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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34589 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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I don't quite understand how we'd even begin to program a deontological or virtue ethicist AI. We're capable of giving things functions that they try and maximise, and we can call the subject of that function 'utility'. Whatever the flaws or virtues of utilitarianism, it does have the singular advantage of being computable. Compare to a virtue ethicist AI - how on earth do we begin building such a thing?

Even if it would be better, it seems like we're much closer to getting 'AI with a function it seeks to maximise' than we are getting 'AI who desires to fulfill virtues such as honour and charity'.

I agree that having an AI that believed in being virtuous according to human standards would be far, far better than one with a complicated mathematical function we try and map onto human utility and hope it doesn't kill us, but I've seen no reason to think the first is even possible.

We're capable of giving things functions that they try and maximise, and we can call the subject of that function 'utility'

Well, so far we're not capable of this. At best we build something that essentially modifies itself in response to rewards. It's not trying to maximize anything.

Given this, I don't think it's fair to describe current AIs as utilitarian. Their training reward functions were utilitarian, maybe, but it would be pretty easy to create reward functions that align more with virtue ethics.

Their training reward functions were utilitarian, maybe, but it would be pretty easy to create reward functions that align more with virtue ethics.

I am absolutely keen to hear more about this, because everything I know tells me this is a close-to-impossible problem. The notion of 'pretty easy' seems intuitively wrong to me, but if you have any reading to offer on the subject I'd love to go through it.

Well, emphasis on more similar to virtue ethics. All it would take would be to change the reward criteria.

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