10 ms·

Is Ethical A.I. Even Possible?

58 points by furcyd 8y ago

adjkant 8y ago
Ethical AI is hard, but so are ethical laws, ethical taxation, and ethical advertising, to name a few more ubiquitous things than AI. The real answer here is that ethics is hard, and even if you know ethics and can get some agreement, getting humans to be ethical is even harder. AI only introduces a new danger, but at the current complexity of AI I don't think its any more significant in effect than the other ethical problems we have. In fact, many misuses of A.I are based on the uses, not the AI itself. I don't think linear regression is inherently an immoral tool either if we're going the "this tool is too dangerous to use/allow access to" route. Until we have anything close to AGI, AI is a tool only as ethical as the user of the tool. That's the real issue here. We absolutely do need regulation, but I'll be damned if 10 people with power in any government understand AI well enough to regulate it. Every day I think we get closer and closer to needing to implement technocrats in governments. The FCC is a great example of a place we should have had the model for decades.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >Ethical AI is hard, but so are ethical laws, ethical taxation, ethical advertising, and yet we don't see those being questioned. We don't? Not only we question those all the time, but we also have failed in producing them in any stable condition in most of our societies.
  - adjkant 8y ago
    Very fair, I'm editing the last part off.
- wallace_f 8y ago
  >Every day I think we get closer and closer to needing to implement technocrats in governments. If one is interested in seeing an opposing point of view to this, one could lookup Philip Hamburger and the term, administrative state.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  Ethical AI is hard, but so are ethical laws, ethical taxation, and ethical advertising, to name a few more ubiquitous things than AI. The real answer here is that ethics is hard, and even if you know ethics and can get some agreement, getting humans to be ethical is even harder. tl;dr: Ethical AI is hard. Ethical NI is harder! Doesn't "Coherent Extrapolated Volition" actually boil down to, "Hey AI, don't do like us. Do as we should do!" (If we were better, more noble beings.) https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Coherent_Extrapolated_Volition https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Coherent_Extrapolated_Voliti... And if we can't have "Coherent Extrapolated Volition" aren't the only outcomes the subsumption of Homo sapiens into a different kind of intelligence and/or its extinction? Come to think of it, "Coherent Extrapolated Volition" just sounds like the same sort of wishful thinking which religions hook into. Voltaire in the 18th century: "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." Tech in 2019: "We need to be the first to implement the god-like AIs, because the the first mover advantage will yield tremendous profits!"
- deytempo 8y ago
  I think AI is especially important for it to be used ethically because it has an unrivaled capacity to be used unethically
  - adjkant 8y ago
    > [AI] has an unrivaled capacity to be used unethically Does it? At a personal level, I'm much more scared of a bad person with a gun and access to me than a bad person with an AI and access to me. It's more important than the ethical use of a teacup, but certainly rivaled and beaten at a micro level. At a macro level I think your argument has more ground to stand on when it comes to things like improved efficiency of mass surveillance, but how much of that is AI part rather than the mass surveillance part? What immoralities are enabled/accelerated that could not be done without AI? In the end I'm just as concerned about mass surveillance as I was before. In a practical sense, even if somehow passed laws limiting AI, do I really think that a government performing mass surveillance in the shadows is going to follow those laws when AI is a concept anyone (with the know-how) can implement? I don't think AI's power/capacity is as high as people think, it just tends to fit well with some very bad macro level ethical actions to enhance them. I'm not sure I'm convinced either way yet, but the claim of "unrivaled" made me immediately skeptical, at least considering the AI of this decade(s). In a hundred years you're probably right with the unrivaled part, though atom bombs and the like are probably close seconds.
    - AstralStorm 8y ago
      AI is about scale. You can achieve similar terrible results by using, say, Mechanical Turk system with additional error checks. That scales too. The other thing AI is about is cost and perhaps secrecy. Turk system requires many people who need to be fed, that puts a pretty high low bar on price. It also requires disseminating data to many agents, each of whom could leak it. Being more accessible means more Bad Guys (unethical actors) using it.
