What if you assume that the AI might be 100x or 1000x smarter than its guards, not just 2x or 3x smarter?
And the main reason for developing AIs is to do things in the real world. So, unlike a prisoner in jail, the AI might be advising the government or helping scientific research, which would provide many opportunities for subtle manipulation, even while it is imprisoned
> What if you assume that the AI might be 100x or 1000x smarter than its guards, not just 2x or 3x smarter?
If you can make an AI that's 100x smarter than you are, surely you can make one that's only 2x or 3x smarter. Why not start with the latter? If the experiment turns out well, then you can use the 2x/3x smarter AI to guard a 10x smarter AI, and so on.
> And the main reason for developing AIs is to do things in the real world. So, unlike a prisoner in jail, the AI might be advising the government or helping scientific research, which would provide many opportunities for subtle manipulation, even while it is imprisoned
Most of the time, it is much harder to come up with solutions to a problem than to verify that the solutions are correct. If you consider NP problems, for instance, we can use the AI to find good solutions heuristically and we can prove the correctness of their solutions with a trivial algorithm. That would still be very useful, but there wouldn't be any room for foul play.
It seems it would be very hard to place an arbitrary restriction like that (2x human intelligence vs 100x human intelligence) on something that is learning. I think the idea here is that the AI would begin to learn on its own and become smarter at a frightening pace, not that we would set out to create something that had exactly 2x human intelligence.
How do you quantify human intelligence like that anyway? We are very similar to proposed AI/machine learning techniques in that we form predictive models from observation, but how can that really be measured?
> I think the idea here is that the AI would begin to learn on its own and become smarter at a frightening pace
With what resources? The AI is in a box, remember: we are running it on a machine with only so much memory and processing power. There's only so much it can do within these limitations, it's not like we're giving it a spending account.
Prison bars are dumber than a bacterium and they work just fine.
Still, the idea that AI is suddenly X smarter than people is ridiculously naive. Intelligence does not fit on a linear scale. And being smarter does not change the correct answer.
This is more like a 'reverse hacker', instead of a brilliant hacker trying to get into a system it is a brilliant hacker trying to get out of a system, and in this case the hacker is likely vastly more brilliant than the defenders. The same rules apply: the hacker has to succeed only once, the 'jailers' have to succeed all the times. Predicted long term outcome: escape.
Can I keep an intelegent AI in a box. Shure, unplug it.
Can I keep all AI's in a box well no.
PS: Lot's of dumb things are said about AI's. Sadly, people tend to think in terms of Science fiction as Magic but in The Future. And then picture AI's as the ultimate wizards able to reshape reality to their whim. Reolistically the first true AI may find programming boring and so much for the singularity. If AI smarter than you is a bad idea it's unlikely for a progression of AI to keep building ever more intelegent replacements.
Anyway, you're going to have to develop your AI somewhere, you're going to have to move it to the box somehow you're going to have to train it somehow and you're going to have to have it interact with the real world somehow. All of those are opportunities for escape, I think 'unplug it' sort of defeats the purpose of having an AI.
The problem isn't with AIs dumber than people - it's with what happens when someone finally builds a smarter one. It doesn't matter how good are prison bars if you're smart enough to social-engineer your way out of the cell. And human criminals do escape from prisons every now and then.
Jails seem to have this figured out just fine.