I’m curious about the source of your intuition that we are obligated to make an optimal selection. You mention that the utility difference between two plausibly best meals could be large, which is true, especially when we drop the metaphor and reflect on the utility difference between two plausibly best FAI value schemes. And I suppose that, taken literally, the utilitarian code urges us to maximize utility, so leaving any utility on the table would technically violate utilitarianism.
On a practical level, though, I’m usually not in the habit of nitpicking people who do things for me that are sublimely wonderful yet still marginally short of perfect, and I try not to criticize people who made a decision that was plausibly the best available decision simply because some other decision was also plausibly the best available decision. If neither of us can tell for sure which of two options is the best, and our uncertainty isn’t of the kind that seems likely to be resolvable by further research, then my intuition is that the morally correct thing to do is just pick one and enjoy it, especially if there are other worse options that might fall upon us by default if we dither for too long.
I agree with you that a trusted moral authority figure can make it easier for us to pick one of several plausibly best options...but I disagree with you that such a figure is morally necessary; instead, I see them as useful moral support for an action that can be difficult due to a lack of willpower or self-confidence. Ideally, I would just always pick a plausibly best decision by myself; since that’s hard and I am a human being who sometimes experiences angst, it’s nice when my friends and my mom help me make hard decisions. So the role of the moral authority, in my view, isn’t that they justify a hard decision, causing it to become correct where it was not correct prior to their blessing; it’s that the moral authority eases the psychological difficulty of making a decision that was hard to accept but that was nevertheless correct even without the authority’s blessing.
Yes, I agree with everything you said… until the last sentence ;)
In-parable, your mom is mostly just there as moral support. Neither of you is doing cognitive work the other couldn’t. But an aligned AI might have to do a lot of hard work figuring out what some candidate options for the universe even are, and if we want to check its work it will probably have to break big complicated visions of the future into human-comprehensible mouthfuls. So we really will need to extend trust to it—not as in trusting that whatever it picks is the only right thing, but trusting it to make decent decisions even in domains that are too complicated for human oversight.
I’m curious about the source of your intuition that we are obligated to make an optimal selection. You mention that the utility difference between two plausibly best meals could be large, which is true, especially when we drop the metaphor and reflect on the utility difference between two plausibly best FAI value schemes. And I suppose that, taken literally, the utilitarian code urges us to maximize utility, so leaving any utility on the table would technically violate utilitarianism.
On a practical level, though, I’m usually not in the habit of nitpicking people who do things for me that are sublimely wonderful yet still marginally short of perfect, and I try not to criticize people who made a decision that was plausibly the best available decision simply because some other decision was also plausibly the best available decision. If neither of us can tell for sure which of two options is the best, and our uncertainty isn’t of the kind that seems likely to be resolvable by further research, then my intuition is that the morally correct thing to do is just pick one and enjoy it, especially if there are other worse options that might fall upon us by default if we dither for too long.
I agree with you that a trusted moral authority figure can make it easier for us to pick one of several plausibly best options...but I disagree with you that such a figure is morally necessary; instead, I see them as useful moral support for an action that can be difficult due to a lack of willpower or self-confidence. Ideally, I would just always pick a plausibly best decision by myself; since that’s hard and I am a human being who sometimes experiences angst, it’s nice when my friends and my mom help me make hard decisions. So the role of the moral authority, in my view, isn’t that they justify a hard decision, causing it to become correct where it was not correct prior to their blessing; it’s that the moral authority eases the psychological difficulty of making a decision that was hard to accept but that was nevertheless correct even without the authority’s blessing.
Yes, I agree with everything you said… until the last sentence ;)
In-parable, your mom is mostly just there as moral support. Neither of you is doing cognitive work the other couldn’t. But an aligned AI might have to do a lot of hard work figuring out what some candidate options for the universe even are, and if we want to check its work it will probably have to break big complicated visions of the future into human-comprehensible mouthfuls. So we really will need to extend trust to it—not as in trusting that whatever it picks is the only right thing, but trusting it to make decent decisions even in domains that are too complicated for human oversight.