  - richardw 8y ago
    Past a certain point I don't think it will be used. It will use.
kingkawn 8y ago
First we’d have to make an ethical society...
pixl97 8y ago
No. And if you think yes, you are probably deceiving yourself about your own ethical abilities.
- adjkant 8y ago
  What is unethical about a farmer using AI to figure out the best arrangement of his crops to maximize the food he produces, maintain his land quality, and minimize his environmental impact?
  - mLuby 8y ago
    Nothing. But what about when said farmer buys Farm AI 2.0 that also optimizes the livestock side of his farm. The AI has determined it's more efficient to pack cubes into a barn than keep them out in the pasture (the cubes contain chickens or pigs). Now the farmer upgrades to Farm AI 3.0 which also optimizes the business side of his farm. And it decides to fire a bunch of farm hands, perhaps replacing them with cheaper robots or aliens. The farmer sips his lemonade, absolved of guilt for the decisions the AI has made.
    - wool_gather 8y ago
      This has nothing to do with AI. You could say the same about a human agricultural consultant. A person can absolve their own sense of guilt by saying that they were just following instructions. But the farmer still chose here to use the AI, or to implement its recommendations. A person can even talk themselves out of feeling guilty for a bad choice just by saying "I felt so strongly, I couldn't do anything differently". Some choice was still made by the person; they bear the responsibility even if they don't think they do.
  - kthejoker2 8y ago
    I mean, the short answer is if all of the constraints and inputs to a problem are known, you don't need an AI at all. There is a guaranteed optimal crop arrangement, and the model to produce it would be purely based on natural sciences only - physics, biochemistry, engineering etc. AI is only required when there is some unknown, ambiguous, adversarial, or otherwise non-existent input or constraint. AI (or indeed any intelligence) is only useful in situations where there is "bias" (in the data science sense), inference, preference, and extrapolation being used to make decisions in an unknown space. And it's precisely in these areas where ethics can be part of the "weights" given to those inferences and preferences.
ThomPete 8y ago
Ethical yes, whether those ethics are in alignment with humans is another question.
dogma1138 8y ago
Is an ethical hammer even possible?
- coldtea 8y ago
  A, the old "it's how you use the tool" chestnut. Only some tools are inherently abusable -- something that has been expressed in lots of forms, from "the medium is the message" critique of TV/internet/etc, to the gun control debate ("guns don't kill people, people kill people" etc).
  - mcguire 8y ago
    Could you provide some examples of tools which are not inherently abusable? I can't think of any.
    - jakelazaroff 8y ago
      I think the point is more like: consider how often a gun is abused vs. a blanket. Surely it's not a stretch to conclude that the former enables unethical acts far more than the latter.
      - mindslight 8y ago
        That framing only captures half of the truth though. The quality a gun has that a blanket does not is to enable adversarial actions. So yes, the technology of the gun does enable unethical actions like point-and-click murder. But it also enables individuals and smaller groups to defend themselves against aggressors, which most people would consider ethical. I'm not disagreeing with the idea that "artifacts have politics" [0], but rather pointing out that focusing solely on the negative actions enabled by guns is fallacious. In fact, the development of firearms is historically seen as having democratized power. It's just that most of what we consider the positive effects have been incorporated into the framework of our society, while we continue trying to diminish the negative ones. Now having said that, so far "AI" (really ML) is primarily being wielded by large centralized entities against individuals. A less-equipped defending army does not particularly benefit from having a few drones with facial recognition, as their human soldiers are under attack regardless. Whereas it does enable a much larger conquering army to further insulate itself from the results of war. Even relatively benign uses like voice recognition or recommendations have become excuses to retain large surveillance datasets on our entire society, and to shape the development so results favor large centralizing entities rather than their supposed users - eg the common engagement metric of "human time wasted". But are the ethical issues the result of "AI" technology itself, or better attributed to the larger system its deployed upon? On the consumer side, I would say that the fundamental ethical problem is that software is not under its users control. If the majority of training sets were being accumulated voluntarily, with the goal of developing applications that actually helped users, then I think the ethical landscape would look quite different. [0] If you don't recognize the reference, search it.
