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The site's creators perhaps acknowledge this in a way, by listing a number of bullet points that they expect Watson to advise on and presumably agree with: sing

by mbrock 11y ago

The site's creators perhaps acknowledge this in a way, by listing a number of bullet points that they expect Watson to advise on and presumably agree with: single-payer health care, recreational drug legalization, and so on. But how do they know Watson would find the expected value of these things positive? Maybe Watson would be a republican. And this all points down a huge rabbit hole of ethical and political philosophy and stuff. Like, should Watson take into consideration his likelihood of being elected? In that case, much of his neural network should be dedicated to predicting voter outcome. And that seems pretty obviously problematic.

kuschku 11y ago
> Maybe Watson would be a republican That’s very unlikely. Any logical system based on the concept that human life is worth existing on its own (no matter what the person has contributed to society) automatically ends up with the necessary conclusion that things like subsidized healthcare are mandatory. Obviously, one could give the program the basic assumption that human life is not worth anything, and it should instead focus purely on profit, and it might end up with a more republican ideology. But giving an AI with access to nuclear weapons the assumption that human life isn’t the most important factor is... a bad idea.
- mbrock 11y ago
  What if the logical system determines that the introduction of single-payer healthcare would lead to some kind of political crisis in the next 8 years, for complex predictive reasons that the human mind can barely understand? It's easy to derive conclusions from moral axioms, but very difficult to do actual politics in a country full of voters, corporations, lobbyists, etc. Artificial intelligence is not a magic solution to that.
  - DonHopkins 11y ago
    It would certainly be a political crisis for the Republican party if their base were to realize how much they've been lying about health care. Bring it on!
    - kantianethics 11y ago
      It's easy to pick sides, whether Republican or Democrat. It's harder to understand that both arguments about society have value. Fundamental Republicans believe capitalism and the free market is the system that "works best" to ensure a level playing field for everyone. True republicans work to ensure a fair marketplace for everyone, both for poor individuals and rich corporations, providing citizens the ability to better their condition and increase their freedom. Fundamental Democrats believe that the freedom of citizens is constantly at risk from outside factors, and that the government is the best agent to maintain citizen's free will. True republicans believe that human nature is fundamentally good, and that the government increases equality by maintaining a free market, while democrats suggest that human nature is often weak, requiring the government's intervention to protect society from itself. In reality, very few Republican and Democrat politicians actually represent these values. Often, republican views of the free market disproportionately benefit the rich, and democratic attempt to redistribute wealth, instead of fixing inequality at the source. Although I consider myself independent, I personally would side with a republican interpretation of health care. Studies have shown that government programs in fields such as healthcare are inefficient when compared to their private counterparts, as a competitive market increases supply, and therefore decreases costs, as opposed to monopolies or government programs that provide a single source of service.
      - kuschku 11y ago
        > Although I consider myself independent, I personally would side with a republican interpretation of health care. Studies have shown that government programs in fields such as healthcare are inefficient when compared to their private counterparts, as a competitive market increases supply, and therefore decreases costs, as opposed to monopolies or government programs that provide a single source of service. There is no need to choose – you can easily provide a minimum standard to everyone, and let the market handle everything above that. Which is the concept of the social market economy in general: Everyone gets at least a specified minimum level of service, provided by society, paid by everyone (the social part) – and everything above that level is done with a fair and free market (the market part).
- grondilu 11y ago
  > human life is worth existing on its own Worth to whom? A human life has value, but not to everybody. Or at least not the same value for everybody. Keeping people alive at any cost, and imposing to people how much they should contribute for achieving that, is not something everyone can agree with.
  - conceit 11y ago
    > Keeping people alive at any cost, and imposing to people how much they should contribute for achieving that, is not something everyone can agree with Oh, unless the people are politicians, is that what you are saying? Of course, not everyone can agree with that, either. But it is already the norm, so this is just an extension to the rule. So the question is just how much they would agree to contribute.
- ajmurmann 11y ago
  Agreeing on moral axioms also might be non-trivial. I for example do not agree with the one you list above, but instead go withz Peter Singer on preventing suffering and not protecting life per se. So abortions for example and even euthanasia of severely sick people including newborns are fair game. Also leads to the question if animal suffering should count and if so, how much? I think trying to take our moral debates down to principals like this might be a super valuable exercise for society though. Regardless if we program Watson to be president or not. Edit: of course this in practice would devolve to 50+% of the country in essence saying "Whatever I think the bible says should be our acxiom". Completely ruining the discussion.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    (I personally also subscribe to the "preventing suffering" axiom, but wanted to show a better contrast) But then the AI may decide life is suffering, and end suffering by ending life... Asimov’s laws of robots end up with the previously mentioned axiom, though.
    - ajmurmann 11y ago
      That's a very interesting point! Watson is I essence a robot, so Asimov's laws should be a good starting point. But are they also a good starting point for the president? Why should laws be different for robots than for people? My head is spinning...
      - krapp 11y ago
        >Asimov's laws should be a good starting point No they really shouldn't. Asimov's Laws of Robotics were a plot device intended to be subverted by the robots in his stories, they were never meant to be taken seriously.
  - awinter-py 11y ago
    Hard work and change are both forms of suffering (they're unpleasant as you experience them). Why not a more useful goal with the ability to say 'ok, done' -- like 'develop octopus-like mechanical limbs' or 'regrow human arms by splicing in reptilian DNA'. After all, neither of those experiments has ever gone seriously wrong.
