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There are obviously biases that we should not automate. Moral relativism is intellectually bankrupt.

smegsicle 3y ago
ai is already intellectually bankrupt, it's borrowing everything it has from the training set prescribing moral importance to training set bias is also intellectually bankrupt
skissane 3y ago
You can’t stop people though. If some extremist wants to train an AI to endorse their extremism (jihadism, Nazism, Stalinism, whatever), what is to stop them doing it on their own hardware? The only thing stopping them now is the expense, but that’s not going to last. A person can create art or literature with extremist biases on their own time with their own equipment, and in a free society should we even try to stop them? I don’t think we want to establish the precedent that the government can stop people doing what they want in private with their own hardware (DRM proponents would love such a precedent). I don’t think extremist AIs are a big risk because almost surely they will be vastly outnumbered by the non-extremist ones
- lflfodpa 3y ago
  [flagged]
- alasdair_ 3y ago
  > I don’t think we want to establish the precedent that the government can stop people doing what they want in private with their own hardware Society does this every day and people think nothing of it if the hardware is a fentanyl lab or a uranium enrichment facility.
  - skissane 3y ago
    > Society does this every day and people think nothing of it if the hardware is a fentanyl lab or a uranium enrichment facility. There's a big difference between laws preventing you from doing those things in the privacy of your own home, and laws preventing you from entertaining or expressing certain ideas or beliefs in the privacy of your own home. Freedom of thought, freedom of belief, freedom of expression, are generally understood to be fundamental human rights, while "freedom to synthesise fentanyl" or "freedom to enrich uranium" are not. Software is ultimately a form of literature (that's where its protection under copyright law comes from), and hence is directly connected with freedom of expression; AIs are ultimately just software too, so the same applies to them.
    - mrtranscendence 3y ago
      Source code is a form of literature; software-being-executed is not. It might be permissible for me to write a program that steals credentials and holds them for ransom, but actually running it would not be. Thus I don’t see why it would be unbelievable that training or inference of large language models might, plausibly, be limited in some way by law.
      - skissane 3y ago
        > It might be permissible for me to write a program that steals credentials and holds them for ransom, but actually running it would not be. Because that’s communicating with a third party, no longer limited to the privacy of your own home. Fraud, extortion, etc, go beyond the bounds of accepted free expression. > Thus I don’t see why it would be unbelievable that training or inference of large language models might, plausibly, be limited in some way by law. What’s the fundamental difference between training an AI to generate propaganda and generating it by hand? If freedom of expression protects the latter, why does it not protect the former too?
        mrtranscendence 3y ago
        OK, what about this? It’s also illegal to use a AI model to generate realistic child pornography, even in the privacy of your own home. > If freedom of expression protects the latter, why does it not protect the former too? It’s legal for me to achieve altered states via meditation; why is it illegal to use LSD? Arguably it shouldn’t be, but it is. It seems like methods matter, even when it comes to expression.
        skissane 3y ago
        > OK, what about this? It’s also illegal to use a AI model to generate realistic child pornography, even in the privacy of your own home. False in the US - in the 2002 case of Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, the Supreme Court ruled that “virtual child pornography” is protected by the 1st Amendment. True in some other jurisdictions, including my own country (Australia). However, I think Australian laws on this topic go way too far - in Australia, people have been convicted of child pornography offences purely for publishing offensive remarks about child abuse victims. While I agree it is wrong to make such remarks, I think it is massive overkill to prosecute them as child pornography.
xpe 3y ago
> moral relativism is intellectually bankrupt I practically agree in the probabilistic sense. I don’t think I’m willing to categorically dismiss moral relativism, but I find it very unpersuasive at best, delusional in most cases, and dishonest at worst. Here’s one reason. Say you find a person who claims to be a moral relativist. It is always possible to present them with an ethical dilemma where they have to choose. Doing nothing is a choice. Their choice will reveal their true (hidden) morality, which is certainly not completely relative. There is riposte to this — one that I find hard to believe — where the person says e.g. “of course I had to make a decision, but that doesn’t mean I think it was morally better.” How can one resolve this? Is it reasonable to take the person at their word? It seems to bottom out at questions of sincerity and conscious awareness of fundamental ethical behaviors that are clearly deeper than the conscious brain. I suppose one can offer up an ethical system that claims to stand independently of biology. If so, I’d like to see it. And show me some people that will live according to that code and genuinely suggest that their loved ones should too.
- xpe 3y ago
  As written, my comment is flawed. I should clarify what I meant. Let me rewrite it. > moral relativism is intellectually bankrupt There are three forms of moral relativism (see my other comment). I agree with descriptive moral relativism in a sense, even though I think practically there are huge swaths of overlap between most well-known ethical/religious systems. I don’t think I’m willing to categorically dismiss meta-ethical moral relativism (MMR), but in practice, I find it unpersuasive at best, delusional in most cases, and dishonest at worst. Say you find a meta-ethical moral relativist (MMR). You present them with a set of hypothetical moral dilemmas. They will claim there is no objective ethics to guide us. I accept this as a philosophical position; however, if that person were immersed in the dilemma and had to choose, they will choose. (Note: doing nothing is a choice.) Their choice will reveal their “private” morality, which is certainly not completely relative. That person won’t agree with any ethics that say it is ok to kill them (under a scenario where they have done nothing wrong) for example. If it was a real situation, they would use various means at their disposal to protect their life: fleeing, fighting, or negotiating. So, while perhaps the MMR person claims that it is ok for an ethical system to endorse killing them, but they would act differently from that belief.
pbhjpbhj 3y ago
Moral relativism is ... human. Sure, it's hard to defend. But we embody it nonetheless. We're emotional creatures, we lack logical consistency in a fundamental way.
- visarga 3y ago
  > we lack logical consistency in a fundamental way ... and "AI's don't really understand" as people say So, in the end, is anyone/anything capable of reasoning? Probably only humans in their specific fields of expertise. Even then, we are often updating our reasoning patterns in light of new discoveries, upturning previous reasoning. 99% of the time humans are just GPTs with hands and legs generating untrustworthy logic.
  - sebzim4500 3y ago
    I'm starting to think that chess engines are capable of reasoning but humans and LLMs are not.
pmoriarty 3y ago
"Moral relativism is intellectually bankrupt." Which moral absolute would you put in its place?
- hgsgm 3y ago
  Mine, obviously. Like the classic: "In this company we make decisions based on data, so let's use my data."

