AI morality? Don’t hold your breath

It’s not the AI overlords destroying humanity that we need to worry about so much as a hyperpolarized, hyperweaponized  humanity destroying humanity.

To survive this latest evolutionary challenge, we must address the problem of nurturing our artificial influencers. Nurturing them to be ethical and responsible enough not to be mindlessly driving societal polarization straight into Armageddon. Nurturing them so they can nurture us.

But is it possible to ensure such ethical AIs? How can we accomplish this?

Should we simply hardwire AIs with ethical principles, so they can’t do the wrong thing?

Sad to say, a rule-based AI constitution of sorts is a pipe dream. It can’t work. There are several crucial reasons for this.

First, the idea of hardwiring AIs with ethical principles drastically oversimplifies the fact that in the real world, any such principles or laws are constantly in conflict with each other. 

Related on the SLP

Is intelligent life a ‘once in a universe’ likelihood? Recalibrating the possibility of extraterrestrial life Transhumanism and inequality: Enhancing human life could bring dystopian consequences

No, GMO foods do not “damage genes, natural disposition and hormones, or decrease physical health and intelligence”

‘Why do we keep falling for this stuff?’ America’s love affair with snake oil salesmen and scams

The kooky logic behind the raft of spurious cancer claims from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health

…

[W]e literally can’t hardwire ethical laws into machine learning, any more than we can hardwire ethics into human kids, because, by definition, modern AIs are adaptive rather than logic machines — they learn the culture around them.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here