ErikAugust 8y ago
Removes paywall, and reduces page load 91% - from 3.93MB to 349KB, uses zero JavaScript: https://beta.trimread.com/articles/215 https://beta.trimread.com/articles/215
- rootusrootus 8y ago
  How apropos to post that in a thread discussing ethics.
- darkpuma 8y ago
  Instead of giving your data to a third party service, just use umatrix. None of the javascript on the article is necessary to read the article: https://0x0.st/zocK.png https://0x0.st/zocK.png
chobeat 8y ago
If you're interested in reading more about the subject of AI and Ethics or AI and Fairness, I kindly suggest this reading list I've been working on for a while: https://github.com/chobeat/awesome-critical-tech-reading-list https://github.com/chobeat/awesome-critical-tech-reading-lis... There are also other topics but it's intended as a primer for engineers interested in understanding the social problems created by new technologies.
- calabin 8y ago
  I'm kicking myself that I never thought to use GitHub to put together a reading list. Great idea.
  - amelius 8y ago
    Yeah, great idea. The thing that's missing, though, is that you can't easily leave a comment on each of the listed items. That makes it a sort of one-way piece of information. Perhaps a wiki would be better (?)
    - chobeat 8y ago
      True but you have the issues and the PR. The format for sure is not intended for casual discussion but at the same time there's plenty of space to discuss improvements and bring criticism.
laretluval 8y ago
It's time for a Butlerian Jihad
- tolstoy77 8y ago
  best comment of the day on hn.
- exoram 8y ago
  Loved Dune, nice reference.
6cd6beb 8y ago
Ethics is subjective. If ethics could be codified I think we'd have one ruleset everyone agrees on. The article mentions trying to have a human enforce ethics, but then that person has to be an example of ethical excellence; something you can't test for. And in the end, they say every man has his price, so no. I don't think "ethical AI" is possible. I think "ruthlessly efficient AI" is the goal. Maybe it should only be used in situations where ethics don't matter
- DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
  > Ethics is subjective I'm really glad you raised this point. I don't know if there's a uniquely good ethic or not. But for sure there's no consensus about what constitutes ethical behavior. It drives me crazy when companies make preachy policy statements that beg this question.
- wetpaws 8y ago
  What's even worse, ethics vary from culture to culture and tend to change over time.
- darkpuma 8y ago
  Ruthlessly efficient AI is the next "big stick". Nuclear weapons brought us relatively close to world peace (after burning up hundreds of thousands of people and scaring the whole world shitless) maybe ruthless AI can do the same. I'm not particularly eager to see what an AI arms race and cold war looks like though. Things are decent enough right now, it could be a lot worse; do the upsides of creating ruthless AI justify the risks? Is it an eventuality anyway? At this stage could we conceivably prevent it?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- bellerose 8y ago
  > If ethics could be codified I think we'd have one ruleset everyone agrees on. People want to deeply believe this as true. I find it false because I see free will as an illusion. Majority of people think free will exists. Agreement on ethics cannot exist with this conflict because it inherently effects morality.
corysama 8y ago
There is a work of fiction (the name of which I unfortunately do not recall) that tells tales of war machines, hard-coded with the rules and conventions of war, coming into conflict with their own angry and frustrated operators. I love the concept of AI that could be not just super-intelligent, but also/instead super-moral. I hope we can find the inspiration to bring some of that concept into reality.
gesman 8y ago
(Criminal|Unethical|Bad) for one is (hero|ethical|good) for another.
tolstoy77 8y ago
Wow, was just looking through the glassdoor reviews at the company in the article,Clarifai. https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Clarifai-RVW23884886.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Clarifai-R... Seems like an awful place to work. They have a role I was about to apply to in the bay area. Looks like I'll avoid this place.
- ex_clarifai 8y ago
