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

So in your design, you'd have to figure out a way to prevent self-halting under all possible input conditions, under all possible self-modifications of the machine.

Self-modifications are being performed by the machine itself. Thus we (and/or machine) don't need to prove that all modifications aren't "suicidal". Machine can be programmed to perform only provably (in reasonable time) non-suicidal self-modifications. Rice's theorem doesn't apply in this case.

Edit: However this leaves meta-level unpatched. Machine can self-modify into non-suicidal machine that doesn't care about preserving non-suicidability over modifications. This can be patched by constraining allowed self-modifications to a class of modifications that leads to machines with provably equivalent behavior (with a possible side effect of inability to self-repair).

The kind of constraint you propose would be very useful. We would have to first prove that there is a kind of topology in under general computation (because the machine can change its own language, so the solution can't be language specific) that only allows non-suicidal trajectories under all possible inputs and self-modifications. (or perhaps at least with low probability, but this is not likely to be computable). I have looked, but not found such a thing in existing theory. There is work on topology of computation, but it's something different from this... (read more)

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