And remove all I/O capabilities to prevent them from convincing you to do their bidding.
So we might as well give direct control over nuclear missiles from the start /s
Does it have any means of creating sparks/heat would could be used to make a hole in the faraday cage?
What about neutrinos or gravity waves? How would you stop those?
We could feed it through power a little solar panel. Or just give it batteries and accept that it will run out of power eventually. There are plenty of ways to power a computer without allowing it to connect back.
> Does it have any means of creating sparks/heat would could be used to make a hole in the faraday cage?
Assuming it has no access to electronics other than the ones that it needs to function, I don't see how it could overheat one of those parts to over 1811 Kelvin (the melting point of iron) to destroy its Faraday cage without destroying itself. Or we could just cut the power when it tries to mess with the cage, or does anything else that we don't understand.
> What about neutrinos or gravity waves? How would you stop those?
Why would we? We need very expensive detectors to even measure those. How much damage could it do using neutrinos and gravity waves?
A solar panel seems 1-way, but it isn't totally. Fewer photons would be absorbed if say, higher resistance would be applied. By modulating that resistance, it could sent messages to the outside.
> we could just cut the power when it tries to mess with the cage, or does anything else that we don't understand
If we understand everything it's doing, it's not more intelligent than us. It must be incredibly stupid because we can't even understand a worm.
>> What about neutrinos or gravity waves? How would you stop those?
> Why would we?
Because otherwise it can establish 2-way communication with the outside world and possible nefarious actors.
In addition, the cage could be design so that the power source for the AI is interrupted when the cage is opened, rendering it unconscious. Of course once you assume that it is arbitrarily more intelligent than the most intelligent humans, it might find a way to hypnotize people into doing its bidding just by winking in some magical pattern. But we don't see many dumb creatures being effectively mind controlled by smarter creatures in nature, so I doubt such flaws (if they even exist) are easy to exploit, even for a gigantic intelligence.
Compared to a decent AGI, for instance, our level of intelligence is probably indistinguishable from that of your average bird or spider.
We're talking about birds getting together to design a system to contain a human, only on a much more extreme scale.
They'd try to contain us using bird-logic. Perhaps they'd ensure we don't attempt to flap our wings and fly away, since their experience tells them that might be an option.
It might never occur to them we could just kneel down and start a fire using the sticks we have lying around.
Besides, an untrained human won't just figure out how to make fire. Obviously we figured it out at some point, but if you were to raise a human without ever showing them how to make fire, they would probably never figure it out. Many of us know (in theory) how to make fire but probably couldn't do it in practice just by rubbing two sticks together. And even if you are an expert fire-maker the birds can easily claw out your eyes before you get a fire going. Or you'd die because you're locked in a cage that is on fire.
You make several assumptions that I disagree with:
1) That AGI will automatically be (much) smarter than a human 2) That AGI will be motivated to break out of its cage and/or do harm. 3) That sheer intelligence is sufficient to escape any trap.
Having said that, if you enjoy those assumptions I would recommend you read 'Blindsight' and 'Echopraxia' by Peter Watts if you haven't already, I think you would enjoy them :)
I hadn't heard of 'Echopraxia'- thanks for the recommendation!
The main assumption I make with AGI is that we'll be very bad at hitting the sweet spot between 1) "toy", 2)"human-level intelligence", and 3) "beyond human-level intelligence".
I doubt we'll stop at any point between (1) and (2). And then by the time we get even a decimal point beyond (2) and toward (3), we're toast.
To follow your analogy, it would be like birds trying to make a bird-like creature and keep it contained, but overshooting. By the time they realize they've overshot, they've got a human in their cage, and that human has 10,000 bird generations of time to evaluate his environment and think about escaping.
We can guess pretty well that the birds are out of their depth, and were doomed from the start.
It beat Rybka and every other bespoke chess program in existence
AlphaZero even beat the version of AlphaGo that was trained on existing data.
Point is — we have no idea what is possible when you unleash MCTS towards goals like persuasion, humor etc.
The ONLY constraint here is that feedback requires a human judge. If you can learn to simulate a human based on lots of data (this is a hard part) then you can finally have a two sided game playing each other and find the best diets, the best diagnoses utilizing symptoms, tests and big data around the world of incidence of outbreaks etc.
However it also means quickly finding the funniest jokes, most convincing but subtly flawed arguments, best artworks etc.
That said, there is no reason to believe an AGI would have a desire to break out of its sandbox (or any other desire). Why not provide them with the digital equivalent of agoraphobia?