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!

Either people really don't believe all this stuff about [...] the ability of the SIAI to create a seed AI

It's worth noting that AGI is decades away; no one's trying to take over the universe just yet. In this light, donations to SingInst now are better seen as funding preliminary research and outreach regarding this important problem, rather than funding AI construction.

not just believe Yudkowsky but ask for data and progress reports.

What sort of data and progress reports are you looking for? Glancing at the first two pages of the SingInst blog, I see a list of 2010 publications, and newsletters for last July and October. There's certainly room for criticism (e.g., "Why no newsletter since last October?" or "All this outreach is not very useful; I want to see incremental progress towards FAI"), but I wouldn't say there've been no progress reports.

What sort of data and progress reports are you looking for?

What are they working on right now?
Why are they working on it?
What constitutes a success of the current project?
How much money was spend on that project?
What could be done with more or less money?

As far as I know Yudkowsky is currently writing a book. He earnt $95,550 last year.

What I can't reconcile right now is the strong commitment and what is actually being done. Quite a few people here actually seem to donate considerable amounts of their income to the SIAI. No doubt writing the sequ... (read more)