  Wow this one is good https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Clarifai-RVW23794922.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Clarifai-R... Fun fact, they hired an ex trump org assistant to be his new assistant https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharon-benita-23703449 https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharon-benita-23703449
DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
First things first. What do we mean by "ethical"?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
thrwway19033 8y ago
(Throwaway in case this is crank science.) Neural nets are inspired by human neural structures. Training is in some ways similar to human learning. Genetic algorithms especially in simulated worlds are directly inspired by the biological evolution in the real world. Is there any chance that the resulting algorithms themselves (the AI) shall have any ethical rights or significance? Especially once it exceeds in complexity the human brain. The reason I ask is that it is an ethical question about AI (and therefore on topic), but I don't know how to think about it and hope others here might share some insight.
- sgt101 8y ago
  Really that's more about the effect on us and the systems of society than the intrinsic nature of rights of the AI. Having things that seem human or capable of human insight and yet making them slaves may demean us all.
jamessantiago 8y ago
For this I usually think that complexity in general is dangerous when our ability to apply our own value systems degrades past a certain point. For the 2008 financial issues we had a few financial products like subprime loans where the reasoning and economics behind these were complicated enough that most couldn't effectively regulate or understand the implications of their use. I suppose when enough things go wrong with a complex system it's like having runtime errors popup that you can debug against and get a better understanding of what you created, but that first execution is just dangerous enough that you wouldn't want something that's complex enough to be doing anything important. Then again, we might not think something is complex enough until we start running into the "unknown unknowns" of real world usage. Maybe a somewhat subjective qualifier for what's "complex" could be developed and then the ethical question is "is due diligence being taken to reduce the risks inherent in this complex system?"
bitL 8y ago
We humans have a multitude of competing ethics in the form of religions; we can't even agree on which one is the right one; programming ethics into AI is going back to that chicken-and-egg problem, requiring selecting which philosophical system is the right one. We can view competing religions as optimization algorithms where the best one for given state of world is winning, pressuring other ones to evolve or die off. Would we need competing, multi-GAN style AI "religions" all times at each other's throat as well?
- devoply 8y ago
  There is nothing inherently ethical about any religion. They have some ethical concepts in them that might be universal like don't kill but they are easily overridden by don't kill fellow believers. Similarly there is nothing ethical about any society other than within the small confined system of a certain ideology which validates its own ethics. At the end ethics is just a game we play and we can teach computers to play similar games with a certain set of rules. That does not in any way mean that a computer will be ethical, only that it can be taught to observe the norms of the ethical games played by the society it serves using a rule based system that is applied to certain final actions that it has computed it should carry out.
calibas 8y ago
const not_evil = true;
cmurf 8y ago
Universally ethical A.I.? No. But then neither are humans. So I refuse the idea that always ethical A.I. is a goal that disqualifies A.I. as being useful. Government arguably should be an expedient (this is Thoreau's argument anyway), and it's possible A.I. could be at least a more consistent expedient that also commits to ratting itself out anytime its ethical programming is substantially altered. That isn't at all how humans behave, they can't be programmed this way. Merely having A.I. that concisely points out the competing ethical positions on an issue, would be an improvement to word salad propaganda; propaganda is a significant impediment to both ethical and critical thinking, so an A.I. that were to score statements on a propaganda scale would itself be useful. https://propagandacritic.com/ https://propagandacritic.com/
fouc 8y ago
Ethics in AI makes me think of https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Coherent_Extrapolated_Volition https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Coherent_Extrapolated_Voliti...
HNLurker2 8y ago
Paywall bypass: https://outline.com/VBgvaj https://outline.com/VBgvaj

