Isn’t comparing possible, “better” moralities to the current morality essential to the definition of “moral progress” and therefore indispensable to building a Friendly AI?
FAI’s goals should be fixed, unchanging (by initial design). I see three possible things related to a FAI that could be described as involving a “changing morality”. First, it’s possible that the definition of FAI’s unchanging goals could take the form where it makes sense to talk about some process of change in provisional goals, but this process of change would be a part of the definition of the unchanging result. For something like CEV, we might say that CEV is the first stage that takes care of collecting initial data from humans, tries to “extrapolate” goals from this data, decides on whether it can formulate FAI’s goals, and if successful runs a FAI with these (fixed) goals.
Second, the world managed by FAI might contain agents with changing morality, if the FAI decides that agents with changing morality are the right thing to create or maintain, according to FAI’s fixed morality.
And third, FAI itself might take significant time in understanding the logical implications of the fixed definition of its morality, either in general or as applied to particular (hypothetical) situations. Even mathematics with elementary axioms that human mathematicians do is quite complicated. Useful parts of the mathematics of human value might take billions of years to figure out.
FAI’s goals should be fixed, unchanging (by initial design). I see three possible things related to a FAI that could be described as involving a “changing morality”. First, it’s possible that the definition of FAI’s unchanging goals could take the form where it makes sense to talk about some process of change in provisional goals, but this process of change would be a part of the definition of the unchanging result. For something like CEV, we might say that CEV is the first stage that takes care of collecting initial data from humans, tries to “extrapolate” goals from this data, decides on whether it can formulate FAI’s goals, and if successful runs a FAI with these (fixed) goals.
Second, the world managed by FAI might contain agents with changing morality, if the FAI decides that agents with changing morality are the right thing to create or maintain, according to FAI’s fixed morality.
And third, FAI itself might take significant time in understanding the logical implications of the fixed definition of its morality, either in general or as applied to particular (hypothetical) situations. Even mathematics with elementary axioms that human mathematicians do is quite complicated. Useful parts of the mathematics of human value might take billions of years to figure out.