- Eerie 11y ago
  >Any logical system based on the concept that human life is worth existing on its own (no matter what the person has contributed to society) automatically ends up with the necessary conclusion that things like subsidized healthcare are mandatory. And that abortion is illegal. :-)
  - alttab 11y ago
    If its mandatory, then every fertile human is walking around with the "right" to produce more burden for the state. That would make reproduction a liability... which turns into birth licenses.
  - joesmo 11y ago
    No because an intelligent life from would not define a bunch of cells that just started multiplying last month and cannot survive on their own as as life.
    - trbvm2 11y ago
      As it happens, the ability to reproduce and the ability to respond to stimuli in any manner are generally accepted qualities that distinguish life from non-life. http://www.biology-online.org/dictionary/Life http://www.biology-online.org/dictionary/Life http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/life http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/life Whether a given bunch of cells may be considered human is still very much an open question but whether a cell or cluster of cells is alive should be pretty easy to agree on.
    - jcranmer 11y ago
      An unborn, non-life form still has utilitarian value: there is an expected value that it would perform throughout its otherwise natural life. Actually, a strict utilitarian model would probably conclude that it's not worth aborting to save the mother's life if the baby is viable, since the baby would ultimately produce more value for society than the mother would were she to live out her life. And that's the sort of reasoning that makes everyone hate utilitarian ethics.
- saeranv 11y ago
  I personally agree with you but there are arguments against subsidized health care from the right. It is a cliche, and I think, easily refuted, but there is the libertarian argument that subsidized health care places infringes on personal liberty (forcing one to pay tax, incentivizing the government to regulate your health). Essentially, what if maximizing individual human liberty was the basis of the program, not a utilitarian notion of maximizing net-human life. Caveat: even with human liberty as a basis for developing a political system, you could still end up rationalizing mandatory, subsidized health-care i.e. maximizing freedom entails a poor person shouldn't have to lose his liberty to poor health etc. This is my position, but I don't necessarily think it is the inevitable conclusion of attempting to maximize for human liberty.
- awinter-py 11y ago
  if the goal is 'more human lives' you've built a paperclip maximizer.
- wbillingsley 11y ago
  > That’s very unlikely. > Any logical system based on the concept that human life is worth existing on its own (no matter what the person has contributed to society) automatically ends up with the necessary conclusion that things like subsidized healthcare are mandatory. If you start solely from that premise: "that human life is worth existing on its own (no matter what the person has contributed to society)" you're very unlikely even to reach taxation (a forced contribution to society) let alone forced subsidies or making anything mandatory. Most of government is based in the notion that someone's only value is in what they contribute to society -- from "tax-dodgers" to "benefit leeches" the vernacular is all about the amount of cash that gets paid into the social coffers. Much as I appreciate subsidised healthcare, it's not an "automatic conclusion". It is a negotiated compromise, and largely based on nationalism not the value of the individual (eg, the NHS came into existence post-war, as part of the national rebuilding. It's beginnings very much relied on the war effort and large scale conscription having devalued individual freedom amongst the public). It's become more popular since then because it turns out to work pretty well as a system. Not so much from pure logic, as that healthcare gets more expensive over time (effectively, healthcare can exert a rent on people's lives) and social control of healthcare is a way of putting a cap on its costs at the expense of those in healthcare who could charge much more (eg, watch the NHS junior doctors complaining about the contract changes).
nickodell 11y ago
There's a simple solution to this: give Watson two platforms, one Republican, and one Democrat. Have Watson run in both primary elections. If he wins both primaries, on election day, voters will be able to choose between Watson running in Democrat mode, and Watson running in Republican mode.
- alttab 11y ago
  Democratic super-robot programming voting. I'ma go contact a screen writer now.
- saeranv 11y ago
  I love this idea. One question is how will we accommodate the large spectrum of ideologies within the parties: Ron Paul libertarians vs neo-conservatives like Marco Rubio for example. Or the nuanced distinction between Bernie Sanders' notion of 'progressive' and Hillary Clinton's. Pragmatically speaking, I think we could capture the political spectrum in 4 to 5 parties. Watson-left-liberalist mode (for the Sanders crowd), Watson-authoritarian-right (for Trump supporters) etc. Edit: Sanders correction based on comment below.
  - thevibesman 11y ago
    Sorry to be the language police (but word choice is important when labeling politicians): I don't think any Sander's supporters would vote for a left-libertarian mode; I think you meant left-liberalist or something like that. Libertarianism would be opposed to the role of government in Sander's democratic-socialist platforms.
    - saeranv 11y ago
      No need to apologize, you are definitely correct. I will change it to left-liberalist, that's a lot more accurate.
  - seabass 11y ago
    It's interesting you'd put Trump on the far right. I find Trump to be one of the more moderate republican candidates when compared to Cruz, Carson, and Paul, for example. Trump wants universal healthcare and a progressive tax where the lowest bracket remains 0%. I think most liberals have this caricatured image of him that lead them to these exaggerated conclusions, and while I don't like the guy I really think you've misrepresented his position on the political spectrum.
HillRat 11y ago
Watson will agree with whatever training corpus you feed into it, so like most candidates it can't tell you anything new or novel. However, unlike actual political candidates, Watson would be able to directly answer questions. The problem is that Watson has been talked up as almost a strong AI, when it's actually a really good classifier, annotator and summarizer. While there's a great role for Watson-style systems in policy development and practice, they are only one in a battery of ML and analytic techniques, none of which can stand alone without a fully human point of view.
- excalq 11y ago
  What if Watson read Conservapedia thinking it to be factual. That's a startling thought.
13thLetter 11y ago
> But how do they know Watson would find the expected value of these things positive? Maybe Watson would be a republican. Easy enough. If Watson turned out to be a Republican they would start tweaking the parameters until it became a Democrat.

