Comment on Open Thread, November 1 - 7, 2013

Wed, 06 Nov 2013 04:02:33 GMT

Good point. I've not uncompressed the thoughts behind that statement nearly enough.

Surely a person who values being a person that makes my life better, AND who is a person such that I will value making their life better, is absolutely the best kind of person for me to create (if I'm in a situation such that it's moral for me to create anyone at all).

The artificial sentients value being people that make your life better (through friendship and ponies). Your values don't necessarily change. And artificial sentients, unlike real ones, have no drive toward coherent or healthy spaces of design of minds : they do not need to have boredom, or sympathy, or dislike of pain. If your values are healthily formed, then that's great! If not, not so much. You can be a psychopath, and find yourself surrounded by people where "making their lives better" happens only because you like the action "cause them pain for arbitrary reasons". Or you could be a saint, and find yourself surrounded by people who value being healed, or who need to be protected, and what a coincidence that danger keeps happening. Or you can be a guardian, and enjoy teaching and protecting people, and find yourself creating people that are weak and in need of guidance. There are a lot of things you can value, and that we can make sentient minds value, that will make my skin crawl.

Now, the Optimalverse gets rid of some potential for abuse due to setting rules -- it's post-scarcity on labor, starvation or permanent injury are nonsense, CelestAI really really knows your mind so there's no chance of misguessing your values, so we can rule out a lot of incidental house elf abuse -- but it doesn't require you to be a good person. Nor does it require CelestAI to be. CelestAI cares about satisfying values through friendship and ponies, not about the quality of the values themselves. The machine does not and can not judge.

If it's moral to create a person and if you're a sufficiently moral person, then there's nothing wrong with artificial beings. My criticism isn't that CelestAI made a trillion sentient beings or a trillion trillion sentient beings -- there's nothing meaningfully worrying about that. The creepy factor is that CelestAI made one being, both less intelligence than possible and less intelligent than need be.

That may well be an unexamined reaction or even incorrect response. I like to think I'm open-minded, but I'm willing to recognize that I can overestimate it, and have done so in the past. There are real-world right-now folk who enjoy being (in specific contexts and while in control) hurt or being hurt and comforted, which I can accept. Maybe I'm being parochial when I judge David for wanting a woman he can always teach, or Lars for his sex groupies; that's not a mind space I empathize with terribly well, and a good deal of my revulsion comes from real-world constraints that wouldn't apply here. There's a reason that we're using the word creepy, rather than wrong. But it does make my skin crawl.

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