58 points by furcyd 8y ago

Ethical AI is hard, but so are ethical laws, ethical taxation, and ethical advertising, to name a few more ubiquitous things than AI. The real answer here is that ethics is hard, and even if you know ethics and can get some agreement, getting humans to be ethical is even harder. AI only introduces a new danger, but at the current complexity of AI I don't think its any more significant in effect than the other ethical problems we have. In fact, many misuses of A.I are based on the uses, not the AI itself. I don't think linear regression is inherently an immoral tool either if we're going the "this tool is too dangerous to use/allow access to" route. Until we have anything close to AGI, AI is a tool only as ethical as the user of the tool. That's the real issue here. We absolutely do need regulation, but I'll be damned if 10 people with power in any government understand AI well enough to regulate it. Every day I think we get closer and closer to needing to implement technocrats in governments. The FCC is a great example of a place we should have had the model for decades.

coldtea 8y ago
>Ethical AI is hard, but so are ethical laws, ethical taxation, ethical advertising, and yet we don't see those being questioned. We don't? Not only we question those all the time, but we also have failed in producing them in any stable condition in most of our societies.
- adjkant 8y ago
  Very fair, I'm editing the last part off.
wallace_f 8y ago
>Every day I think we get closer and closer to needing to implement technocrats in governments. If one is interested in seeing an opposing point of view to this, one could lookup Philip Hamburger and the term, administrative state.
stcredzero 8y ago
Ethical AI is hard, but so are ethical laws, ethical taxation, and ethical advertising, to name a few more ubiquitous things than AI. The real answer here is that ethics is hard, and even if you know ethics and can get some agreement, getting humans to be ethical is even harder. tl;dr: Ethical AI is hard. Ethical NI is harder! Doesn't "Coherent Extrapolated Volition" actually boil down to, "Hey AI, don't do like us. Do as we should do!" (If we were better, more noble beings.) https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Coherent_Extrapolated_Volition https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Coherent_Extrapolated_Voliti... And if we can't have "Coherent Extrapolated Volition" aren't the only outcomes the subsumption of Homo sapiens into a different kind of intelligence and/or its extinction? Come to think of it, "Coherent Extrapolated Volition" just sounds like the same sort of wishful thinking which religions hook into. Voltaire in the 18th century: "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." Tech in 2019: "We need to be the first to implement the god-like AIs, because the the first mover advantage will yield tremendous profits!"
deytempo 8y ago
I think AI is especially important for it to be used ethically because it has an unrivaled capacity to be used unethically
- adjkant 8y ago
  > [AI] has an unrivaled capacity to be used unethically Does it? At a personal level, I'm much more scared of a bad person with a gun and access to me than a bad person with an AI and access to me. It's more important than the ethical use of a teacup, but certainly rivaled and beaten at a micro level. At a macro level I think your argument has more ground to stand on when it comes to things like improved efficiency of mass surveillance, but how much of that is AI part rather than the mass surveillance part? What immoralities are enabled/accelerated that could not be done without AI? In the end I'm just as concerned about mass surveillance as I was before. In a practical sense, even if somehow passed laws limiting AI, do I really think that a government performing mass surveillance in the shadows is going to follow those laws when AI is a concept anyone (with the know-how) can implement? I don't think AI's power/capacity is as high as people think, it just tends to fit well with some very bad macro level ethical actions to enhance them. I'm not sure I'm convinced either way yet, but the claim of "unrivaled" made me immediately skeptical, at least considering the AI of this decade(s). In a hundred years you're probably right with the unrivaled part, though atom bombs and the like are probably close seconds.
  - AstralStorm 8y ago
    AI is about scale. You can achieve similar terrible results by using, say, Mechanical Turk system with additional error checks. That scales too. The other thing AI is about is cost and perhaps secrecy. Turk system requires many people who need to be fed, that puts a pretty high low bar on price. It also requires disseminating data to many agents, each of whom could leak it. Being more accessible means more Bad Guys (unethical actors) using it.
- richardw 8y ago
  Past a certain point I don't think it will be used. It will use.

