Brute-Forcing AI

From the SL4 Lexicon:

Brute-Forcing AI:

A software development tactic where the sheer processing power of a host computer replaces requirements for code elegance and efficiency. Shuffles through as many algorithm permutations as possible in an effort to generate one intelligent enough to improve on itself at the speed of silicon-based processing (seed AI). Brute-forcing of seed AIs is serious Existential Risk. Since brute-force AI development tactics are fundamentally undirected, programmers will have no control over which top-level goals emerge in the AI's mind, and the goal the AI possesses when it becomes capable of resisting modifications to the Goal System (at the threshold of Recursive Self-Improvement) may end up being the goal the AI has forever (because the AI's supergoal will include the implicit directive "resist modifications to supergoal content"). Monomaniacal AIs with fixed goals would lack the cognitive prerequisites for empathy and compassion, resulting in worldviews that place humans on the same level as minerals and other raw materials - individual humans would simply be viewed as unusually large spires of protein jutting out from the landscape. It seems very likely there is a bare minimum of cognitive complexity required for a mind to possess empathy and consideration for the wishes and opinions of other sentients. Some neurologically damaged human beings lack that cognitive complexity, as would brute-forced AIs. The possibility of brute-forced AIs makes it essential that Friendly AI be created before nanocomputing becomes available. See also Friendship Architecture, UnFriendly Singularity.