Discovering The Foundations Of A Universal System of Ethics As A

Road To Safe Artificial Intelligence

Mark R. Waser

Inspiration

• Current Culture/Movies (Terminator, I Robot)• Eliezer Yudkowsky/SIAI (Friendly AI)• Steve Omohundro (Basic AI Drives)• Hugo de Garis (The Artilect War)

The Goal

• Simple,

• Safe,

• Stable,

• Self-Correcting, and

• Sensitive to current human thinking, intuitions, and feelings

A universal ethical system that follows the 5 S’s

Points of Departure

• Current Culture/Movies (solely for excitement)• Eliezer Yudkowsky/SIAI (wrong argument)

– Architecture vs. Behavior

– Fails S1, S4, and (for many people) S5

• Steve Omohundro (correct but fell short)• Hugo de Garis (extrapolated the wrong thing)

Omohundro’s Basic AI Drives

• Derived from micro-economic theory & logic• Tendencies which will be present in goal-driven,

self-improving systems unless counteracted• Include desires for self-improvement, rationality,

utility-function preservation, self-protection, and the effective acquisition and use of resources

• “Without explicit goals to the contrary, AIs are likely to behave like human sociopaths in their pursuit of resources.”

Rebuttal

Any sufficiently advanced intelligence (i.e. one with adequate foresight) is guaranteed to realize and take into account the fact that not asking for help and not being concerned about others will generally only work for a brief period of time before ‘the villagers start gathering pitchforks and torches.’

Fundamental Claim I

Acting ethically is an attractor in the state space of intelligent behavior for

goal-driven systems

(if for no other reason than because others will ensure that acting unethically will end up being

counterproductive to your goals)

James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense

The real questions about human behaviors are not why we are so bad but . . . . “how and why most of us, most of the time, restrain our basic appetites for food, status, and sex within legal limits, and expect others to do the same.”

In fact, we are generally good even in situations where social constraints do not apply.

Axelrod & the Prisoner’s Dilemma

• Open-ended series of interaction among peers

• Winning strategies are all nice, retaliatory, forgiving (i.e. selfish individuals for their own selfish good should be nice and forgiving)

• Applicability of the durably iterated Prisoner’s dilemma is much less restricted than it may first appear

• Results were extended with biologist William Hamilton to draw numerous conclusions about biological cooperation in terms of when, why, and how it does and does not appear

In nature, almost without fail, . . .• Cooperation (escalating to altruism) appears

to the extent that the cognitive machinery exists to support it– Blue Jays (Stephens, McLinn, & Stevens)– Unrelated Cotton-Top Tamarins (Hauser, et al)

• The more intelligent a species is, the more social it is– Humans are obligatorily gregarious (de Waal)

Self-Interest vs. Ethics

• Higher personal utility (in the short term)

• More options• Less restrictions

• Higher global utility• Less risk (if caught)• Lower cognitive cost

(fewer options, no need to track lies, etc.)

• Assistance & protection when needed/desired

Morals & Conscious Logical Reasoning

• Moral judgments are not products of, based upon, or even correctly retrievable by conscious reasoning (Hauser)– Allows a better chance of “talking your way out” of a defection

• The unconscious and emotions can seriously bias the evaluation of moral dilemmas

• The deliberation-without-attention effect (Dijksterhuis) shows the limits of the conscious mind in complex choices

• Abandonment of the concept of lifetime development of universal logical moral reasoning (Piaget/Kohlberg/Gilligan)

Linguistic Analogy

• Both language and the moral sense are an innate faculty with operative principles that cannot be consciously expressed (Chomsky, Rawls)

• Cognitive Reuse - It is likely that language/morals were originally mind-internal systems for thought and planning that were later co-opted for their current purposes

• Chomsky developed a set of fundamental questions and distinctions to create a model of how such a cognitive facility can be studied

• Pinker studies cross-cultural invariants in language; Hauser is doing the same for morality

Top-down design – Take I

Man: Ethics is that which is determined and more importantly enforced by society

Machine: So . . . . Why shouldn’t I just harvest you?

Man: Because there might be someone larger than you out there who knows that how you treat me is how you’ll attempt to treat them when you can get away with it.

Top-down design – Take II

Man: Ethical behavior is that which is good for you.

Machine: So . . . . Why shouldn’t I just harvest you?

Man: Because we can form a long-term mutual relationship that will, in the end, dwarf the utility of simply harvesting me now.

Fundamental Claim II

Ethical behavior is simply that behavior which promotes

healthy relationships

(Since healthy relationships are always better than the alternative)

The Relationship View of Ethics

• The ethics of an action is based solely on whether or not it is a defection from the relationship

• Since relationships are based upon perceived rather than actual utility, ethics are also judged that way with each entity judging their own utility– Makes ethics both culture- and context-specific

• Codified relationships are known as “contracts” (or interface specifications for CS majors )

• Relational commitment is what makes loyalty an ethical duty and leads to Singer’s circles of ethics

Fairness

• Refusing to exhibit fair behavior is a relationship defection and an ethical violation

• If you can justify an action to the entities involved, it is a fair and ethical action PROVIDED informed consent and “no force, no fraud”

• An entity may not disagree with reasons that it uses to justify its own behavior

Avoiding Selfishness

• Thomas Scanlon (a “contractualist”) tries to avoid selfishness in personal relationships by appealing to those “motivated to reach agreement” and “reasonable disagreement”

• John Rawls does the same in A Theory of Justice by using the “veil of ignorance” and “original position” to extend the moral sense of fairness to liberty and justice in society (and recognizing this as a descendant of Locke’s social contract)

Scale Invariance• Allows for reframing where our moral sense is not

well-evolved to handle relationships with larger entities– Self-to-country (taxes, tragedy of the commons); country-to-self

(equity, non-interference, taxes); country-to-country (trade barriers, non-interference, refusal to negotiate, terrorism)

• Overrides the “contact principle” and incorrect sympathy for defectors

• Line between an individual and a group will become blurred with machine intelligences and other future technologies

Reprise

• Simple,

• Safe,

• Stable,

• Self-Correcting, and

• Sensitive to current human thinking, intuitions, and feelings

• Scale-Invariant

Preparing for take-off

• As ye sow, so shall ye reap (so we really want to clean up our act before then)

• The bad news – there’s an awful lot of room for transition trauma to the first world given the conditions imposed on the third world

• The good news – most enlightened individuals seem to want to change the world by education and agreement rather than by force

Next . . . .

Implementing Ethics As Part Of An Autogenous Attentional

General Intelligence Architecture

Copies of this powerpoint available from MWaser@BooksIntl.com