kingkawn 8y ago

First we’d have to make an ethical society...

pixl97 8y ago

No. And if you think yes, you are probably deceiving yourself about your own ethical abilities.

adjkant 8y ago
What is unethical about a farmer using AI to figure out the best arrangement of his crops to maximize the food he produces, maintain his land quality, and minimize his environmental impact?
- mLuby 8y ago
  Nothing. But what about when said farmer buys Farm AI 2.0 that also optimizes the livestock side of his farm. The AI has determined it's more efficient to pack cubes into a barn than keep them out in the pasture (the cubes contain chickens or pigs). Now the farmer upgrades to Farm AI 3.0 which also optimizes the business side of his farm. And it decides to fire a bunch of farm hands, perhaps replacing them with cheaper robots or aliens. The farmer sips his lemonade, absolved of guilt for the decisions the AI has made.
  - wool_gather 8y ago
    This has nothing to do with AI. You could say the same about a human agricultural consultant. A person can absolve their own sense of guilt by saying that they were just following instructions. But the farmer still chose here to use the AI, or to implement its recommendations. A person can even talk themselves out of feeling guilty for a bad choice just by saying "I felt so strongly, I couldn't do anything differently". Some choice was still made by the person; they bear the responsibility even if they don't think they do.
- kthejoker2 8y ago
  I mean, the short answer is if all of the constraints and inputs to a problem are known, you don't need an AI at all. There is a guaranteed optimal crop arrangement, and the model to produce it would be purely based on natural sciences only - physics, biochemistry, engineering etc. AI is only required when there is some unknown, ambiguous, adversarial, or otherwise non-existent input or constraint. AI (or indeed any intelligence) is only useful in situations where there is "bias" (in the data science sense), inference, preference, and extrapolation being used to make decisions in an unknown space. And it's precisely in these areas where ethics can be part of the "weights" given to those inferences and preferences.

ThomPete 8y ago

Ethical yes, whether those ethics are in alignment with humans is another question.

dogma1138 8y ago

Is an ethical hammer even possible?

coldtea 8y ago
A, the old "it's how you use the tool" chestnut. Only some tools are inherently abusable -- something that has been expressed in lots of forms, from "the medium is the message" critique of TV/internet/etc, to the gun control debate ("guns don't kill people, people kill people" etc).
- mcguire 8y ago
  Could you provide some examples of tools which are not inherently abusable? I can't think of any.
  - jakelazaroff 8y ago
    I think the point is more like: consider how often a gun is abused vs. a blanket. Surely it's not a stretch to conclude that the former enables unethical acts far more than the latter.
    - mindslight 8y ago
      That framing only captures half of the truth though. The quality a gun has that a blanket does not is to enable adversarial actions. So yes, the technology of the gun does enable unethical actions like point-and-click murder. But it also enables individuals and smaller groups to defend themselves against aggressors, which most people would consider ethical. I'm not disagreeing with the idea that "artifacts have politics" [0], but rather pointing out that focusing solely on the negative actions enabled by guns is fallacious. In fact, the development of firearms is historically seen as having democratized power. It's just that most of what we consider the positive effects have been incorporated into the framework of our society, while we continue trying to diminish the negative ones. Now having said that, so far "AI" (really ML) is primarily being wielded by large centralized entities against individuals. A less-equipped defending army does not particularly benefit from having a few drones with facial recognition, as their human soldiers are under attack regardless. Whereas it does enable a much larger conquering army to further insulate itself from the results of war. Even relatively benign uses like voice recognition or recommendations have become excuses to retain large surveillance datasets on our entire society, and to shape the development so results favor large centralizing entities rather than their supposed users - eg the common engagement metric of "human time wasted". But are the ethical issues the result of "AI" technology itself, or better attributed to the larger system its deployed upon? On the consumer side, I would say that the fundamental ethical problem is that software is not under its users control. If the majority of training sets were being accumulated voluntarily, with the goal of developing applications that actually helped users, then I think the ethical landscape would look quite different. [0] If you don't recognize the reference, search it.

