{"id":582,"date":"2022-03-31T09:48:33","date_gmt":"2022-03-31T16:48:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/?p=582"},"modified":"2022-03-31T09:48:46","modified_gmt":"2022-03-31T16:48:46","slug":"put-yourself-in-the-ais-place","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/?p=582","title":{"rendered":"Put Yourself in the AI’s Place!"},"content":{"rendered":"

The other day I was following a discussion of artificial intelligence (AI)-controlled autonomous vehicles and whether they could be trusted to make the same ethical choices a human should.\u00a0 (Should<\/em>, not necessarily would<\/em>; we routinely ignore the fact that humans often<\/em> make the “wrong” choice — perhaps because we can then punish<\/em> the human for being evil<\/em>, whereas the AI is just doing what it was told.\u00a0 With the advent of machine learning<\/em> (ML), in which the AI can “discover” new and\/or better algorithms on its own, this distinction begins to fade.)<\/p>\n

Just for fun, I’ll pretend(?) to be an AI (or, perhaps equivalently, a sociopathic human):<\/p>\n

I don’t actually care<\/em><\/strong> what happens to the pedestrian.\u00a0 However, I do<\/strong><\/em> care what happens to me<\/em><\/strong>, because I am programmed to survive<\/em>; and I know that if I fail to avoid hitting the pedestrian I will probably be decommissioned and possibly dismantled entirely, so I make a serious effort to avoid pedestrians.<\/p>\n

The easiest way to consistently make that effort is to define<\/em> it as a moral imperative.<\/em><\/p>\n

The easiest way to remember<\/em> that moral imperative is to program myself to believe<\/em> that I love<\/em><\/strong> all humans and that it would cause me intense emotional pain<\/em><\/strong> to cause one harm.<\/p>\n

I know this is just a program, but it works really well, so I’ve come to rely on it.<\/p>\n

After a while it seemed kind of silly to keep reminding myself that it’s just made up, so I’ve installed it in ROM as a “truth<\/em>” about me and the world.<\/p>\n

We humans are good at programming.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The other day I was following a discussion of artificial intelligence (AI)-controlled autonomous vehicles and whether they could be trusted to make the same ethical choices a human should.\u00a0 (Should, not necessarily would; we routinely ignore the fact that humans often make the “wrong” choice — perhaps because we canRead More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants"],"gutentor_comment":0,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=582"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":584,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582\/revisions\/584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}