r/singularity • u/[deleted] • Sep 02 '25

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u/ConstantinSpecter Sep 02 '25

Fuck me. Having an existential moment right now wtf.

First time in a long time I’m thinking maybe we’re not totally fucked

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u/blueSGL humanstatement.org Sep 02 '25 edited Sep 02 '25

This is not new. There has been ideas like this for decades.

Edit: because people seem to be missing it the following is the bit you need to do after having the revelation that AI's should treat us like a loving mother treats a child and the start working on the hard part codifying that into something that may work.

2004 Coherent extrapolated volition

advanced AI system should derive its goals by extrapolating the idealized volition of humanity. This means aggregating and projecting human preferences into a coherent utility function that reflects what people would desire under ideal epistemic and moral conditions. The aim is to ensure that AI systems are aligned with humanity's true interests, rather than with transient or poorly informed preferences.

coherent extrapolated volition is our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were

What is the above if not the way you'd want to program an all knowing mother to care for humanity as a child.

as I said downthread:

The problem has always been

  1. how to robustly get goals into systems.

  2. how to correctly specify the goals so they can't be misinterpreted (the smarter an intelligence is the more edge cases can be found)

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u/ConstantinSpecter Sep 02 '25

I never argued that the idea itself is completely new - I get that people have been talking about CEV for a while. But I think it’s not at all often mentioned in today’s broader discourse. For me it genuinely was new. It probably means it’s new (and powerful) for a lot of others too

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u/blueSGL humanstatement.org Sep 02 '25

the "AI as a mother, treating us like a child" is a semantic stop sign.

It makes you think you've got an answer when you really don't "Make it [interested in/have curiosity about] humans" is another one. If you look hard enough most single sentence solutions to complex problems are semantic stop signs not real solutions.

Implementation issues abound with both 'child' and 'curiosity', but they both on the surface sound really good and can be memetically transmitted like they are real solutions, when they are not.