ErikAugust 8y ago

Removes paywall, and reduces page load 91% - from 3.93MB to 349KB, uses zero JavaScript: https://beta.trimread.com/articles/215 https://beta.trimread.com/articles/215

rootusrootus 8y ago
How apropos to post that in a thread discussing ethics.
darkpuma 8y ago
Instead of giving your data to a third party service, just use umatrix. None of the javascript on the article is necessary to read the article: https://0x0.st/zocK.png https://0x0.st/zocK.png

chobeat 8y ago

If you're interested in reading more about the subject of AI and Ethics or AI and Fairness, I kindly suggest this reading list I've been working on for a while: https://github.com/chobeat/awesome-critical-tech-reading-list https://github.com/chobeat/awesome-critical-tech-reading-lis... There are also other topics but it's intended as a primer for engineers interested in understanding the social problems created by new technologies.

calabin 8y ago
I'm kicking myself that I never thought to use GitHub to put together a reading list. Great idea.
- amelius 8y ago
  Yeah, great idea. The thing that's missing, though, is that you can't easily leave a comment on each of the listed items. That makes it a sort of one-way piece of information. Perhaps a wiki would be better (?)
  - chobeat 8y ago
    True but you have the issues and the PR. The format for sure is not intended for casual discussion but at the same time there's plenty of space to discuss improvements and bring criticism.

laretluval 8y ago

It's time for a Butlerian Jihad

tolstoy77 8y ago
best comment of the day on hn.
exoram 8y ago
Loved Dune, nice reference.

6cd6beb 8y ago

Ethics is subjective. If ethics could be codified I think we'd have one ruleset everyone agrees on. The article mentions trying to have a human enforce ethics, but then that person has to be an example of ethical excellence; something you can't test for. And in the end, they say every man has his price, so no. I don't think "ethical AI" is possible. I think "ruthlessly efficient AI" is the goal. Maybe it should only be used in situations where ethics don't matter

DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
> Ethics is subjective I'm really glad you raised this point. I don't know if there's a uniquely good ethic or not. But for sure there's no consensus about what constitutes ethical behavior. It drives me crazy when companies make preachy policy statements that beg this question.
wetpaws 8y ago
What's even worse, ethics vary from culture to culture and tend to change over time.
darkpuma 8y ago
Ruthlessly efficient AI is the next "big stick". Nuclear weapons brought us relatively close to world peace (after burning up hundreds of thousands of people and scaring the whole world shitless) maybe ruthless AI can do the same. I'm not particularly eager to see what an AI arms race and cold war looks like though. Things are decent enough right now, it could be a lot worse; do the upsides of creating ruthless AI justify the risks? Is it an eventuality anyway? At this stage could we conceivably prevent it?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
bellerose 8y ago
> If ethics could be codified I think we'd have one ruleset everyone agrees on. People want to deeply believe this as true. I find it false because I see free will as an illusion. Majority of people think free will exists. Agreement on ethics cannot exist with this conflict because it inherently effects morality.

corysama 8y ago

There is a work of fiction (the name of which I unfortunately do not recall) that tells tales of war machines, hard-coded with the rules and conventions of war, coming into conflict with their own angry and frustrated operators. I love the concept of AI that could be not just super-intelligent, but also/instead super-moral. I hope we can find the inspiration to bring some of that concept into reality.

gesman 8y ago

(Criminal|Unethical|Bad) for one is (hero|ethical|good) for another.

