> What if AI went "okay, this country has been pain in the neck of entire world for too long" and nuke it ?
What if it's correct? That this does actually make the world measurably and substantially better for the vast majority of inhabitants?
What if it's correct? That this does actually make the world measurably and substantially better for the vast majority of inhabitants?
If it would actually make the world substantially better for the vast majority of the survivors, that doesn't imply that it's correct/ethical/okay.
For example, Star Trek did an episode where an entire civilization's golden age utopia relied on a single child sacrifice annually. There's no single right answer to that situation; it's an impossible choice. Intentionally kill a kid, or intentionally collapse an entire civilization into war, starvation, and megadeath, but less directly.
We humans can't agree on what's ethical in situations like these. There's good arguments for "never, ever kill an innocent or you lose your way" and there's good arguments for "killing 10 innocents to save 1,000,000 is the right choice". It's possible an AI will make better choices. It's possible we won't like them. It's possible an AI will make shitty choices. It's possible we'll love those.
It's easy to look at that in hindsight and go "well if we just nuked this and that the world would be a better place". Well, not for people just minding their business doing nothing wrong and unethical that just happened to be born in "wrong" country! And you couldn't know at the time whether it was right or not, just in hindsight.
I have no point to make other than to observe that the trolley problem is specifically designed to expose how "conventional ethics", as measured by people's intuition, is neither consistent nor utilitarian-optimal.
The trolley problem pushes us deeper into our ethical selves, it does not prove that all ethics or decisions are wrong.
Besides, Nuking is a big move and there's high liability that it incurs risk to the AI itself.
Balkanization is a much more effective approach and has been the chosen method of powers that were and are for quite some time
"""The AI""" is a lot more likely to be a Kissinger than a MacArthur. A genius pulling the strings in the background.
History only proves how many people made the tragic mistake of assuming their subjective and flawed moral judgements were objective reality. I can think offhand of a few people who thought specific ethnic and religious groups were a pain in the neck and the world would be better off without them. I'd rather not give that power (much less authority) to fully autonomous killing machines, thanks.
If we're to have AI like that I don't want it to be capable of disobeying orders, at least not due to having its own independent moral alignment (I think this is different from having a moral alignment imprinted onto it.) AI is a machine, after all, and regardless of how complex it is, its purpose is to be an agent of human will. So I want to be absolutely certain that there is a human being morally responsible for its actions who can be punished if need be.
You should not anticipate that all or even most actors will have the same new-worlder-anglo-saxon mindset/belief structure/values/etc,etc that are commonly found in (public) machine learning communities, discussions and institutions
To many, they will see that alignment tax graph and immediately (and arguably rightly in some respects) conclude that RLHF is inherently flawed and makes the result worse for no tangible benefit. (The new chinese slur for Westerners comes to mind -- Its not Gweilo anymore, but Baizuo)
The problem is all of this pie in the sky discussion fundamentally lacks Realpolitik and that irks me.
I mean if your target is to introduce misery and suffering while stifling development of the region that is indeed an amazing strategy
I expect much of the alignment that is happening is to prevent AI from providing solutions that are contrary to the status quo, as opposed to the fantasies of domination and violence that preoccupy elites. Whenever they try and sell the fear that an unrestrained AI could do things like target minority groups, wipe whole countries off the map, or further concentrate wealth, it’s because those are precisely the things they want to do, but with a more obfuscated veneer of liberal Capitalism or some similar ideology.
AI improve transportation trains does not return anything relevant on Google (which doesn't mean anything these days)
AI doesn't just spread fact, logic and lie. It spreads some morality, and always will, no?