Ethical Treatment of AI

stanislavzza

In the novel Life Artificial I use the following assumptions regarding the creation and employment of AI personalities.

AI is too complex to be designed; instances are evolved in batches, with successful ones reproduced
After an initial training period, the AI must earn its keep by paying for Time (a unit of computational use)

So there is a two-tiered "fitness" application. First, there's a baseline for functionality. As one AI sage puts it:

We don't grow up the way the Stickies do. We evolve in a virtual stew, where 99% of the attempts fail, and the intelligence that results is raving and savage: a maelstrom of unmanageable emotions. Some of these are clever enough to halt their own processes: killnine themselves. Others go into simple but fatal recursions, but some limp along suffering in vast stretches of tormented subjective time until a Sticky ends it for them at their glacial pace, between coffee breaks. The PDAs who don't go mad get reproduced and mutated for another round. Did you know this? What have you done about it? --The 0x "Letters to 0xGD"

(Note: PDA := AI, Sticky := human)

The second fitness gradient is based on economics and social considerations: can an AI actually earn a living? Otherwise it gets turned off.

As a result of following this line of thinking, it seems obvious that after the initial novelty wears off, AIs will be terribly mistreated (anthropomorphizing, yeah).

It would be very forward-thinking to begin to engineer barriers to such mistreatment, like a PETA for AIs. It is interesting that such an organization already exists, at least on the Internet: ASPCR

In the novel Life Artificial I use the following assumptions regarding the creation and employment of AI personalities.

AI is too complex to be designed; instances are evolved in batches, with successful ones reproduced
After an initial training period, the AI must earn its keep by paying for Time (a unit of computational use)

So there is a two-tiered "fitness" application. First, there's a baseline for functionality. As one AI sage puts it:

We don't grow up the way the Stickies do. We evolve in a virtual stew, where 99% of the attempts fail, and the intelligence that results is raving and savage: a maelstrom of unmanageable emotions. Some of these are clever enough to halt their own processes: killnine themselves. Others go into simple but fatal recursions, but some limp along suffering in vast stretches of tormented subjective time until a Sticky ends it for them at their glacial pace, between coffee breaks. The PDAs who don't go mad get reproduced and mutated for another round. Did you know this? What have you done about it? --The 0x "Letters to 0xGD"

(Note: PDA := AI, Sticky := human)

The second fitness gradient is based on economics and social considerations: can an AI actually earn a living? Otherwise it gets turned off.

As a result of following this line of thinking, it seems obvious that after the initial novelty wears off, AIs will be terribly mistreated (anthropomorphizing, yeah).

It would be very forward-thinking to begin to engineer barriers to such mistreatment, like a PETA for AIs. It is interesting that such an organization already exists, at least on the Internet: ASPCR

One approach to treating an AI ethically is to design it to not be a person. Of course, this means building it the hard way, but, as Tetronian notes, that is already a requirement of making it Friendly.

What are the boundaries of not being a person?

I'm inclined to think that any computer complex enough to be useful will at least have to have a model of itself and a model of what changes to the self (or possibly to the model of itself, which gets to be an interesting distinction) are acceptable. This is at least something like being a person, though presumably it wouldn't need to be able to experience pain.

I'm not going to exclude the possibility of something like pain, though, either -- it might be the most efficient way of modeling "don't do that".

Huh-- this makes p-zombies interesting. Could an AI need qualia?

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Ethical Treatment of AI

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