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

A guide might be how humans have done it up to now. Historically, humans have tended to be reluctant to grant full privileges of humanity even to other humans where they could possibly gain advantage for themselves or their group, until the other humans in question have actually figured out how to shoot back. This may itself be a convincing practical reason to treat AIs nicely.

I'm not sure that an AI would necessarily realize that punching back is the obvious answer. However, I do agree that if you are using evolution or some similar process, then you run the risk of eventually creating one that will. Hence my argument below that this is a bad idea.

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Ethical Treatment of AI

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Ethical Treatment of AI

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