Sponsor a "morality turing test" contest
From Prolegomena to any future artificial moral agent:
A Moral Turing Test (MTT ) might similarly be proposed to bypass disagreements about ethical standards by restricting the standard Turing Test to conversations about morality. If human
interrogators ’ cannot identify the machine at above chance accuracy, then the machine is, on this criterion, a moral agent . [...] To shift the focus from conversational ability to action, an alternative MTT could be structured in such a way that theinterrogator ’ is given pairs of descriptions of actual, morally-significant actions of a human and an AMA, purged of all references that would identify the agents. If the interrogator correctly identify es the machine at a level above chance, then the machine has failed the test. A problem for this version of the MTT is that distinguishability is the wrong criterion because the machine might be recognizable for acting in ways that are consistently better than a human in the same situation. So instead, the interrogator might be asked to assess whether one agent is less moral than the other. If the machine is not reported as responding less morally than the human, it will have passed the test. This test is called the ‘comparative MTT’"
The rules may have to be tweaked a bit more, but it sounds like something that might get various AI students or wannabe AI programmers interested in morality.
This may have some value, but probably not towards actually making AI more moral/friendly on average. Conversing about morality can demonstrate knowledge of morality, but does little to demonstrate evidence of being moral/friendly. Example: a psychopath would not necessarily have any difficulty passing this Moral Turing Test.
It looks as though lukeprog has finished his series on how to purchase AI risk reduction. But the ideas lukeprog shares are not the only available strategies. Can Less Wrong come up with more?
A summary of recommendations from Exploring the Idea Space Efficiently:
If you're strictly a lurker, you can send your best ideas to lukeprog anonymously using his feedback box. Or send them to me anonymously using my feedback box so I can post them here and get all your karma.
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