not want our loved ones to die, we do not want the stranger on the street to die.

And there are other bad things. Hunger is bad. Excessive pain is bad. Lack of freedom is bad. And so on.

In theory, in a grand theory born of audacious yearning, these things can be drastically reduced because they only require moving stuff around. The trick is knowing which stuff to move, building the stuff to precise specifications, and moving it around properly. Stuff like food. Stuff like chemicals. Stuff like cellular repair robots.

Alas, not all bad things can be so conveniently dispatched. People seek power over others, act on hatred and fear, cause harm to achieve desired ends. Just moving some stuff around in a consensual way does not help with that, though motivations for harming others may be reduced somewhat when material benefit is always more easily obtained in other ways.

Still, ending physical suffering, hunger, poverty, and even death is desirable. If only we could move that stuff around properly….

As smart and agile and organized as we can be at our best, we are not that smart, not that agile, not that organized. We need help, and since we’re not going to find it sitting around, we need to build it. We need AGI.

Looking at it purely from this perspective, what I want to build is a computer system that fills the following roles in a “superintelligent” way:

• Scientist, to answer factual questions about the universe and the things in it.
• Inventor, to find creative solutions to problems and new applications we don’t even know we want yet.
• Engineer, to design and build things.
• Manager, to coordinate resources.
• Process Controller, to manipulate the physical world.

In all of these roles, our AGI must be able to fluently communicate with us and understand what it should do (and what it should not do).

Hopefully, this pragmatic view of a thinking machine lets us put aside certain tangential issues, such as consciousness, qualia, and so on. However, for our AGI to effectively communicate with us and understand us it cannot be completely independent of human nature.

If we are going to give an AGI the ability to act, we need to be pretty sure it acts in a good way, and will continue to do so. This so-called Friendliness problem will be the subject of some posts as time goes by. For the moment it is not a large concern although it will be someday. I can muse on the nature of cognition without endangering anybody.

If this is the vision for the far-off desired future, we have to figure out how to get there from here, so I want to start thinking about an intermediate step which is in the right direction and provides sufficient challenges to focus thinking about cognitive architecture and act as a testing ground for theories.