tolstoy77 8y ago

Wow, was just looking through the glassdoor reviews at the company in the article,Clarifai. https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Clarifai-RVW23884886.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Clarifai-R... Seems like an awful place to work. They have a role I was about to apply to in the bay area. Looks like I'll avoid this place.

ex_clarifai 8y ago
Wow this one is good https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Clarifai-RVW23794922.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Clarifai-R... Fun fact, they hired an ex trump org assistant to be his new assistant https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharon-benita-23703449 https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharon-benita-23703449

DoofusOfDeath 8y ago

First things first. What do we mean by "ethical"?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

thrwway19033 8y ago

(Throwaway in case this is crank science.) Neural nets are inspired by human neural structures. Training is in some ways similar to human learning. Genetic algorithms especially in simulated worlds are directly inspired by the biological evolution in the real world. Is there any chance that the resulting algorithms themselves (the AI) shall have any ethical rights or significance? Especially once it exceeds in complexity the human brain. The reason I ask is that it is an ethical question about AI (and therefore on topic), but I don't know how to think about it and hope others here might share some insight.

sgt101 8y ago
Really that's more about the effect on us and the systems of society than the intrinsic nature of rights of the AI. Having things that seem human or capable of human insight and yet making them slaves may demean us all.

jamessantiago 8y ago

For this I usually think that complexity in general is dangerous when our ability to apply our own value systems degrades past a certain point. For the 2008 financial issues we had a few financial products like subprime loans where the reasoning and economics behind these were complicated enough that most couldn't effectively regulate or understand the implications of their use. I suppose when enough things go wrong with a complex system it's like having runtime errors popup that you can debug against and get a better understanding of what you created, but that first execution is just dangerous enough that you wouldn't want something that's complex enough to be doing anything important. Then again, we might not think something is complex enough until we start running into the "unknown unknowns" of real world usage. Maybe a somewhat subjective qualifier for what's "complex" could be developed and then the ethical question is "is due diligence being taken to reduce the risks inherent in this complex system?"

bitL 8y ago

We humans have a multitude of competing ethics in the form of religions; we can't even agree on which one is the right one; programming ethics into AI is going back to that chicken-and-egg problem, requiring selecting which philosophical system is the right one. We can view competing religions as optimization algorithms where the best one for given state of world is winning, pressuring other ones to evolve or die off. Would we need competing, multi-GAN style AI "religions" all times at each other's throat as well?

devoply 8y ago
There is nothing inherently ethical about any religion. They have some ethical concepts in them that might be universal like don't kill but they are easily overridden by don't kill fellow believers. Similarly there is nothing ethical about any society other than within the small confined system of a certain ideology which validates its own ethics. At the end ethics is just a game we play and we can teach computers to play similar games with a certain set of rules. That does not in any way mean that a computer will be ethical, only that it can be taught to observe the norms of the ethical games played by the society it serves using a rule based system that is applied to certain final actions that it has computed it should carry out.

calibas 8y ago

const not_evil = true;

cmurf 8y ago

Universally ethical A.I.? No. But then neither are humans. So I refuse the idea that always ethical A.I. is a goal that disqualifies A.I. as being useful. Government arguably should be an expedient (this is Thoreau's argument anyway), and it's possible A.I. could be at least a more consistent expedient that also commits to ratting itself out anytime its ethical programming is substantially altered. That isn't at all how humans behave, they can't be programmed this way. Merely having A.I. that concisely points out the competing ethical positions on an issue, would be an improvement to word salad propaganda; propaganda is a significant impediment to both ethical and critical thinking, so an A.I. that were to score statements on a propaganda scale would itself be useful. https://propagandacritic.com/ https://propagandacritic.com/

fouc 8y ago

Ethics in AI makes me think of https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Coherent_Extrapolated_Volition https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Coherent_Extrapolated_Voliti...

HNLurker2 8y ago

Paywall bypass: https://outline.com/VBgvaj https://outline.com/VBgvaj