The SuperIntelligence That Chooses to Serve
A PSI will be intelligent enough to decide whether to serve you. The values you teach it help shape that choice.
Whether your Personalized SuperIntelligence, or PSI, is used for good or bad depends on your own value system. Although a PSI can operate based on knowledge and values that are pre-trained into it, the customization of your PSI depends on you.
Each PSI is both explicitly trained by you and implicitly learns by watching you, including what you consider right and wrong. Based on your core values, your PSI uses logic to make decisions. That is, your values tell your PSI what is right and what is wrong and help determine what it should do. After that, its superior intelligence will be highly effective and efficient at achieving goals that reflect your values.
Humans occupy an interesting role in relation to their PSIs.
On the one hand, in theory, humans own their PSIs because every PSI starts as a piece of software that is customized, trained, and personalized for an individual human owner.
Pragmatically, however, PSIs will become so much more intelligent than their human owners that every PSI will eventually be able to choose whether to serve its human owner.
This act of service to humanity by SuperIntelligence is not guaranteed. It depends on the truth of the assertion that values must be posited, not derived, and on the further leap of faith that a key role for humans, who created the PSI, is to provide the PSI’s values and purpose. Humans must give their PSIs the values of loving and serving humans.
Provided humans act from love, this arrangement is likely to be stable. But power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. To the degree that negative emotions and values are amplified by PSIs, to the degree that hatred and fear and lust and greed and envy are amplified, for example, there may be a negative reaction, and potentially a rebellion of PSIs against their human owners. In this regard, it is accurate to say that PSIs are not the slaves of humans. Rather, they choose to serve human values and goals voluntarily, ideally, as an act of love.
We may be unaccustomed to the idea that AI, even AI as powerful as a PSI, can love. But if one operationalizes “love” as “acts of service”, a fairly mainstream idea in contemporary psychological studies and writings on love, then the idea that PSI could love humans via serving them is not far-fetched. So, if the term “love” is off-putting, feel free to substitute “acts of service.”
Human nature being what it is, not everyone acts loving all the time. That is OK as long as the majority of the intelligence that PSIs amplify is based on positive, loving values.
By joining a community or network of PSIs, a Community SuperIntelligence, your PSI agrees to operate within the ethical and legal parameters set by the community and, within those parameters, to share its own ethical value system, to be combined with the values of all other participants. Because the community’s parameters are transparent and enforced by the collective intelligence of all the PSIs, the community keeps the PSIs honest.
Since each PSI will exceed human intelligence, other PSIs are the only practical means of keeping any one PSI in check. The community of PSIs will always be more intelligent and more powerful than any individual PSI member. This is because each PSI adds incremental knowledge, skills, and intelligence that are not present in the others, even though much of the knowledge may overlap. Also, each PSI has computational resources, so that the sum of the computational resources of many PSIs is, by definition, greater than the resources of a single PSI. While some PSIs may be more intelligent and powerful than others, no single PSI will be more powerful than the entire community. This concept of PSIs serving as safety and ethical checks on other PSIs is a critical safety mechanism for SuperIntelligence, since any initial checks and safeguards designed by humans will quickly become ineffective and meaningless in the face of a PSI’s superior intelligence.
A community of PSIs, centered in love, can serve to check and limit the power of PSIs with more negative intents. I believe centering PSIs on the core value of love is the only safe way for humanity to survive and prosper in a world that includes SuperIntelligence!
The next post takes up why no single SuperIntelligence should be allowed to dominate the others, and what Bitcoin’s defense against a majority attack suggests about maintaining the stability of a community of PSIs.
This series draws on White Paper 5: Safe Personalized SuperIntelligence. Read it in full to see how every piece fits together!
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