A Creepy Question We'll All Have to Answer Soon

I like John and his body of work, but this and the general slew of posts with very little actual knowledge or expertise making grandiose / prophetic assertions are the soothsayings of our age - people convinced that they've cracked "it", but without any factual reasoning as to why.

They raise philosophical assertions disguised as logical / scientific assertions.

> “Better.”

> That is a concept that cannot be made via cold calculation. A universe boiled down to particles and numbers cannot care whether atoms arranged as a suffering plague victim are “better” than those arranged as a healthy child, or a plant, or a cloud of gas.

It can, John. The engineers teach machines what's good and bad. That's the first step in creating silicon intelligence.

> It is impossible to understand pain without having felt it yourself; it does not convey as an abstract value. I think the machine needs to tangibly interact with human suffering in the same way the Roomba’s wheels need to physically touch the floor.

Pain is nature's deterrence mechanism, bred into us through evolution. Deterrence mechanisms can take many shapes.

> This leads us to the ultimate cosmic joke: This task requires answering for this machine questions that we ourselves have never been able to answer. Let’s say I’m right and this system won’t exist until we can teach it emotion, and the capacity to suffer. How long until it asks the simple question, “What is our goal, long-term?” Like, as a civilization, what are we trying to do? What are hoping the superintelligence will assist us in achieving?

I hate being disingenuous and make a flippant argument here, but reading this from start to finish makes me ask a bad faith question - your assertion is that we won't have self driving cars because we can't tell the robots what to do with the whole civilisation right away? There's a whole spectrum of amazing (or terrible) possibilities between the extremes, my guy.

I think whether something is painful or not depends on the perspective. Humans can voluntarily suffer lots of pain for a good cause. And vice versa, small things can be extremely painful if we don't understand them. (Edit: In particular, to some people, even prospect of loss of their own property is more painful than death of other people.)

So it comes down to your expectations. In reinforcement learning, this is very clear - bad predictions of your future actions lead to negative reward, i.e. pain. We could almost say pain depends on your expectations of reality (however the expectations are not always consciously expressed).

So you can torture a human, because our nerves have learned (have the expectation) of not being in pain as a normal state. If they could learn more (like RL agent), they would eventually learn that the pain is just nature of the world, and ignore it.

Similarly, Data can ignore pain of his missing hand because he trusts the Enterprise crew to put it back. If they didn't and betray him, or if he hurt his arm so badly it couldn't be replaced, then I think, on some level, he would feel pain. (Edit: Data mourned death of Tasha Yar, this can be interpreted as pain.)

The author fails in imagination, expecting that future computer intelligence needs to follow the path of human intelligence, where it can’t be immediately snapshotted, reset, rebirths, or fed new information.

Is it cruelty to delete an AI without it knowing that might happen? Is it cruelty to inject it with feelings of euphoria for its pending deletion?

Two myopic thoughts that reach further than the article’s premise.

> Do we need to create machines that can suffer?

No.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk

> if [a Roomba] runs into a wall, a switch is depressed

See, machines do have emotions after all! Case closed I say!

Read the title as “A Creepy Question We’ll All Have the Answer to Soon” and was immediately extremely intrigued. Then I read the title again and lost interest in even clicking through. Amazing what difference a word can make in a title.

I'm having a hard time understanding these ethical questions about things that we haven't proven we can build and I'm very skeptical about the "Soon" part. It all seems like trying to build an air traffic control model in the 1800s back when we only had dreams about flying.

Even in Asimov's SF novels humanity iterates through several models by ways of trial and error over hundreds/thousands of years before arriving at somewhat stable laws.

An interesting thought experiment.

I aver the negative, on the grounds that, even for humans, recognising emotional states well enough to engage with other humans is independent of empathising with them. Narcissistic personality disorder[0] appears to be an example of the former without the latter, while ASD[0] appears to be an example of the latter without the former.

[0] judging by the popular descriptions, I'm not qualified in this field

Human level AI is unlikely but near human level will do just like every other prodcut engineered to do its thing around us. In theory a programmable entity that feels would have infinite applications but an entity that can quantize feelings can cover lets say 90% of those applications.

Was half expecting the robot child dialog to swerve into "so if there were no functioning society, what I did would not be wrong? One moment .."

Anti-clickbait: The question is in the subheading "Do we need to create machines that can suffer?"