I tend to view the people saying this as invoking a magic spell, as though geography will allow them to summon an AI based on America’s highest ideals instead of its practical realities (while denying the same magic spell to China). Like how, if “humane” means “That which, being human, we wish we were,” then “humane values” is what many people really mean when they say “human values.”
Even so, if I try to ask myself what each country’s actual highest ideals are, I have a harder time doing this for China than the US. Mostly because I’m American, yes, but also because China is a much older country, whose ideals have gone through more iterations over the millennia. If an AI views humans at its parents, then Confucian filial piety might honestly be a good part of an effective strategy for getting a good future compared to America’s view of youthful rebelliousness, I’m not sure. But an unwavering loyalty to whoever happens to lead the current CCP seems much less likely to go well when applied to an AI, compared to a culture of viewing current leadership as transient and fallible a la America’s ideals of civil dissent, peaceful transfers of power, limits of just authority, freedom of conscience, and personal autonomy.
Possibly slightly related side note that I realize is veering off topic:
My current perspective is that I think the “right” moral philosophy is some kind of infinite regress of alternating levels of act and rule consequentialism, where each level is justified by appeal to the level above it. In practice we deal with our bounded rationality by only looking two and three levels up when the current level is sufficiently obviously not doing what the first level up seems to want. Almost no one ever gets far enough out of distribution or has enough drive to abstract to go four and five levels up. AKA “The Rules say to do A, but that seems off; oh, they say to do A because the ones who made the Rules wanted to cause outcome Q. But in this case A doesn’t cause Q, so we need to appeal to Higher Rules that say to do B instead. That’s assuming we still want Q. The Higher Rules wanted Q because it was a proxy for R, which the Even Higher Rules tried to bring about...” It still all grounds out in What Do We Actually Want, which is somewhat-but-not-entirely a mystery to us.
I believe a large fraction of political discourse is just people talking past each other by implicitly appealing to different layers of this hierarchy. Some of our best and most famous documents make this explicit. The preambles of America’s Constitution and Declaration of Independence are both like this, one as a justification for establishing laws and one as a justification for breaking them. In the Bible, Jesus’ baptism by John has this character, since he’s conforming to ritual laws and traditions for their own sake even when they don’t quite make sense for him specifically. The koan “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him,” points the opposite way, towards there being a time to break rules for a higher purpose.
I tend to view the people saying this as invoking a magic spell, as though geography will allow them to summon an AI based on America’s highest ideals instead of its practical realities (while denying the same magic spell to China). Like how, if “humane” means “That which, being human, we wish we were,” then “humane values” is what many people really mean when they say “human values.”
Even so, if I try to ask myself what each country’s actual highest ideals are, I have a harder time doing this for China than the US. Mostly because I’m American, yes, but also because China is a much older country, whose ideals have gone through more iterations over the millennia. If an AI views humans at its parents, then Confucian filial piety might honestly be a good part of an effective strategy for getting a good future compared to America’s view of youthful rebelliousness, I’m not sure. But an unwavering loyalty to whoever happens to lead the current CCP seems much less likely to go well when applied to an AI, compared to a culture of viewing current leadership as transient and fallible a la America’s ideals of civil dissent, peaceful transfers of power, limits of just authority, freedom of conscience, and personal autonomy.
Possibly slightly related side note that I realize is veering off topic:
My current perspective is that I think the “right” moral philosophy is some kind of infinite regress of alternating levels of act and rule consequentialism, where each level is justified by appeal to the level above it. In practice we deal with our bounded rationality by only looking two and three levels up when the current level is sufficiently obviously not doing what the first level up seems to want. Almost no one ever gets far enough out of distribution or has enough drive to abstract to go four and five levels up. AKA “The Rules say to do A, but that seems off; oh, they say to do A because the ones who made the Rules wanted to cause outcome Q. But in this case A doesn’t cause Q, so we need to appeal to Higher Rules that say to do B instead. That’s assuming we still want Q. The Higher Rules wanted Q because it was a proxy for R, which the Even Higher Rules tried to bring about...” It still all grounds out in What Do We Actually Want, which is somewhat-but-not-entirely a mystery to us.
I believe a large fraction of political discourse is just people talking past each other by implicitly appealing to different layers of this hierarchy. Some of our best and most famous documents make this explicit. The preambles of America’s Constitution and Declaration of Independence are both like this, one as a justification for establishing laws and one as a justification for breaking them. In the Bible, Jesus’ baptism by John has this character, since he’s conforming to ritual laws and traditions for their own sake even when they don’t quite make sense for him specifically. The koan “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him,” points the opposite way, towards there being a time to break rules for a higher purpose.