A Brief Overview of Machine Ethics

lukeprog

Earlier, I lamented that even though Eliezer named scholarship as one of the Twelve Virtues of Rationality, there is surprisingly little interest in (or citing of) the academic literature on some of Less Wrong's central discussion topics.

Previously, I provided an overview of formal epistemology, that field of philosophy that deals with (1) mathematically formalizing concepts related to induction, belief, choice, and action, and (2) arguing about the foundations of probability, statistics, game theory, decision theory, and algorithmic learning theory.

Now, I've written Machine Ethics is the Future, an introduction to machine ethics, the academic field that studies the problem of how to design artificial moral agents that act ethically (along with a few related problems). There, you will find PDFs of a dozen papers on the subject.

Enjoy!

Your karma balance should be enough to prove that you definitely aren't the only critic on LW. Others who also disagree with him about various things have even higher balances.

There are definitely a number of true fanboys on this site, they may even be the majority (although I hope not), but they certainly aren't the whole of the LW crowd, and it is intellectually dishonest to put words in the rest of our mouths just by quoting Eliezer.

As for SIAI, by its very purpose only attracts people who agree with Eliezer's philosophy of AI. There is nothing wrong with this. There is no good reason for someone who doesn't believe in the necessity or possibility of FAI to go work there. Would you also object if it seemed like everyone working for Village Reach agreed about giving vaccinations to African children being a good idea?

Would you also object if it seemed like everyone working for Village Reach agreed about giving vaccinations to African children being a good idea?

If I would disagree and believe that it is worth it to voice my disagreement, then yes. You just can't compare that though. Can you name another group of people who try to take over the universe?

As for SIAI, by its very purpose only attracts people who agree with Eliezer's philosophy of AI. There is nothing wrong with this.

Jehovah's Witnesses also only attract certain people. A lot of money is being donate... (read more)

6XiXiDu15y

See, that one person who donated the current balance of his bank account got 52 upvotes for it. Now I'm not particularly shocked by him doing that or the upvotes. I don't worry that all that money might be better spend somehow. What drives me is curiosity mixed with my personality, I want to do what's right. That is the reason for why I criticize and why some comments may seem, or actually are derogatory. I think it needs to be said, I believe I can provoke feedback that way and learn more about the underlying rational. I desperately try to figure out if there is something I am missing. I haven't read most of the sequences yet, let me explain why. I'm a really slow reader, I have almost no education and need a lot of time to learn anything. I did a lot of spot tests, reading various posts and came across people who read the sequences but haven't been able to conclude that they should stop doing anything except trying to earn money for the SIAI. My conclusion is that reading the sequences shouldn't be a priority right now but rather learning the mathematical basics, programming and reading various books. But I still try to spend some time here to see if that assessment might be wrong. My current take on the whole issue is that the sequences do not provide much useful insights. I already know that by all that we know today AGI is possible and that it is unlikely that humans are the absolute limit when it comes to intelligence. I intuitively agree with the notion that AGI in its abstract form (intelligence as an algorithm) doesn't share our values if you do not deliberately 'tell' it to care. I see that one can outweigh even a low probability of risks from AI by assuming a future galactic civilization that is at stake. So what is my problem? I've written hundreds of comments about all kinds of problems I have with it, but maybe the biggest problem is a simple bias. I have an overwhelming gut feeling telling me that something is wrong with all this. I also do not trus

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