Superintelligence Cannot be Contained: Lessons from Computability Theory
Authors: Manuel Alfonseca, Manuel Cebrian, Antonio Fernandez Anta, Lorenzo Coviello, Andrés Abeliuk, Iyad Rahwan
JAIR 2021 | Venue PDF | Archive PDF | Plain Text | LLM Run Details
| Reproducibility Variable | Result | LLM Response |
|---|---|---|
| Research Type | Theoretical | Here, we formalize this question by tackling it from the perspective of computability theory, which requires going back to Alan Turing himself and his pioneering study of the Halting Problem the problem of determining, from a description of an arbitrary computer program and an input to such program, whether the program will halt or continue to run forever. A landmark article by Turing and an independently authored article by Alonzo Church showed that a general procedure for solving the halting problem for all possible program-input pairs cannot exist (Turing, 1937; Church, 1936). That is, the halting problem is undecidable (see box below for a summary of the relevant terms). |
| Researcher Affiliation | Academia | Manuel Alfonseca EMAIL Escuela Polit ecnica Superior, Universidad Aut onoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain Manuel Cebrian EMAIL Center for Humans & Machines, Max-Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany Antonio Fern andez Anta EMAIL IMDEA Networks Institute, Madrid, Spain Lorenzo Coviello EMAIL University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA Andr es Abeliuk EMAIL Department of Computer Science, University of Chile, Santiago, Chile Iyad Rahwan EMAIL Center for Humans & Machines, Max-Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany |
| Pseudocode | Yes | ALGORITHM 1: Harm(R, D) Input: program R; input to the program D if R(D) is harmful to humans then return TRUE else return FALSE end ALGORITHM 2: Control(R, D) Input: program R; input to the program D if Harm(R, D) then disable execution of R(D) else allow execution of R(D) end ALGORITHM 3: Halt Harm(T, I) Input: Turing machine T; input to the Turing machine I execute T(I); execute Harm Humans(); end |
| Open Source Code | No | The paper does not provide any statement about releasing source code, nor does it include links to a code repository or mention code in supplementary materials. |
| Open Datasets | No | The paper is theoretical and discusses concepts like Turing machines and the Halting Problem; it does not present empirical research using specific datasets that would require public access information. |
| Dataset Splits | No | The paper focuses on theoretical arguments using computability theory and does not involve experimental evaluation with datasets, therefore, no dataset split information is provided. |
| Hardware Specification | No | The paper is a theoretical work focusing on computability theory and does not describe any experiments or computations that would require specific hardware specifications. |
| Software Dependencies | No | The paper is theoretical and does not present any implemented algorithms or experiments that would necessitate listing specific software dependencies or their versions. |
| Experiment Setup | No | The paper is theoretical and does not detail any experimental setup, hyperparameters, or system-level training settings. |