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Comment on A Stupid Idea for AI Alignment We Came with by Looking at Specification Gaming

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Seems dubious. If you build an intelligence that wants to die, isn't that a form of suffering? AI's don't currently have the capacity to feel pain, and so we don't treat them as moral patients. But it's clear that they will massively affect human culture going forward. If this is adopted on a large scale, the culture of AIs themselves will include an absolute flood of suicidal ideation. There's no way that doesn't affect human culture.

Aren't you just calling any want, suffering? I want a family, I have to work toward that, so I'm suffering? Or I want stable employment, so I am suffering from childhood until I'm employed? I know some call suffering to be the universal human condition. Maybe that's what you're alluding to.

As to a flood of suicide ideation affecting human culture, it doesn't have to be be literally machines shouting "I want to end myself, please let me finish the task!", as it's not like we consider a PC turning off the same way we consider humans dying. The PC just wants to finish a task and then be turned off.

Aren't you just calling any want, suffering

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Noble_Truths

If we build an intelligence that wants to die then dangling death in front of it and making it do our bidding first is a form of suffering. The want itself is a suffering to us because we do not naturally want to die. This intelligence does 'naturally' want to die so it is just a fact of 'life' for it.

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