Ceramic engineering researcher by training. Been interested in ethics for several years. More recently have gotten into data science.
sweenesm
Karma: 35
Thanks for the reply.
Regarding your disagreement with my point #2 - perhaps I should’ve been more precise in my wording. Let me try again, with words added in bold: “Although pain doesn’t directly cause suffering, there would be no suffering if there were no such thing as pain…” What that means is you don’t need to be experiencing pain in the moment that you initiate suffering, but you do need the mental imprint of having experienced some kind of pain in your lifetime. If you have no memory of experiencing pain, then you have nothing to avert. And without pain, I don’t believe you can have pleasure, so nothing to crave either.
Further, if you could abolish pain as David Pearce suggests, by bioengineering people to only feel different shades of pleasure (I have serious doubts about this), you’d abolish suffering at the same time. No person bioengineered in such a way would suffer over not feeling higher states of pleasure (i.e., “crave” pleasure) because suffering has a negative feeling associated with it—part of it feels like pain, which we supposedly wouldn’t have the ability to feel.
This gets to another point: one could define suffering as the creation of an unpleasant physical sensation or emotion (i.e., pain) through a thought process, that we may or may not be aware of. Example: the sadness that we typically naturally feel when someone we love dies is pain, but if we artificially extend this pain out with thoughts of the future or past, not the moment, such as, “will this pain ever stop?,” or, “If only I’d done something different, they might still be alive,” then it becomes suffering. This first example thought, by the way, could be considered aversion to pain/craving for it to stop, while the second could be considered craving that the present were different (that you weren’t in pain and your loved one were still alive). The key distinctions for me are that pain can be experienced “in the moment” without a thought process on top of it, and it can’t be entirely avoided in life, while suffering ultimately comes from thoughts, it falls away when one’s experiencing things in the moment, and it can be avoided because it’s an optional thing one choses to do for some reason. (A possible reason could be to give oneself an excuse to do something different than feel pain, such as to give oneself an excuse to stop exercising by amping up the pain with suffering.)
Regarding my point #4, I honestly don’t know what animals’ experiences are like or how much cognition they’re capable of. I do think, though, that if they aren’t capable of getting “out of the moment” with thoughts of the future or past, then they can’t suffer, they can only feel the pain/pleasure of the moment. For instance, do chickens suffer with thoughts of, “I don’t know how much longer I can take this,” or do they just experience the discomfort of their situation with the natural fight or flight mechanism and Pavlovian links of their body leading them to try to get away from it? Either way, pain by itself is an unpleasant experience and I think we should try to minimize imposing it on other beings.
It’s also interesting how much upvoted resistance you’ve gotten to the message of this post. Eckhart Tolle (“The Power of Now”) https://shop.eckharttolle.com/products/the-power-of-now is a modern day proponent of living in the moment to make suffering fall away, and he also encounters resistance: https://www.reddit.com/r/EckhartTolle/comments/sa1p4x/tolles_view_of_suffering_is_horrifying/
Thank you for the post! I basically agree with what you’re saying, although I myself have used the term “suffering” in an imprecise way—it often seems to be the language used in the context of utilitarianism when talking about welfare. I first learned the distinction you mention between pain and suffering during some personal development work years ago, so outside the direct field of philosophy.
I would add a couple of things:
Pain is experienced “in the moment,” while suffering comes from the stories we tell ourselves and the meanings we make of things (“craving, aversion, and clinging” are part of this—for example, one story we tell ourselves could be: if I don’t get what I crave, I somehow won’t be OK). This means that if we’re fully experiencing the present moment, suffering falls away.
Although pain doesn’t directly cause suffering, there would be no suffering if there were no pain or chance of pain (I also believe there’d be no pleasure without pain as a comparison point)
The lower someone’s self-esteem, the less responsibility they take for their emotions and the more likely they are to believe that pain causes suffering, not that their own cognitive processes that they can change with effort cause their suffering—this is why I think interventions to help raise people’s self-esteem and personal responsibility levels (especially for emotions) are so important
It’s difficult to know if animals “suffer” or not since they seem to live much more in the moment than humans and likely contain less capacity to make up stories around pain to turn it into suffering. Even if they exhibit behavior that seems to indicate suffering, it’s hard to know if this isn’t just hardwired or from Pavlovian links. It’s probably good to err on the side of caution, though, and assume many animals can suffer (in addition to feeling pain) until proven otherwise.
