Thanks

Graham

I wish to enter this discussion and hope that not too many of my thoughts have been offered too many times before! Apols if so.

My background is as a psychologist and innovation facilitator. More recently I have been working with Rita Carter on the notion of Multiplicity, that we all have multiple minds which each have their own memories, motivations and access to skill sets. I know this concept will not be new to AI people as computers have elements of Multiplicity built in.

It seems to me that the desire or need to place conscience in artificially intelligent machines (though I confess I am not entirely sure I know what non-artificially intelligent machines are) that need is based best on an assessment of risk.

I start with the proposition that risk lies in handing power to one thing/person or a small group of things/people such that normal corrections against excess cannot be managed without risk and high cost.

Human history is full of attempts to manage that risk and each of us may have their own view of how successful those attempts have been. So our desire or need to hand conscience over to machines can be put against a more general suggestion that neither machines nor people should be handed such power as to not have it able to be corrected easily by other forces.

In that sense the machine element of the problem does not exist as being different.

Having said that, the attempt to place conscience inside a machine may be very informative in trying to understand how we might do so for human beings also. I am not sure I or other people know how to place conscience inside the mind of another in such a way as to have it rule over decision making.
Many people with the very best of moral upbringing have engaged later in atrocities. We do now how to get people to act morally when they are not tempted by too great a prize or challenged by too great a threat, but after that, well, the jury is surely out.

At the other end there are criminal gangs and terrorist groups who would declare their behaviour in the strongest moral terms. Family/religion is everything.

My third point brings in Multiplicity (see http://www.ritacarter.co.uk for the book) and I think this risk management has lots of connections to Multiplicity as I think the reason why we have multiple selves is to help us manage our thinking and decision making and reduce the risk of over-powerful personas taking actions which are harmful to ourselves or our communities (and of course our genes).

If our high risk decision making has to pass through a parliament of minds (French – Parler), then this is fine whether it is machine or human or, and maybe this is always the best option, human and machine?

As AI gets more powerful there should come a time when we hand one of the keys to decision making to these machines, always ensuring that humans have some keys too and that all are needed for risky decisions. This would have the additional advantage of reducing the risk of relying on the human conscience, which has been at different times and for different peoples a failure and a success.

As a final note, I do think conscience ‘morality’ could be much simpler than we might imagine, and some parts of an understanding of morality may be found in Pirsig’s book, Lila, an enquiry into Morality.

Thanks

Graham Rawlinson
Author of PhD The Significance of Letter Position in Word Recognition, Nottingham University (not Cambridge as was wrongly circulated)

To replace “without real work”, maybe I should have said “with relatively little work”, as you imply above with the phrase “depressingly easy”. That would be accurate, yes?

I only arrived in this community in 2001, so I can’t say for sure whether the ideas you list first appeared from you or Eliezer. Do you have any references to mailing list posts I might be able to look at to settle the issue?