by mbrock 11y ago

kuschku 11y ago

> Maybe Watson would be a republican That’s very unlikely. Any logical system based on the concept that human life is worth existing on its own (no matter what the person has contributed to society) automatically ends up with the necessary conclusion that things like subsidized healthcare are mandatory. Obviously, one could give the program the basic assumption that human life is not worth anything, and it should instead focus purely on profit, and it might end up with a more republican ideology. But giving an AI with access to nuclear weapons the assumption that human life isn’t the most important factor is... a bad idea.

mbrock 11y ago
What if the logical system determines that the introduction of single-payer healthcare would lead to some kind of political crisis in the next 8 years, for complex predictive reasons that the human mind can barely understand? It's easy to derive conclusions from moral axioms, but very difficult to do actual politics in a country full of voters, corporations, lobbyists, etc. Artificial intelligence is not a magic solution to that.
- DonHopkins 11y ago
  It would certainly be a political crisis for the Republican party if their base were to realize how much they've been lying about health care. Bring it on!
  - kantianethics 11y ago
    It's easy to pick sides, whether Republican or Democrat. It's harder to understand that both arguments about society have value. Fundamental Republicans believe capitalism and the free market is the system that "works best" to ensure a level playing field for everyone. True republicans work to ensure a fair marketplace for everyone, both for poor individuals and rich corporations, providing citizens the ability to better their condition and increase their freedom. Fundamental Democrats believe that the freedom of citizens is constantly at risk from outside factors, and that the government is the best agent to maintain citizen's free will. True republicans believe that human nature is fundamentally good, and that the government increases equality by maintaining a free market, while democrats suggest that human nature is often weak, requiring the government's intervention to protect society from itself. In reality, very few Republican and Democrat politicians actually represent these values. Often, republican views of the free market disproportionately benefit the rich, and democratic attempt to redistribute wealth, instead of fixing inequality at the source. Although I consider myself independent, I personally would side with a republican interpretation of health care. Studies have shown that government programs in fields such as healthcare are inefficient when compared to their private counterparts, as a competitive market increases supply, and therefore decreases costs, as opposed to monopolies or government programs that provide a single source of service.
    - kuschku 11y ago
      > Although I consider myself independent, I personally would side with a republican interpretation of health care. Studies have shown that government programs in fields such as healthcare are inefficient when compared to their private counterparts, as a competitive market increases supply, and therefore decreases costs, as opposed to monopolies or government programs that provide a single source of service. There is no need to choose – you can easily provide a minimum standard to everyone, and let the market handle everything above that. Which is the concept of the social market economy in general: Everyone gets at least a specified minimum level of service, provided by society, paid by everyone (the social part) – and everything above that level is done with a fair and free market (the market part).
grondilu 11y ago
> human life is worth existing on its own Worth to whom? A human life has value, but not to everybody. Or at least not the same value for everybody. Keeping people alive at any cost, and imposing to people how much they should contribute for achieving that, is not something everyone can agree with.
- conceit 11y ago
  > Keeping people alive at any cost, and imposing to people how much they should contribute for achieving that, is not something everyone can agree with Oh, unless the people are politicians, is that what you are saying? Of course, not everyone can agree with that, either. But it is already the norm, so this is just an extension to the rule. So the question is just how much they would agree to contribute.
ajmurmann 11y ago
Agreeing on moral axioms also might be non-trivial. I for example do not agree with the one you list above, but instead go withz Peter Singer on preventing suffering and not protecting life per se. So abortions for example and even euthanasia of severely sick people including newborns are fair game. Also leads to the question if animal suffering should count and if so, how much? I think trying to take our moral debates down to principals like this might be a super valuable exercise for society though. Regardless if we program Watson to be president or not. Edit: of course this in practice would devolve to 50+% of the country in essence saying "Whatever I think the bible says should be our acxiom". Completely ruining the discussion.
- kuschku 11y ago