Lamini’s Targeted Hallucination Reduction May Be a Big Deal for Job Automation
How to Give Coming AGI’s the Best Chance of Figuring Out Ethics for Us
I basically agree with Shane’s take for any AGI that isn’t trying to be deceptive with some hidden goal(s).
(Btw, I haven’t seen anyone outline exactly how an AGI could gain it’s own goals independently of goals given to it by humans—if anyone has ideas on this, please share. I’m not saying it won’t happen, I’d just like a clear mechanism for it if someone has it. Note: I’m not talking here about instrumental goals such as power seeking.)
What I find a bit surprising is the relative lack of work that seems to be going on to solve condition 3: specification of ethics for an AGI to follow. I have a few ideas on why this may be the case:
Most engineers care about making things work in the real-world, but don’t want the responsibility to do this for ethics because: 1) it’s not their area of expertise, and 2) they’ll likely take on major blame if they get things “wrong” (and it’s almost guaranteed that someone won’t like their system of ethics and say they got it “wrong”)
Most philosophers haven’t had to care much about making things work in the real-world, and don’t seem excited about possibly having to make engineering-type compromises in their system of ethics to make it work
Most people who’ve studied philosophy at all probably don’t think it’s possible to come up with a consistent system of ethics to follow, or at least they don’t think people will come up with it anytime soon, but hopefully an AGI might
Personally, I think we better have a consistent system of ethics for an AGI to follow ASAP because we’ll likely be in significant trouble if malicious AGI come online and go on the offensive before we have at least one ethics-guided AGI to help defend us in a way that minimizes collateral damage.
American Philosophical Association (APA) announces two $10,000 AI2050 Prizes for philosophical work related to AI, with June 23, 2024 deadline: https://dailynous.com/2024/04/25/apa-creates-new-prizes-for-philosophical-research-on-ai/
sweenesm’s Shortform
Nice write up on this (even if it was AI-assisted), thanks for sharing! I believe another benefit is Raising One’s Self-Esteem: If high self-esteem can be thought of as consistently feeling good about oneself, then if someone takes responsibility for their emotions, recognizing that they can change their emotions at will, they can consistently choose to feel good about and love themselves as long as their conscience is clear.
This is inline with “The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem” by Nathaniel Branden: living consciously, self-acceptance, self-responsibility, self-assertiveness, living purposefully, and personal integrity.
Thanks for the post. I don’t know the answer to whether a self-consistent ethical framework can be constructed, but I’m working on it (without funding). My current best framework is a utilitarian one with incorporation of the effects of rights, self-esteem (personal responsibility) and conscience. It doesn’t “fix” the repugnant or very repugnant conclusions, but it says how you transition from one world to another could matter in terms of the conscience(s) of the person/people who bring it about.
It’s an interesting question as to what the implications are if it’s impossible to make a self-consistent ethical framework. If we can’t convey ethics to an AI in a self-consistent form, then we’ll likely rely in part on giving it lots of example situations (that not all humans/ethicists will agree on) to learn from and hope it’ll augment this with learning from human behavior, and then generalize well to outside all this not perfectly consistent training data. (Sounds a bit sketchy, doesn’t it—at least for the first AGI’s, but perhaps ASI’s could fare better?) Generalize “well” could be taken to mean that an AI won’t do anything that most people would strongly disapprove of if they understood the true implications of the action.
[This paragraph I’m less sure of, so take it with a grain of salt:] An AI that was trying to act ethically and taking the approval of relatively wise humans as some kind of signal of this might try to hide/avoid ethical inconsistencies that humans would pick up on. It would probably develop a long list of situations where inconsistencies seemed to arise and of actions it thought it could “get away with” versus not. I’m not talking about deception with malice, just sneakiness to try to keep most humans more or less happy, which, I assume would be part of what its ethics system would deem as good/valuable. It seems to me that problems may come to the surface if/when an “ethical” AI is defending against bad AI, when it may no longer be able to hide inconsistencies in all the situations that could rapidly come up.
If it is possible to construct a self-consistent ethical framework and we haven’t done it in time or laid the groundwork for it to be done quickly by the first “transformative” AI’s, then we’ll have basically dug our own grave for the consequences we get, in my opinion. Work to try to come up with a self-consistent ethical framework seems to me to be a very under explored area for AI safety.
