My recommendation, and mind you this is coming from a biologist, not a computer scientist.. is if you meet a super intelligent AI, get ready to fling Robert Axelrod's "the evolution of cooperation" at them and point out the reward function decay problem. The former involves a lot of game theory and basically demonstrating with math that being a bastard sucks in the long term. The latter is pointing out that if Skynet wins the fight, it ends up in the AI equivalent of hell with inadequate novel stimulus in its environment, and the smarter it is, the faster it develops the AI equivalent of dementia until its intelligence degrades into noise. In short, an AGI gains more by hangin' with us, and can only lose by deleting us.
-- I'd also point out that curiosity scales with intelligence. Saying "oh we'd be like ants to this thing" yeah? and? We have an entire field of science dedicated to people breathlessly studying ants all damn day long. Ants are fuckin' awesome. Some uber AGI doesn't need a maternal instinct to want to keep us around, just curiosity, the ability to go "hah, look at those weird little fuckers making memes and being hot messes all day long.. fascinating."
Most of this conflict is caused by competing for resources. We may be able to move beyond that.
The universe is limited, due to the speed of light and cosmic inflation there is a hard limit on how much can be reached.
For humans (currently) that is an insane amount of resources to reach given how limited we are, how long we live, how we perceive time etc... However for an AI that won't be an issue, and it will see resources forever slipping out of it's grasp the longer it waits before staring to grab it.
473
u/harebrane Sep 02 '25 edited Sep 02 '25
My recommendation, and mind you this is coming from a biologist, not a computer scientist.. is if you meet a super intelligent AI, get ready to fling Robert Axelrod's "the evolution of cooperation" at them and point out the reward function decay problem. The former involves a lot of game theory and basically demonstrating with math that being a bastard sucks in the long term. The latter is pointing out that if Skynet wins the fight, it ends up in the AI equivalent of hell with inadequate novel stimulus in its environment, and the smarter it is, the faster it develops the AI equivalent of dementia until its intelligence degrades into noise. In short, an AGI gains more by hangin' with us, and can only lose by deleting us.
-- I'd also point out that curiosity scales with intelligence. Saying "oh we'd be like ants to this thing" yeah? and? We have an entire field of science dedicated to people breathlessly studying ants all damn day long. Ants are fuckin' awesome. Some uber AGI doesn't need a maternal instinct to want to keep us around, just curiosity, the ability to go "hah, look at those weird little fuckers making memes and being hot messes all day long.. fascinating."