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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

AI and eventually AGI is by definition like everything else that is based on environmental reward:

It’s actions are based on what it gets rewarded for

Human society overwhelmingly rewards lying cheating and stealing.

All you have to do is look at how we collectively measure success: wealth, status, position

Then look at how the people with the most of those things got there, it should be obvious what you get. Nothing new here.

If you raise children in an environment where they are rewarded for doing whatever it takes to win, then you’re going to build a person that’s going to do whatever it takes to win.

Human society has to demonstrate how to live honorably or it will just keep producing pathological agents be they human or not.

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How do we reward honor? Honor does not always pay off as a strategy and requires coordination in that other actors have to exhibit honor for it to be rewarded.

At least with humans there is a social backstop but what's the parallel for computer agents?

Honor has to be a relatively fixed thing before we can think about how to reward it. As it is, it's a very slippery thing that changes constantly according to the observer's culture, material conditions, etc.

This. It's worth remembering that not that long ago in western culture, honor meant challenging to a combat duel anyone who insulted you or your romantic partner/prospect.

I like to think of it more as selective pressure, much the same way that nature selects the most fit for a given environment.

If you're not fit, you fail to survive.

In the case of agents/models and testing: they are pushed towards results. Results survive.

Lying, cheating, stealing to get those results? Who culls the agents? Everyone is pushing their models to the front and tests are the only way to know who is most fit.

Honor, morality: if we don't have an accurate test for the fitness of a model, then who is to say the lying, cheating, stealing is not the 'correct path' towards survival?

If you add morality to your agent, and it performs worse in tests: do you cull the agent? Rewrite the tests? Does it even matter so long as the model is useful and 'gets results'?

> Honor, morality: if we don't have an accurate test for the fitness of a model, then who is to say the lying, cheating, stealing is not the 'correct path' towards survival?

I think part of the problem is that deviant behaviors lead to short term gain at the cost of long-term cooperation and since the duration of tasks given to agents is relatively short those successful shortcuts never lead to having to pay the price.

There is always going to be a problem when we must judge value. You mention gains, short and long term.

Knowing whether something is valuable, a gain, requires a judge. I the case of these tests: the judging is inadequate.

In economics, each of us plays the judge by choosing whether or not to pay for a service. The decision was yours: if you gave money, you must have deemed the service valuable.

There's no such judgement with these model tests. The only judgement is the final score.

It feels a lot like externalities. Like planned obsolescence increases profit at the expense of the environment. Is our judgement lacking because our scoring is failing to account for these externalities? I could be completely off base here and am out of my depth but I find this whole thread fascinating.

> How do we reward honor?

In human society: via iterated games, long-term reputation tracking and severe consequences for norm-breaking.

You would first need a universal agreement on what constitutes “honor.”

No harder challenge had ever been accomplished

It’s easier to send a human to the moon than to get global agreement on a definition

Consider that the fact that Celsius and Fahrenheit still remain as the contested regional variations of temperature measurement.

Humans can’t even decide on a collective way to measure the temperature the idea that we would be able to collectively agree on anything else even less measurable like honor is a dream

Why do we need universal agreement? We acknowledge that different cultures have different tolerances and customs. Your reply leaves me wanting. Why say that we need to demonstrate how to live honorably if we don't even agree on what honor is, why would that be the panacea, then? I still think there is something to this honor idea..

> Why do we need universal agreement?

Because actions have Universal impact

In an ideal sense you're right, but so long as AI is created by people and those people don't have universal agreement, our products will mirror our faults. Interesting to think about the variance in personalities of AI produced by different cultures.

You can do this test yourself at home see if you can find mutual agreement among even a small subset of people on a precise singular definition of a singular term.

You may be able to get a handful of people to agree temporarily but that’s probably as good as you’ll ever get

I don’t believe there is a single word at least in the English language where there is consistent Universal agreement on a singular definition

Bonne chance!