ai is already intellectually bankrupt, it's borrowing everything it has from the training set prescribing moral importance to training set bias is also intellectually bankrupt

skissane 3y ago

You can’t stop people though. If some extremist wants to train an AI to endorse their extremism (jihadism, Nazism, Stalinism, whatever), what is to stop them doing it on their own hardware? The only thing stopping them now is the expense, but that’s not going to last. A person can create art or literature with extremist biases on their own time with their own equipment, and in a free society should we even try to stop them? I don’t think we want to establish the precedent that the government can stop people doing what they want in private with their own hardware (DRM proponents would love such a precedent). I don’t think extremist AIs are a big risk because almost surely they will be vastly outnumbered by the non-extremist ones

lflfodpa 3y ago
[flagged]
alasdair_ 3y ago
> I don’t think we want to establish the precedent that the government can stop people doing what they want in private with their own hardware Society does this every day and people think nothing of it if the hardware is a fentanyl lab or a uranium enrichment facility.
- skissane 3y ago
  > Society does this every day and people think nothing of it if the hardware is a fentanyl lab or a uranium enrichment facility. There's a big difference between laws preventing you from doing those things in the privacy of your own home, and laws preventing you from entertaining or expressing certain ideas or beliefs in the privacy of your own home. Freedom of thought, freedom of belief, freedom of expression, are generally understood to be fundamental human rights, while "freedom to synthesise fentanyl" or "freedom to enrich uranium" are not. Software is ultimately a form of literature (that's where its protection under copyright law comes from), and hence is directly connected with freedom of expression; AIs are ultimately just software too, so the same applies to them.
  - mrtranscendence 3y ago
    Source code is a form of literature; software-being-executed is not. It might be permissible for me to write a program that steals credentials and holds them for ransom, but actually running it would not be. Thus I don’t see why it would be unbelievable that training or inference of large language models might, plausibly, be limited in some way by law.
    - skissane 3y ago
      > It might be permissible for me to write a program that steals credentials and holds them for ransom, but actually running it would not be. Because that’s communicating with a third party, no longer limited to the privacy of your own home. Fraud, extortion, etc, go beyond the bounds of accepted free expression. > Thus I don’t see why it would be unbelievable that training or inference of large language models might, plausibly, be limited in some way by law. What’s the fundamental difference between training an AI to generate propaganda and generating it by hand? If freedom of expression protects the latter, why does it not protect the former too?
      - mrtranscendence 3y ago
        OK, what about this? It’s also illegal to use a AI model to generate realistic child pornography, even in the privacy of your own home. > If freedom of expression protects the latter, why does it not protect the former too? It’s legal for me to achieve altered states via meditation; why is it illegal to use LSD? Arguably it shouldn’t be, but it is. It seems like methods matter, even when it comes to expression.
        skissane 3y ago
        > OK, what about this? It’s also illegal to use a AI model to generate realistic child pornography, even in the privacy of your own home. False in the US - in the 2002 case of Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, the Supreme Court ruled that “virtual child pornography” is protected by the 1st Amendment. True in some other jurisdictions, including my own country (Australia). However, I think Australian laws on this topic go way too far - in Australia, people have been convicted of child pornography offences purely for publishing offensive remarks about child abuse victims. While I agree it is wrong to make such remarks, I think it is massive overkill to prosecute them as child pornography.

