What irritates me about this post is that Yudkowsky just seems to assume without questioning (at least not in that article and related ones) that we ought be concerned about human morality. In "Fake Utility Functions", he argues that hedonistic utilitarianism fails to due justice to all the complex human values . But that's not the goal utiltiarians wanted to achieve, that's not their view of ethics. Ethics should be independent of the evolutionary psychology of Homo sapiens. Self-aware beings could have ended up with different values. What are the meta criteria by which we should decide what values to have in the first place? Hedonistic utilitarians answer that what matters, ultimately, can only be conscious experience. Yudkowsky seemed to assume that hedonistic utiltiarians thought that humans must want to be hedonistic utiltiarians deep down. But they don't need that to be the case at all. Human ethical intuitions could well be more misguided than Yudkowsky acknowledges anyway (i.e. that many people have strong intuitions against some of the consequences of consequentialism). Yudkowsky's dismissal of the One Great Moral Principle thus seems hastened. Toby Ord made a similar point in the comments to "Fake Utility Functions". (I don't want to advocate classical utilitarianism here because I think there are reasons that speak against happiness being the relevant criterion, I just wanted to point out that more thought should be given to this foundational issue of ethics.)
I think you misunderstood my point here.
But first, yes, I skimmed through the recommended article, but dont see how does it fit in here. Its an old familiar dispute about philosophical zombies. My take on this, the idea of such zombies is rather artificial. I think it is advocated by people who have problems a understanding mind/body connection. These people are dualists, even if they don`t admit it.
Now about morality. There is a good expression in the article you referenced: high-level cognitive architectures. We don`t know yet what this architecture is, but this is the level that provides categories and the language one has to understand and adopt in order to understand high-level mind functionality, including morality. Programming languages are a way below that level and not suitable for the purpose. As an illustration, imagine that we have a complex expert system that performs extensive data base searches and sophisticated logical inferences, and then we try to understand how it works in terms of gates, transistors, capacitors that operate on a microchip. It will not do it! The same is about trying to program morality. How one is going to do this? To write a function like, bool isMoral(...)? You pass parameters that represent a certain life situation and it returns true of false for moral/immoral? That seems absurd to me. The best that I can think about utilizing programming for AI is to write a software that models behavior of neurons. There still will remain a long way up to high-level cognitive architectures, and only then, morality.
I think you misunderstood my point here.
I was responding directly to this claim:
Are you serious? Do you really think that morality can be programmed on computers? Good luck then.
... which I would not make due to the violation of GAP.
Regarding the somewhat weaker claim "programming morality into computers would be very hard" we may have less disagreement. My expectation is that even with the best human minds dedicated into 'programming morality into computers" after first spending decades of research into those 'high-level architectures' they are still quite likely to make a mistake and thereby kill us all.
Today's post, Heading Toward Morality was originally published on 20 June 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was LA-602 vs RHIC Review, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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