[ExI] Meta question

[William Flynn Wallace]

Whew.

Note that lacking a utility function does not mean you are irrational. It
is just that you may have messy, probabilistic goals that are not known
entirely to yourself.

I'd say that last sentence will apply to every single human being and all
their goals.  In fact, you could change the last to 'goals that are mostly
not known....' and still be correct for large amounts of human motivations.
(We in the group, however, know ourselves perfectly.)

After thinking about this for awhile (all day), in many instances I prefer
'nonrational' to irrational especially as applied to unconscious drives.

bill w

-- 
Dr Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University


On Fri, Aug 19, 2016 at 2:53 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> On 2016-08-19 18:25, William Flynn Wallace wrote:
>
> Just how can Anders group parse that?  How do you put all that into
> equations?  Seems pretentious or maybe over-simplifying human behavior.
>  (now I could get an even more complicated response from Anders that I will
> fail to follow in its entirely)
>
>
> Mostly because our equations are about AI. The designers can build AIs to
> have a particular utility function, and that will be it. Humans are messy
> and might not be well described even by complex utilities. But at least
> some AI can be analysed in great detail by this formalism.
>
> (I'm actually more interested in neuromorphic systems that borrow their
> structure and hence also messiness from biology; they will of course at
> most have approximate utilities.)
>
> Note that lacking a utility function does not mean you are irrational. It
> is just that you may have messy, probabilistic goals that are not known
> entirely to yourself.
>
> --
> Dr Anders Sandberg
> Future of Humanity Institute
> Oxford Martin School
> Oxford University
>
>
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>
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