PrawnOfFate comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013) - Less Wrong

27 Post author: orthonormal 01 April 2013 04:19PM

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Comment author: PrawnOfFate 25 April 2013 12:34:28PM *  1 point [-]

I'm increasingly baffled as to why AI is always brought in to discussions of metaethics. Societies of rational agents need ethics to regulate their conduct. Out AIs aren't sophisticated enough to live in their own socieities. A wireheading AI isn't even going to be able to survive "in the wild". If you could build an artificial society of AI, then the questions of whether they spontaneously evolved ethics would be a very interesting and relevant datum. But AIs as we know them aren't good models for the kinds of entities to which morality is relevant. And Clippy is particularly exceptional example of an AI. So why do people keep saying "Ah, but Clippy..."...?

Comment author: Nornagest 25 April 2013 06:45:38PM *  2 points [-]

And Clippy is particularly exceptional example of an AI. So why do people keep saying "Ah, but Clippy..."...?

Well, in this case it's because the post I was responding to mentioned Clippy a couple of times, so I thought it'd be worthwhile to mention how the little bugger fits into the overall picture of value stability. It's indeed somewhat tangential to the main point I was trying to make; paperclippers don't have anything to do with value drift (they're an example of a different failure mode in artificial ethics) and they're unlikely to evolve from a changing value system.