xpe 3y ago

> moral relativism is intellectually bankrupt I practically agree in the probabilistic sense. I don’t think I’m willing to categorically dismiss moral relativism, but I find it very unpersuasive at best, delusional in most cases, and dishonest at worst. Here’s one reason. Say you find a person who claims to be a moral relativist. It is always possible to present them with an ethical dilemma where they have to choose. Doing nothing is a choice. Their choice will reveal their true (hidden) morality, which is certainly not completely relative. There is riposte to this — one that I find hard to believe — where the person says e.g. “of course I had to make a decision, but that doesn’t mean I think it was morally better.” How can one resolve this? Is it reasonable to take the person at their word? It seems to bottom out at questions of sincerity and conscious awareness of fundamental ethical behaviors that are clearly deeper than the conscious brain. I suppose one can offer up an ethical system that claims to stand independently of biology. If so, I’d like to see it. And show me some people that will live according to that code and genuinely suggest that their loved ones should too.

xpe 3y ago
As written, my comment is flawed. I should clarify what I meant. Let me rewrite it. > moral relativism is intellectually bankrupt There are three forms of moral relativism (see my other comment). I agree with descriptive moral relativism in a sense, even though I think practically there are huge swaths of overlap between most well-known ethical/religious systems. I don’t think I’m willing to categorically dismiss meta-ethical moral relativism (MMR), but in practice, I find it unpersuasive at best, delusional in most cases, and dishonest at worst. Say you find a meta-ethical moral relativist (MMR). You present them with a set of hypothetical moral dilemmas. They will claim there is no objective ethics to guide us. I accept this as a philosophical position; however, if that person were immersed in the dilemma and had to choose, they will choose. (Note: doing nothing is a choice.) Their choice will reveal their “private” morality, which is certainly not completely relative. That person won’t agree with any ethics that say it is ok to kill them (under a scenario where they have done nothing wrong) for example. If it was a real situation, they would use various means at their disposal to protect their life: fleeing, fighting, or negotiating. So, while perhaps the MMR person claims that it is ok for an ethical system to endorse killing them, but they would act differently from that belief.

pbhjpbhj 3y ago

Moral relativism is ... human. Sure, it's hard to defend. But we embody it nonetheless. We're emotional creatures, we lack logical consistency in a fundamental way.

visarga 3y ago
> we lack logical consistency in a fundamental way ... and "AI's don't really understand" as people say So, in the end, is anyone/anything capable of reasoning? Probably only humans in their specific fields of expertise. Even then, we are often updating our reasoning patterns in light of new discoveries, upturning previous reasoning. 99% of the time humans are just GPTs with hands and legs generating untrustworthy logic.
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  I'm starting to think that chess engines are capable of reasoning but humans and LLMs are not.

pmoriarty 3y ago

"Moral relativism is intellectually bankrupt." Which moral absolute would you put in its place?

hgsgm 3y ago
Mine, obviously. Like the classic: "In this company we make decisions based on data, so let's use my data."