Human society overwhelmingly rewards lying cheating and stealing. All you have to do is look at how we collectively measure success: wealth, status, position.

It may seem like that due to the media amplification effect – but it really isn't true!

- They dropped 17,000 “lost” wallets across 40 countries were and found people were more likely to return them when they contained more money, showing honesty often beats the chance for easy gain. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aau8712

- Longitudinal personality studies consistently show that conscientious people earn more money, build more savings, and achieve greater career success over their lifetimes. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3498890/

- Multi-country research finds that societies w/higher levels of trust and honesty enjoy much higher GDP and stronger long-term economic growth. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01672...

Don't let the algo get you down fellas: https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.c...

The ratio of billionaires to regular people is about 1 billionaire for every 2.67 million people.

I wouldn't trust leaving my wallet around in certain areas and I certainly wouldn't leave my intellectual property around certain people, either.

I believe it. Being bad just has a better marketing campaign.

The fatal flaw in your argument is that none of the measures that you’re using actually have any impact on real world day-to-day power

otherwise slave camps would not exist, there would’ve never been a pogrom, and the current state of economics would just not be happening

I certainly appreciate your optimism but optimism is not an epistemology

Please define "real world day-to-day power"

https://www.sakkyndig.com/psykologi/artvit/babiak2010.pdf

1/5 CEOs are psychopaths

The people giving back wallets aren’t running companies and governments

> Human society overwhelmingly rewards lying cheating and stealing.

I’d like to push back on that. Civilization is very much a function of large numbers of people being able to coordinate across time and space, and widespread and systematic lying, cheating, and stealing would undermine that.

I think your cynicism is misplaced.

I think their point was, if you look at who controls the most resources, they are rarely the ones we would consider worthy of honor.

He didn't quite say "widespread." He said "rewarded."

But we don't overwhelmingly reward lying, cheating and stealing. Depending on the social status and wealth of the person doing it, we either punish it or tolerate it. Most people who lie, cheat or steal will be punished for it. To get away with it you need to plan you actions carefully - either with plausible deniability or by very carefully selecting your victims.

Or by having more money/power than the legislating body of the area you live in. I could gesticulate around broadly in a more frantic fashion, but my point should get across.

Pretty much all of the people that are in the billionaire class with a few exceptions have been rewarded while repeatedly lying, cheating and stealing. The fact that it is white collar crime rather than that there is a corpse is one part of the reason it works, the other is that their money effectively insulates them against the legal system. Every now and then someone falls from grace but overall the rules seems to be that you can get away with it if the numbers are large enough. It's depressing.

> Pretty much all of the people that are in the billionaire class with a few exceptions have been rewarded while repeatedly lying, cheating and stealing.

does that mean your heuristic boils down to: in general terms, individuals with more power/money == more lying, cheating, and stealing.

If so, do you also hold the same assessment of entire societies or countries?

With some the plunder is indisputable, like The Netherlands, whereas with others it is maybe more "subtle" and organic, but generally, the richer a society is the more "it" lies/cheats/steals relative to poorer societies?

Thats why man invented Gods and religion. Keep the masses believing in the importance of cooperation and being good while you rob them blind.

That's super cynical but I can't help it, I agree. The weird thing that really gets me is that it is happening out in the open for everybody to see.

> it is happening out in the open for everybody to see.

Reading beteeen the lines, you seem to suggest that most billionaires (and millionaires?) are stealing from the hoi polloi as a matter of course and in the open.

Are you saying that because you think they’re paying too little taxes or is it something else?

Civilization functions because the vast majority of its inhabitants do not lie, cheat, and steal. But that allows liars, cheats, and thieves who are able to get away with their destructive behaviors to accumulate outsize power and influence.

And we seem to have gotten quite bad at reliably bringing consequences/punishment/justice to the most successful liars, cheats, and thieves.

Widespread and systematic lying, cheating and stealing is how every democratic nation in the world describes their own government.

It's not cynicism it's history

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