5 ms·

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.
      - sgt101 8y ago
        Firearms didn't democratise power in the soviet States, revolutionary China or Africa.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    You can't very much abuse a shoe to cause harm. Or a fax machine. Or broccoli. Or a pencil. (Yeah, you could stab someone in the eye with the latter, but it's not something inherently violent about a pencil more than 2000 other things you could do it with, and most people would never do anything like that despite having used one). Other things however, are either precisely made for harm and profit (e.g. a grenade, or "Hot Pockets"), or lend themselves very well to it (e.g. dynamite, internet cookies, etc.).
- dogma1138 8y ago
  I think you are missing the point, the argument is AI ethical isn’t the same as can AI be ethical. AI is a tool, and while you can say some tools are easier to abuse than others it has not baring on their ethics since tools have no ethics to begin with. And the leverage or force multiplication you get from a tool is directly tied to how easily it can be abused but also to how useful it is to you in general. Is a gun less ethical than a siringe because it can be used for violence? How about siginges fuling the drug epidemic? Are nukes less ethical than conventional weapons? Were the looms that the luddites seek the destroy unethical because they put people out of work? Should we consider combines and modern agriculture unethical because they drastically changed the balance of power of various nations? Ofc not as all of these arguments are silly and flawed once you actually begin to deconstruct them. This has nothing to do about gun control I have no problem controlling guns because I don’t want to get shot and if someone does break into my house I prefer them not to be armed. I also prefer the police not to be armed at all times because I think that it’s just as important not to bring a gun to a knife fight as it is the other way around if you don’t want to escalate things. I have no problem of regulating the application of AI when necessary. However it does not mean that I think that it has anything to do with its ethics but with ours. Some uses of AI could be deemed by society to be unethical for the same reason that society deemed that harvesting the organs of a random person to save 5 people is unethical because people wouldn’t be able to function knowing that they might be harvested at any moment. So if we bring this back to AI it’s not that I would think that say an AI run mass surveillance system is unethical because I’m not sure if the AI can make ethical decisions I would consider it unethical if society wouldn’t be able to function well under it.
  - adjkant 8y ago
    > Is a gun less ethical than a syringe because it can be used for violence? A gun's purpose is to shoot bullets. A syringe has the purpose of delivering fluid into the human body. It's not hard to evaluate the ethics of the most common actions for each of those. While the tool itself technically has no ethics, owning or using the tool tends to have ethical implications. In a practical world, it is very fair to evaluate those implications, at least at an estimation level. Don't get me wrong, there's a ton of complexity when it comes to tools and ethics and no easy answers, and with the luddite example it brings in questions of work ethics and societal structure, so the loom doesn't exist in a vacuum. But not all tools bring in the entirety of ethics into consideration. There are ethical estimations of tools (think of them as potential ethical energy) that we can try to estimate. Syringe > Gun seems like one we can make. Gun vs Nuke, a bit harder due to the consideration of use vs threat of use. The loom alone is pretty neutral and is far more reflective of direct context, where the context of a gun or syringe generalizes easier. And of course these are all my calculations, and you and others can have different ones, but I think if we really decided to spend 8 hours nailing down this discussion, you would indeed see a loose tiering/ranking of tools and "potential ethical energy". I wouldn't be surprised to see other measures/categories emerge either such as severity, risk, and commonality of use case. The question becomes this: what is the "potential ethical energy" of AI. IMO it's very close to the loom in that the context matters the most, but there's also a severity of effect factor in play that makes it more dangerous. Still, I would say AI has an overall positive potential ethical energy.
klyrs 8y ago
Does a hammer make decisions?
- mLuby 8y ago
  Does an AI (as we have them now)? If I give someone a paper and say "wait a day then follow these instructions", I'm making the decisions, not them, even if the paper has branching logic like "if it's morning, call Alice but if it's afternoon call Bob."
  - nkozyra 8y ago
    Isn't that the point? Ethics is in the execution, if I make "ethical" instructions and someone follows them, they're operating by the constraints of said ethics. The point is that agents that operate ethically need not be sentient, they just need to play faithfully in our rule sets. Which will sometimes mean eschewing maxima when doing so violates them. It will sometimes mean losses or ties in zero sum games.
    - dogma1138 8y ago
      Does a bomb makes a decision to explode? What we define and can construct as an AI is no more capable of making a decision than your microwave.
nkozyra 8y ago
If the hammer is trained to operate autonomously, yes.
- dogma1138 8y ago
  My dishwasher is autonomous should I it be concerned about it’s ethics?
  - nkozyra 8y ago
    Your dishwasher makes no autonomous decisions. AI takes training data and uses algorithms to make choices. Aware of the protocols of ethics, it can reject those choices. Without ethics, it will aim for global maxima and victory in zero sum games. So ... no.
_rpd 8y ago
Or ethical wire clippers? http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

