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

How is Rice's theorem at all relevant here?

Note: Just because there is no general algorithm to tell whether an arbitrary AI is friendly, doesn't mean it's impossible to construct a friendly AI.

Imagine that you want to construct an AI that will never self-halt (easier to define than friendliness, but the same idea applies). You could build the machine so that it doesn't have an off switch, and therefore can't halt simply out of inability. However, if the machine can self-modify, it could subsequently grant itself the ability to halt. 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. This latter task cannot be solved in the general ca... (read more)

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Ethical Treatment of AI

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Ethical Treatment of AI

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