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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34999 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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Do you think a deontological or virtue ethicist AI, or one programmed/designed by deontologists or virtue ethicists would be less likely to pose an existential risk?

Yes, absolutely.

Edit to elaborate: A big part of Yudkowsky's problem is that he thinks that he can bypass the flaws of utilitarianism by having more information, by applying more intelligence/computing power, by being one iteration further along the recursive loop than everyone else. But the thing about recursive loops is that they are recursive, and as such being one iteration further along is the same as being as being one iteration behind.

I don't quite understand how we'd even begin to program a deontological or virtue ethicist AI. We're capable of giving things functions that they try and maximise, and we can call the subject of that function 'utility'. Whatever the flaws or virtues of utilitarianism, it does have the singular advantage of being computable. Compare to a virtue ethicist AI - how on earth do we begin building such a thing?

Even if it would be better, it seems like we're much closer to getting 'AI with a function it seeks to maximise' than we are getting 'AI who desires to fulfill virtues such as honour and charity'.

I agree that having an AI that believed in being virtuous according to human standards would be far, far better than one with a complicated mathematical function we try and map onto human utility and hope it doesn't kill us, but I've seen no reason to think the first is even possible.

We're capable of giving things functions that they try and maximise, and we can call the subject of that function 'utility'

Well, so far we're not capable of this. At best we build something that essentially modifies itself in response to rewards. It's not trying to maximize anything.

Given this, I don't think it's fair to describe current AIs as utilitarian. Their training reward functions were utilitarian, maybe, but it would be pretty easy to create reward functions that align more with virtue ethics.

Their training reward functions were utilitarian, maybe, but it would be pretty easy to create reward functions that align more with virtue ethics.

I am absolutely keen to hear more about this, because everything I know tells me this is a close-to-impossible problem. The notion of 'pretty easy' seems intuitively wrong to me, but if you have any reading to offer on the subject I'd love to go through it.

Well, emphasis on more similar to virtue ethics. All it would take would be to change the reward criteria.

While defining terms is its own challenge, working in binary true/false and yes/no evaluations is arguably easier from a programming perspective than dealing weighted averages or trying to maximize a given value. Sure, a deontological AI will inevitably be vulnerable to Asimovian/Aes Sedai-esqe fallacies and exploits but a deontological AI is also not going to try and tile the universe in paper-clips or try to exterminate all life to in the name of preventing future suffering unless it's creator explicitly programs it to do so.

While Yudkowsky sees this as a fatal flaw, how can AGI it be described as intelligent if it doesn't "shut up and do the math". I see this as a feature. Utilitarianism is a stupid and evil ideology that is fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing. You can have a benevolent AI or you can have a utilitarian/consequentialist AI. You can't have both.

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