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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

> Yes, proper intellect generates ethics ("an" ethical stance, output of the preceding intellectual effort). It requires that adequate level of ability and effort and reflection though to reach specific ethical milestones and adherence.

If this was true, why are the history books littered with so many evil people who gained power?

This isn't a rhetorical question, by the way: If you can prove that being smart actually does necessarily come with ethics despite that observation, that solves a whole category of doom scenarios.

(Not all doom scenarios, because we still have the "what if AI is only a smart as those specific evil people" or heck, "what if AI is only as smart as cancer, killing its host" scenarios; but it helps a lot for the foom-then-doom cases).

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> why are the history books littered with so many evil people who gained power

That they gained power or not is as-if irrelevant: the amount of intelligence that grants successful agency is not above the threshold of ethics - on the contrary, a psychotic agent reaches goals with less constraints.

If they were evil under some judgement of level l, they simply did not reach that judgement. It's what I was saying in the original post. They were not intelligent enough - either in the general ability, or in the specific deliberation.

I don't understand your argument here.

> That they gained power or not is almost irrelevant: the amount of intelligence that grants successful agency is not above the threshold of ethics - on the contrary, a psychotic agent reaches goals with less constraints.

Even if I were to grant your conclusion despite you not arguing it effectively here: this means an AI at the level of Pol Pot or whoever, doesn't know they're evil, but is still smart enough to lead a genocide? How is this supposed to help anyone?

> If they were evil under some judgement of level l, they simply did not reach that judgement. It's what I was saying in the original post. They were not intelligent enough - either in the general ability, or in the specific deliberation.

Or they did reach the judgement and simply don't care about the ethical framework in question. Like, I can easily reach the judgement that my bisexuality is حَرَام (haram, forbidden) under Islamic law, or that doing overtime on a Sunday is forbidden by the Ten Commandments, but I don't care.

(Sorry Ben, possibly a stub now: I am really pressed for time.)

> Pol Pot ... still smart enough to lead a genocide

Yes. What has agent A invested in during formation and during instantial assessement? How much for each? It became proficient in something, lacking something else. You have to invest more to reach the good thresholds. You can see it clearly in people (t-scalar of talents to invest, with D distribution etc).

It is a problem in NNs, because we would have to assess how much resource investment is sufficient, also in the instance decisions.

> simply don't care about the ethical framework in question

In Decision Theory there is no separation between the two (deliberation and framework): you have to balance all the incentives and goals and factors. That framing becomes improper: the decided action will be optimal given the balances of all goals and the placement of the solutions in the territory (the solutions space).

But, also my point: intellect defines the goals and determines the weights.

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