  (I personally also subscribe to the "preventing suffering" axiom, but wanted to show a better contrast) But then the AI may decide life is suffering, and end suffering by ending life... Asimov’s laws of robots end up with the previously mentioned axiom, though.
  - ajmurmann 11y ago
    That's a very interesting point! Watson is I essence a robot, so Asimov's laws should be a good starting point. But are they also a good starting point for the president? Why should laws be different for robots than for people? My head is spinning...
    - krapp 11y ago
      >Asimov's laws should be a good starting point No they really shouldn't. Asimov's Laws of Robotics were a plot device intended to be subverted by the robots in his stories, they were never meant to be taken seriously.
- awinter-py 11y ago
  Hard work and change are both forms of suffering (they're unpleasant as you experience them). Why not a more useful goal with the ability to say 'ok, done' -- like 'develop octopus-like mechanical limbs' or 'regrow human arms by splicing in reptilian DNA'. After all, neither of those experiments has ever gone seriously wrong.
Eerie 11y ago
>Any logical system based on the concept that human life is worth existing on its own (no matter what the person has contributed to society) automatically ends up with the necessary conclusion that things like subsidized healthcare are mandatory. And that abortion is illegal. :-)
- alttab 11y ago
  If its mandatory, then every fertile human is walking around with the "right" to produce more burden for the state. That would make reproduction a liability... which turns into birth licenses.
- joesmo 11y ago
  No because an intelligent life from would not define a bunch of cells that just started multiplying last month and cannot survive on their own as as life.
  - trbvm2 11y ago
    As it happens, the ability to reproduce and the ability to respond to stimuli in any manner are generally accepted qualities that distinguish life from non-life. http://www.biology-online.org/dictionary/Life http://www.biology-online.org/dictionary/Life http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/life http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/life Whether a given bunch of cells may be considered human is still very much an open question but whether a cell or cluster of cells is alive should be pretty easy to agree on.
  - jcranmer 11y ago
    An unborn, non-life form still has utilitarian value: there is an expected value that it would perform throughout its otherwise natural life. Actually, a strict utilitarian model would probably conclude that it's not worth aborting to save the mother's life if the baby is viable, since the baby would ultimately produce more value for society than the mother would were she to live out her life. And that's the sort of reasoning that makes everyone hate utilitarian ethics.
saeranv 11y ago
I personally agree with you but there are arguments against subsidized health care from the right. It is a cliche, and I think, easily refuted, but there is the libertarian argument that subsidized health care places infringes on personal liberty (forcing one to pay tax, incentivizing the government to regulate your health). Essentially, what if maximizing individual human liberty was the basis of the program, not a utilitarian notion of maximizing net-human life. Caveat: even with human liberty as a basis for developing a political system, you could still end up rationalizing mandatory, subsidized health-care i.e. maximizing freedom entails a poor person shouldn't have to lose his liberty to poor health etc. This is my position, but I don't necessarily think it is the inevitable conclusion of attempting to maximize for human liberty.
awinter-py 11y ago
if the goal is 'more human lives' you've built a paperclip maximizer.
wbillingsley 11y ago
> That’s very unlikely. > Any logical system based on the concept that human life is worth existing on its own (no matter what the person has contributed to society) automatically ends up with the necessary conclusion that things like subsidized healthcare are mandatory. If you start solely from that premise: "that human life is worth existing on its own (no matter what the person has contributed to society)" you're very unlikely even to reach taxation (a forced contribution to society) let alone forced subsidies or making anything mandatory. Most of government is based in the notion that someone's only value is in what they contribute to society -- from "tax-dodgers" to "benefit leeches" the vernacular is all about the amount of cash that gets paid into the social coffers. Much as I appreciate subsidised healthcare, it's not an "automatic conclusion". It is a negotiated compromise, and largely based on nationalism not the value of the individual (eg, the NHS came into existence post-war, as part of the national rebuilding. It's beginnings very much relied on the war effort and large scale conscription having devalued individual freedom amongst the public). It's become more popular since then because it turns out to work pretty well as a system. Not so much from pure logic, as that healthcare gets more expensive over time (effectively, healthcare can exert a rent on people's lives) and social control of healthcare is a way of putting a cap on its costs at the expense of those in healthcare who could charge much more (eg, watch the NHS junior doctors complaining about the contract changes).

