What you are getting at is that the ends justify the means only when the means don’t effect the ends. In the case of a human as part of the means, the act of the means may effect the human and thus effect the ends. In summary, reflexivity is a bitch. This is a reason why social science and economics is so hard—the subjects being modeled change as a result of the modeling process.
This is a problem with any sufficiently self-reflective mind, not with AIs that do not change their own rules. A simple mechanical narrow AI that is programmed to roam about collecting sensory data and to weigh the risk of people dying due to traffic collisions, then stepping in only to minimize the number of deaths, would be justified if it happens to allow or even cause the smaller number of deaths.
The concept of corruption doesn’t exist in this context, the act is just a mechanism. A person can transition from an uncorrupted state to a corrupted state only because the rules governing the person’s behavior is subject to modification in such a complex fashion as to occur even under the radar of the person it is happening to, because the person is the behavior caused by the rules, and when the rules change the person changes. We are not in as much control as we would like to think.
When the eastern religions preach the ego is the root of all our problems, they may be more right than we give them credit for. Ego is self-identity, which arises out of the ability to introspect and separate the aggregate of particles constituting ‘I’ with the rest of the particles in the environment. How would you go about building an AGI that doesn’t have the false duality of self and non-self? Without ego corruption does not exist.
Imagine instead of an embodied AGI, or even a software AGI running on some black box computational machine sitting in a basement, the friendly AGI takes the form of an intelligent environment, say a superintelligent house. In the house there exists safeguards that disallows any unfriendly action. The house isn’t conscious, it just adds a layer of friendliness on top of harsh reality. This may be a fruitful way of thinking about friendliness that avoids all the messy reflexivity.
What you are getting at is that the ends justify the means only when the means don’t effect the ends. In the case of a human as part of the means, the act of the means may effect the human and thus effect the ends. In summary, reflexivity is a bitch. This is a reason why social science and economics is so hard—the subjects being modeled change as a result of the modeling process.
This is a problem with any sufficiently self-reflective mind, not with AIs that do not change their own rules. A simple mechanical narrow AI that is programmed to roam about collecting sensory data and to weigh the risk of people dying due to traffic collisions, then stepping in only to minimize the number of deaths, would be justified if it happens to allow or even cause the smaller number of deaths.
The concept of corruption doesn’t exist in this context, the act is just a mechanism. A person can transition from an uncorrupted state to a corrupted state only because the rules governing the person’s behavior is subject to modification in such a complex fashion as to occur even under the radar of the person it is happening to, because the person is the behavior caused by the rules, and when the rules change the person changes. We are not in as much control as we would like to think.
When the eastern religions preach the ego is the root of all our problems, they may be more right than we give them credit for. Ego is self-identity, which arises out of the ability to introspect and separate the aggregate of particles constituting ‘I’ with the rest of the particles in the environment. How would you go about building an AGI that doesn’t have the false duality of self and non-self? Without ego corruption does not exist.
Imagine instead of an embodied AGI, or even a software AGI running on some black box computational machine sitting in a basement, the friendly AGI takes the form of an intelligent environment, say a superintelligent house. In the house there exists safeguards that disallows any unfriendly action. The house isn’t conscious, it just adds a layer of friendliness on top of harsh reality. This may be a fruitful way of thinking about friendliness that avoids all the messy reflexivity.
Fun stuff this. I am enjoying these discussions.