If we had humans who suffer from seeing a certain color, we would probably work to give them eyeglasses filtering that color out (and not to eliminate this color from the world, given that others might have legitimate interest in seeing that color).
(I am writing this as a person who can’t consume garlic or onions with impunity. Also my threshold for needing sunglasses is much lower than that of a typical person. And your example of a breed of dogs is consistent with interventions on the level of affected individuals, not on the level of remaking the reality for everyone.)
But yes, there are certainly ways to press this line of thinking harder (e.g. making entities which suffer from not enough suffering being inflicted on others; I am not sure this is all that AI-specific either, unfortunately).
Consuming is a private thing; if you don’t want to consume something, don’t. Sometimes costs may be imposed on others, for example requiring food producers to disclosed what ingredients they used. But that’s still fairly limited impact.
This is different from if you e.g. suffered whenever you knew that onions exist, even if on the opposite side of the planet.
(Or maybe I am wrong, and humanity would develop proper infohazard policies, if there was a need.)
Yeah, this was mostly in response to your example of perceiving violet. That was also “kind of private” (sort of, but with onion intolerance it’s really difficult to be safe as well, especially if one needs to eat out; I wish society would bother to develop a pill (similar to what exists for lactose intolerance) or at least a rapid testing system (like acidity measuring strips), but no such luck yet).
So I felt this was more or less on par.
If one creates a “true incompatibility” (e.g, on a level of “my religion requires that those people don’t exist, and I suffer otherwise”)? Well, wars have been fought over things like that. It’s easy to imagine situations when there are true incompatibilities like that, when there are no solutions allowing for no one to suffer.
If the “competition of sufferings” happens to indeed be fundamental in some cases, I am not sure we should expect such situations to be resolved peacefully. Although who knows… Perhaps, sometimes they might be resolved peacefully.
To your point, one of the premises in the paper is that for a moral hijacking scenario to be meaningful, there must be a situation where no “easy-outs” exist, such as simply equipping the AIs with a purple light filter (Section 3.1). Legitimate instrumental goals may exist in these AIs, such as the desire to understand the true nature of their surroundings, that could conflict with the need to hide behind such a filter.
I found it challenging to come up with a clear example of purely aesthetic harm to use as the running example in the work. I think it’s important for the harm to be minor, since these are the situations where we have the most reason to actually accomodate for the AI’s suffering. Purple is just a color, but as you mention, we could imagine more abstract concepts as sources of suffering that are difficult to simply cover up.
If we had humans who suffer from seeing a certain color, we would probably work to give them eyeglasses filtering that color out (and not to eliminate this color from the world, given that others might have legitimate interest in seeing that color).
(I am writing this as a person who can’t consume garlic or onions with impunity. Also my threshold for needing sunglasses is much lower than that of a typical person. And your example of a breed of dogs is consistent with interventions on the level of affected individuals, not on the level of remaking the reality for everyone.)
But yes, there are certainly ways to press this line of thinking harder (e.g. making entities which suffer from not enough suffering being inflicted on others; I am not sure this is all that AI-specific either, unfortunately).
Consuming is a private thing; if you don’t want to consume something, don’t. Sometimes costs may be imposed on others, for example requiring food producers to disclosed what ingredients they used. But that’s still fairly limited impact.
This is different from if you e.g. suffered whenever you knew that onions exist, even if on the opposite side of the planet.
(Or maybe I am wrong, and humanity would develop proper infohazard policies, if there was a need.)
Yeah, this was mostly in response to your example of perceiving violet. That was also “kind of private” (sort of, but with onion intolerance it’s really difficult to be safe as well, especially if one needs to eat out; I wish society would bother to develop a pill (similar to what exists for lactose intolerance) or at least a rapid testing system (like acidity measuring strips), but no such luck yet).
So I felt this was more or less on par.
If one creates a “true incompatibility” (e.g, on a level of “my religion requires that those people don’t exist, and I suffer otherwise”)? Well, wars have been fought over things like that. It’s easy to imagine situations when there are true incompatibilities like that, when there are no solutions allowing for no one to suffer.
If the “competition of sufferings” happens to indeed be fundamental in some cases, I am not sure we should expect such situations to be resolved peacefully. Although who knows… Perhaps, sometimes they might be resolved peacefully.
To your point, one of the premises in the paper is that for a moral hijacking scenario to be meaningful, there must be a situation where no “easy-outs” exist, such as simply equipping the AIs with a purple light filter (Section 3.1). Legitimate instrumental goals may exist in these AIs, such as the desire to understand the true nature of their surroundings, that could conflict with the need to hide behind such a filter.
I found it challenging to come up with a clear example of purely aesthetic harm to use as the running example in the work. I think it’s important for the harm to be minor, since these are the situations where we have the most reason to actually accomodate for the AI’s suffering. Purple is just a color, but as you mention, we could imagine more abstract concepts as sources of suffering that are difficult to simply cover up.