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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 th

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.

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.