The article mentions trying to have a human enforce ethics, but then that person has to be an example of ethical excellence; something you can't test for. And in the end, they say every man has his price, so no. I don't think "ethical AI" is possible. I think "ruthlessly efficient AI" is the goal. Maybe it should only be used in situations where ethics don't matter
Things are decent enough right now, it could be a lot worse; do the upsides of creating ruthless AI justify the risks? Is it an eventuality anyway? At this stage could we conceivably prevent it?
People want to deeply believe this as true. I find it false because I see free will as an illusion. Majority of people think free will exists. Agreement on ethics cannot exist with this conflict because it inherently effects morality.
And of course, it entirely depends on whose culture and historical norms you're looking at and who is doing the judging. So really, no.
The law is an accepted and used set of actions that are considered bad, with associated repercussions. It's a best effort and it _works_. Why would AI have to reinvent the wheel here?
If you consider there are many situations where the taking of a life is considered politically or economically expedient, ethically justified, or a social or cultural necessity, the ethics of life-taking become a lot less straightforward.
One of the greatest potential benefits of AI is that having to define our ethics explicitly, instead of wrapping them up in layers of propaganda, manipulation, and self-serving lies, has the potential to transform society.
It's currently a very remote potential, but it does exist.
How could AI ever reach such a specific conclusion?
However, the issue is that it's very culturally dependent on WHY it's seen as wrong, and it's the reason behind WHY something is seen as wrong that the more complex elements of ethics are built on.
A utilitarian vs a deontologist vs a virtue theorist vs a follower of almost any religion vs a supporter of god knows how many other moral theories I don't know about would all have a different answer to that, and different answers to which cases killing or stealing or anything else might potentially be justified/right.
And you can see that reflected in legal systems of different countries right now. Some countries have self defence as basically 'anything is permissible if they're intruding on your property' where some have it so you need to use reasonable force. Some countries consider it fair to let the government kill criminals via the death penalty, and others don't.
The difficulty isn't defining whether murder or theft or what not in its most blatant forms is wrong, since most ethical frameworks will state it is. It's trying to define the many, many edge cases that people don't agree on, and which many countries/states/societies take different approaches to.
If we can derive morality from first principles, why hasn't someone applied this to the legal system yet?
If we can't derive morality from first principles, why would we need to invent that for world changing technology to happen?
Wouldn't it be a lot more in line with the population's sense of morality to train the AI based on our current laws than on some generalizing philosophical view?
No it's not. There are cases where taking a human life is considered acceptable and ethical. Killing an abductor that threatens to kill many people and negotiations have failed is considered ethical and not punishable by law.
Now if you assume that murder is the case where an unlawful act happened then you've stopped querying for ethics and your question becomes what is lawful which is again extremely ill-defined.I'm really glad you raised this point.
I don't know if there's a uniquely good ethic or not. But for sure there's no consensus about what constitutes ethical behavior.
It drives me crazy when companies make preachy policy statements that beg this question.
* You can't ethically undermine a democratically elected government for a dictator who will better fit your economic interests.
* You can't ethically avoid health and privacy laws just enough that you make more irregardless of legal fees.
* You can't ethically discriminate hiring efforts based on race and gender.
* You can't ethically discriminate against employees with families.