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.
    - sgt101 8y ago
      Firearms didn't democratise power in the soviet States, revolutionary China or Africa.
- coldtea 8y ago
  You can't very much abuse a shoe to cause harm. Or a fax machine. Or broccoli. Or a pencil. (Yeah, you could stab someone in the eye with the latter, but it's not something inherently violent about a pencil more than 2000 other things you could do it with, and most people would never do anything like that despite having used one). Other things however, are either precisely made for harm and profit (e.g. a grenade, or "Hot Pockets"), or lend themselves very well to it (e.g. dynamite, internet cookies, etc.).
dogma1138 8y ago
I think you are missing the point, the argument is AI ethical isn’t the same as can AI be ethical. AI is a tool, and while you can say some tools are easier to abuse than others it has not baring on their ethics since tools have no ethics to begin with. And the leverage or force multiplication you get from a tool is directly tied to how easily it can be abused but also to how useful it is to you in general. Is a gun less ethical than a siringe because it can be used for violence? How about siginges fuling the drug epidemic? Are nukes less ethical than conventional weapons? Were the looms that the luddites seek the destroy unethical because they put people out of work? Should we consider combines and modern agriculture unethical because they drastically changed the balance of power of various nations? Ofc not as all of these arguments are silly and flawed once you actually begin to deconstruct them. This has nothing to do about gun control I have no problem controlling guns because I don’t want to get shot and if someone does break into my house I prefer them not to be armed. I also prefer the police not to be armed at all times because I think that it’s just as important not to bring a gun to a knife fight as it is the other way around if you don’t want to escalate things. I have no problem of regulating the application of AI when necessary. However it does not mean that I think that it has anything to do with its ethics but with ours. Some uses of AI could be deemed by society to be unethical for the same reason that society deemed that harvesting the organs of a random person to save 5 people is unethical because people wouldn’t be able to function knowing that they might be harvested at any moment. So if we bring this back to AI it’s not that I would think that say an AI run mass surveillance system is unethical because I’m not sure if the AI can make ethical decisions I would consider it unethical if society wouldn’t be able to function well under it.
- adjkant 8y ago
  > Is a gun less ethical than a syringe because it can be used for violence? A gun's purpose is to shoot bullets. A syringe has the purpose of delivering fluid into the human body. It's not hard to evaluate the ethics of the most common actions for each of those. While the tool itself technically has no ethics, owning or using the tool tends to have ethical implications. In a practical world, it is very fair to evaluate those implications, at least at an estimation level. Don't get me wrong, there's a ton of complexity when it comes to tools and ethics and no easy answers, and with the luddite example it brings in questions of work ethics and societal structure, so the loom doesn't exist in a vacuum. But not all tools bring in the entirety of ethics into consideration. There are ethical estimations of tools (think of them as potential ethical energy) that we can try to estimate. Syringe > Gun seems like one we can make. Gun vs Nuke, a bit harder due to the consideration of use vs threat of use. The loom alone is pretty neutral and is far more reflective of direct context, where the context of a gun or syringe generalizes easier. And of course these are all my calculations, and you and others can have different ones, but I think if we really decided to spend 8 hours nailing down this discussion, you would indeed see a loose tiering/ranking of tools and "potential ethical energy". I wouldn't be surprised to see other measures/categories emerge either such as severity, risk, and commonality of use case. The question becomes this: what is the "potential ethical energy" of AI. IMO it's very close to the loom in that the context matters the most, but there's also a severity of effect factor in play that makes it more dangerous. Still, I would say AI has an overall positive potential ethical energy.

klyrs 8y ago

Does a hammer make decisions?

mLuby 8y ago
Does an AI (as we have them now)? If I give someone a paper and say "wait a day then follow these instructions", I'm making the decisions, not them, even if the paper has branching logic like "if it's morning, call Alice but if it's afternoon call Bob."
- nkozyra 8y ago
  Isn't that the point? Ethics is in the execution, if I make "ethical" instructions and someone follows them, they're operating by the constraints of said ethics. The point is that agents that operate ethically need not be sentient, they just need to play faithfully in our rule sets. Which will sometimes mean eschewing maxima when doing so violates them. It will sometimes mean losses or ties in zero sum games.
  - dogma1138 8y ago
    Does a bomb makes a decision to explode? What we define and can construct as an AI is no more capable of making a decision than your microwave.

nkozyra 8y ago

If the hammer is trained to operate autonomously, yes.

dogma1138 8y ago
My dishwasher is autonomous should I it be concerned about it’s ethics?
- nkozyra 8y ago
  Your dishwasher makes no autonomous decisions. AI takes training data and uses algorithms to make choices. Aware of the protocols of ethics, it can reject those choices. Without ethics, it will aim for global maxima and victory in zero sum games. So ... no.

_rpd 8y ago

Or ethical wire clippers? http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]