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Well, most moral philosophies usually hold some very basic things as wrong, murder and stealing being among them. However, the issue is that it's very cultural
by CM30 8y ago
Well, most moral philosophies usually hold some very basic things as wrong, murder and stealing being among them.
However, the issue is that it's very culturally dependent on WHY it's seen as wrong, and it's the reason behind WHY something is seen as wrong that the more complex elements of ethics are built on.
A utilitarian vs a deontologist vs a virtue theorist vs a follower of almost any religion vs a supporter of god knows how many other moral theories I don't know about would all have a different answer to that, and different answers to which cases killing or stealing or anything else might potentially be justified/right.
And you can see that reflected in legal systems of different countries right now. Some countries have self defence as basically 'anything is permissible if they're intruding on your property' where some have it so you need to use reasonable force. Some countries consider it fair to let the government kill criminals via the death penalty, and others don't.
The difficulty isn't defining whether murder or theft or what not in its most blatant forms is wrong, since most ethical frameworks will state it is. It's trying to define the many, many edge cases that people don't agree on, and which many countries/states/societies take different approaches to.
- lemagedurage 8y agoThis however seems more of a problem in philosophy than in governments. AI can cover the laws of the country in which it runs. The laws define the edge cases more more thoroughly than any philosophical school of thought. It raises questions like If we can derive morality from first principles, why hasn't someone applied this to the legal system yet? If we can't derive morality from first principles, why would we need to invent that for world changing technology to happen? Wouldn't it be a lot more in line with the population's sense of morality to train the AI based on our current laws than on some generalizing philosophical view?
- CM30 8y agoWell it depends how the AI operates, is distributed, etc. Any AI that affects people and populations in multiple regions will need to adapt to the laws in those different regions. Which could mean a lot of extra complexity, even if you limited it just to the US. You can't assume the same AI setup that'd work fine in the US would work in the UK or vice versa, because the laws aren't consistent about many elements. Either way, it's still a complicated thing to figure out.