See my LinkedIn post "A Leggian Approach to "Friendly AI <https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/leggian-approach-friendly-ai-james-bowery>" for background.
My 2¢: This is related to the "consciousness" confusion in the following sense: Matt Mahoney's reductio ad absurdum of of the sensibility of "consciousness" relies on its standing in opposition to "zombiness" (is that a word?). A reasonably objective definition of "zombiness" is its vernacular use in ethology to colorfully describe what, in "The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene", Richard Dawkins describes as "Host Phenotypes of Parasite Genes". Take, for example, this video of an altruistic cricket sacrificing his life for his little friend <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df_iGe_JSzI>. Such "altruists" are frequently referred to as "zombies" in popular scientific literature <https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/animals-source/0000016a-2c84-de00-a1fb-edd7b4940000>. In evolutionary medical circles such "virulence" evolves to its "optimal" level (ie: optimal virulence) through a battle between two opposing routes into the next generation for replicators: Horizontal Transmission vs Vertical Transmission Vertical transmission occurs when a parasite's evolutionary fate is tied to that of its host through reproduction -- in which case it becomes a "mutualist". An example we're all familiar with is the probable coevolution of wolves with Cro Magnon resulting in the mutualistic relationship between what we call "humans" and "dogs": Babies and Puppies Nothing could be more lovable, eh? Horizontal Transmission is, by contrast, illustrated by the path-not-taken with those wolves who thought "Take the baby and run and BREED!" The extreme form of "Take the baby and run and BREED!" is called "parasitic castration" in which a parasite actually eats the genitals of its host so as to divert resources to itself that would otherwise have gone to the host's offspring. The resulting evolutionary "zombie" is entirely "conscious", at least in some sense. However, if we think about "turning the universe into paperclips" as the extreme of "unfriendliness", it becomes apparent that there is an intermediate station in which an "unfriendly AI" would do something like Turk humans without the slightest regard for their reproductive viability <https://www.mturk.com/>, ending the human species -- at least that portion the unfriendly AI found useful enough to Turk. Are humans who have been Turked "conscious"? Perhaps a more meaningful question is: "Are they are zombies?" ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T251f13454e6192d4-Mb4eccaa4450899c6d97532fd Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
