RE: Consequentialism and big data, the need for intelligent machines to assist with moral decision making
I'm not sure that completely self autonomous AI is even a possibility although I'm aware that many are attempting to prove me wrong and are doing a pretty good job of it so far but in relation to making moral decisions from big data, I would think that the process of making these decisions would be somewhat determined by the information provided in the beginning, i.e the programmers own version of morality. If AI really did become self aware and capable of determining it's own morality, I would be pretty worried.
As for being able to guide us in our own moral decisions by weighing the positive and negative consequences, I think it's quite sad that we've arrived at a point where we need this to be so at all. It must mean we have lost our own ability to communicate with our hearts and souls.
I take your point also that the amount of data required for making any decision with all of the information is too much for any of our brains to cope with but I would add that perhaps we are over-complicating something that was intended to be simple. Do we really need to know everything about everything and will that lead to a happier, healthier, freer society???
Really interesting post mate. Lots to think about.
Hope your day is going well. :)
You are correct that AI has to be trained by the crowd. You are incorrect in thinking "the programmers" have this duty. We are all the trainers as all sources available can be provided as data sources. The knowledge base from which AI can make sense of morality is not provided in centralized fashion by programmers in an ivory tower but ideally in a decentralized collaborative fashion by anyone over the Internet. Think about how Wikipedia for example has become a repository for human knowledge? The same in my opinion can be done for morality because knowledge can be contributed to by global participants.
This is irrelevant science fiction. It is equal to asking when Jesus will return or if God exists. These may happen or may be true but when dealing with morality we have to stick to science in my opinion (avoiding religion) as this is the only way to seriously tackle the problem. An AI which is self aware is like discovering aliens or God exists, but since we have no way to prove self awareness or measure it, it is equal to asking if atoms in a rock are self aware or if the universe itself is self aware, because the rock and the universe also do computation.
What good is transparency if humans get to make just as many mistakes as before? If we are going transparent then we have to reduce our error rate else we immediately look bad. This transparency will create a massive amount of demand for these sorts of AI 'moral calculators' which I speak of. Would you rather have your life destroyed by coordinated shunning if you mess up, or would you rather consult with an AI before doing anything so that you minimize your risk of that as much as possible?
It's not that I'm over complicating but the technology is making life over complicated. The more transparent society becomes the more complicated even the smallest decisions become because the errors are under a magnifying glass. Just because things go more open and transparent it does not mean your peers will not expect perfect decisions from you and will not seek to punish you for the slightest little mistakes.
Consider this, if we are trending toward radical transparency where no one can have privacy or secrets, where everyone knows anything about you, and must make decisions based on this knowledge of you, well don't you want these people to have the maximum ability to make quality decisions off this information? Would you prefer we all know everything about you but rely only on our ignorant biased flawed brains to rank and judge your decisions?
And there is my point, I don't think it is fair to you or to anyone if we are judged by ignorance. I do not think humans are capable of being rational, or fair, or moral, whether these humans are in the position of judge or in the position of being judged. I think if the crowd is going to have unlimited transparency, openness, then it also needs to scale up it's decision making and moral capacity along with this. If this does not happen then it will be a horrific dystopia in my opinion.
I understand this of course and how it is achieved but that suggests that the AI would have autonomous responsibility for determining what is moral and what isn't from the information it is provided with by way of the internet and all of the communication that takes place on it but in my personal opinion, I would say that a lot of what society celebrates on social media and the internet in general is less than moral, to me, so the information would be skewed. Steemit as an example on the surface is a place of morality and decentralised thought but in reality it is no such thing and any information gained by AI from watching the behaviour and reward for that behaviour would surely lead the AI to have a twisted view of what was acceptable behaviour.
I get this as well but forgive me for saying but science and scientists do not have the best track record for making moral decisions. The Manhattan Project and CERN are two examples I could cite where scientists through caution to the wind and made a decision which could have adversely affected the entire population. If there is the possibility of AI becoming self aware then we should give it considerable thought and I would hope decide on a different, less dangerous approach, rather than allowing my own desire to find out to override what for me is a natural instinct to air on the side of caution, especially when the potential dangers are so great.
I have to be honest and say neither but if forced to choose I would have to go for the first option. The second is just too creepy for me. I would rather be guided by my own sense of morality even though I appreciate that this has been confused throughout my life by social influences.
I really appreciate your time mate and hope you can appreciate that I am very ignorant to a lot of factors but I'd like to be more aware myself and develop my own moral compass more so I will definitely be keeping an eye out for more of your posts and am sure I will be encouraged by them to consider things in a different light, which I always enjoy. :)
Cheers @dana-edwards. Have a great day mate.