nickodell 11y ago

There's a simple solution to this: give Watson two platforms, one Republican, and one Democrat. Have Watson run in both primary elections. If he wins both primaries, on election day, voters will be able to choose between Watson running in Democrat mode, and Watson running in Republican mode.

alttab 11y ago
Democratic super-robot programming voting. I'ma go contact a screen writer now.
saeranv 11y ago
I love this idea. One question is how will we accommodate the large spectrum of ideologies within the parties: Ron Paul libertarians vs neo-conservatives like Marco Rubio for example. Or the nuanced distinction between Bernie Sanders' notion of 'progressive' and Hillary Clinton's. Pragmatically speaking, I think we could capture the political spectrum in 4 to 5 parties. Watson-left-liberalist mode (for the Sanders crowd), Watson-authoritarian-right (for Trump supporters) etc. Edit: Sanders correction based on comment below.
- thevibesman 11y ago
  Sorry to be the language police (but word choice is important when labeling politicians): I don't think any Sander's supporters would vote for a left-libertarian mode; I think you meant left-liberalist or something like that. Libertarianism would be opposed to the role of government in Sander's democratic-socialist platforms.
  - saeranv 11y ago
    No need to apologize, you are definitely correct. I will change it to left-liberalist, that's a lot more accurate.
- seabass 11y ago
  It's interesting you'd put Trump on the far right. I find Trump to be one of the more moderate republican candidates when compared to Cruz, Carson, and Paul, for example. Trump wants universal healthcare and a progressive tax where the lowest bracket remains 0%. I think most liberals have this caricatured image of him that lead them to these exaggerated conclusions, and while I don't like the guy I really think you've misrepresented his position on the political spectrum.

HillRat 11y ago

Watson will agree with whatever training corpus you feed into it, so like most candidates it can't tell you anything new or novel. However, unlike actual political candidates, Watson would be able to directly answer questions. The problem is that Watson has been talked up as almost a strong AI, when it's actually a really good classifier, annotator and summarizer. While there's a great role for Watson-style systems in policy development and practice, they are only one in a battery of ML and analytic techniques, none of which can stand alone without a fully human point of view.

excalq 11y ago
What if Watson read Conservapedia thinking it to be factual. That's a startling thought.

13thLetter 11y ago

> But how do they know Watson would find the expected value of these things positive? Maybe Watson would be a republican. Easy enough. If Watson turned out to be a Republican they would start tweaking the parameters until it became a Democrat.