Machine Intelligence and Human Ethics

[I_am_not_mafia]

If we're worried about an AI suffering, then being artificial we can easily provide it the means to switch off its suffering. It is after all just a computer program.

Unfortunately this will probably mean that the AI won't work. It will switch off its capacity to suffer and then not be compelled to act.

We could try to write code to keep track of whether the AI is only producing the equivalent of pain signals and to give it the functionality to mute them. But then we're going to lose more robots because what if it's in a situation whereby it is being continually damaged and all it can do is seek to minimise that damage as far as it is capable of? Space travel is expensive. The last thing you want is for the AI to voluntarily give up and effectively commit suicide.

We have evolved pain and the capacity to suffer for a reason. The same reasons will apply to an autonomous space faring robot.

[LastPoet]

Job of the future: cyber_doctor. Where you prescribe bits of software to your patients.

How about medicinal marijuana written in code? Hmmm need to research on that.

[Anomalocaris]

If we have few qualms about killing a chimpanzee, it's unclear where the ethics to deny killing or sacrificing an intelligence that isn't human would come from.

In practice, Ethics do not guide our actions.  Rather ethics are used to justify our actions to, and enlist support from, those who thinks ethics ought to guide our actions. 

Chimpanzee sentience and intelligence are fait accomplis incidental to chimp’s perceived role in our world as far as most of us are concerned.  So as always where it is too much trouble we feel free to ignore those principles by which we flatter ourselves in other areas.

Machine sentience and intelligence would likely be designed to be central to machine’s roles in our world.  So not accommodating the sentient wishes that may emerge may involve punishing consequences.   So should machine sentience and intelligence with emergent sentient wishes become fait accompli, we may find high minded principles suitable to enlist into the services of getting the laggards onboard with the process of avoiding those consequences.

[Fake Messiah]

I recently reread Carl Sagan's essay 'In Defense Of Robots', in which he makes his usually eloquent case for the unmanned exploration of space, among other things.

In the essay, he stresses the point that unmanned space vehicles will necessarily have to become more intelligent if they are to remain the best option for this type of work. But he stops short of at what seems (to me, at least) to be a vitally important question:  At what point does machine intelligence make it unethical to use spacebots for suicide missions?

Indeed, in the next century (if humanity manages to live that long) there will be such powerful all knowing computers that they will be able to explore other planets, space and other galaxies by staying on Earth and calculating what is out there very precisely without ever anyone visiting other planets and galaxies.





EDIT now I put the correct video

[Anomalocaris]

I recently reread Carl Sagan's essay 'In Defense Of Robots', in which he makes his usually eloquent case for the unmanned exploration of space, among other things.

In the essay, he stresses the point that unmanned space vehicles will necessarily have to become more intelligent if they are to remain the best option for this type of work. But he stops short of at what seems (to me, at least) to be a vitally important question:  At what point does machine intelligence make it unethical to use spacebots for suicide missions?

Indeed, in the next century (if humanity manages to live that long) there will be such powerful all knowing computers that they will be able to explore other planets, space and other galaxies by staying on Earth and calculating what is out there very precisely without ever anyone visiting other planets and galaxies.





EDIT now I put the correct video

The imminent arrival of the ability to forecast all reality without having to accommodate any possibility of impertinent disagreement by reality has been predicted since man first got into the business of predicting.

In fact the most enthusiastic practitioners of such predicts are the religious zelots.