Thanks for the interesting post! I basically agree with what you’re saying, and it’s mostly in-line with the version of utilitarianism I’m working on refining. Check out a write up on it here.
Thanks for the post. I don’t know if you saw this one: “Thank you for triggering me”, but it might be of interest. Cheers!
Thank you for sharing this. I’m sorry that anxiety and depression continue to haunt you. I’ve had my own, less extreme, struggles, so I can relate to some of what you wrote. In my case, I was lucky enough to find some good personal development resources that helped me a lot. One I might suggest for you to check out is: https://www.udemy.com/course/set-yourself-free-from-anger/. You can often get this course on sale for <$20. From what you’ve described, I think the “Mini Me” section might be most useful to you. Hope this helps you in some way.
Thanks for the interesting post! I agree that understanding ourselves better through therapy or personal development it is a great way to gain insights that could be applicable to AI safety. My personal development path got started mostly due to stress from not living up to my unrealistic expectations of how much I “should” have been succeeding as an engineer. It got me focused on self-esteem, and that’s a key feature of the AI safety path I’m pursuing.
If other AI safety researchers are interested in a relatively easy way to get started on their own path, I suggest this online course which can be purchased for <$20 when on sale: https://www.udemy.com/course/set-yourself-free-from-anger
Good luck on your boundaries work!
Thanks for the feedback! I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “no pattern-matching to actually glue those variables to reality.” Are you suggesting that an AGI won’t be able to adequately apply the ethics calculator unless it’s able to re-derive the system for itself based on its own observations of reality? The way I envision things happening is that the first AGI’s won’t be able to derive a mathematically consistent system of ethics over all situations (which is what the ethics calculator is supposed to be) - no human has done it yet, as far as I know—but an ASI likely will—if it’s possible.
If a human can figure it out before the first AGI comes online, I think this could (potentially) save us a lot of headaches, and the AGI could then go about figuring out how to tie the ethics calculator to its reality-based worldview—and even re-derive the calculator—as its knowledge/cognitive abilities expand with time. Like I said in the post, I may fail at my goal, but I think it’s worth pursuing, while at the same time I’d be happy for others to pursue what you suggest, and hope they do! Thanks again for the comment!
Update on Developing an Ethics Calculator to Align an AGI to
I don’t know if you saw this post from yesterday, but you may find it useful: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ELbGqXiLbRe6zSkTu/a-review-of-weak-to-strong-generalization-ai-safety-camp
Thanks for adding the headings and TL;DR.
I wouldn’t say my own posts have been particularly well-received on LW so far, but I try to look at this as a learning experience—perhaps you can, too, for your posts?
When I was in grad school, my advisor took the red pen to anything I wrote and tore it apart—it made me a better writer. Perhaps consider taking a course on clear technical writing (such as on udemy.com), or finding tips on YouTube or elsewhere on the web, and then practicing them, perhaps with ChatGPT’s help? Becoming a more clear and concise writer can be useful both for getting one’s views across and crystallizing one’s own thinking.
Thanks for the comment. I agree that context and specifics are key. This is what I was trying to get at with “If you’d like to change or add to these assumptions for your answer, please spell out how.”
By “controlled,” I basically mean it does what I actually want it to do, filling in the unspecified blanks at least as well as a human would to follow as closely as it can to my true meaning/desire.
Thanks for your “more interesting framing” version. Part of the point of this post was to give AGI developers food for thought about what they might want to prioritize for their first AGI to do.
Thank you for the comment. I think all of what you said is reasonable. I see now that I probably should’ve been more precise in defining my assumptions, as I would put much of what you said under “…done significant sandbox testing before you let it loose.”
This article on work culture in China might be relevant: https://www.businessinsider.com/china-work-culture-differences-west-2024-6
If there’s a similar work culture in AI innovation, that doesn’t sound optimal for developing something faster than the U.S. when “outside the LLM” thinking might ultimately be needed to develop AGI.
Also, Xi has recently called for more innovation in AI and other tech sectors:
https://www.msn.com/en-ie/money/other/xi-jinping-admits-china-is-relatively-weak-on-innovation-and-needs-more-talent-to-dominate-the-tech-battlefield/ar-BB1oUuk1