Cross-posted from Accelerating Future:
An 'ethical robotics' bit has started hitting the AI news sites today, this time from tech philosopher Bernhard Irrgang at the Dresden University of Technology. As always, I ask, "does this person have a clue?" And from reading his paper, "Ethical Acts in Robotics", the answer is, unfortunately, a firm no.
From the opening:
To consider the question, can Computers/Robots act morally, one must first distinguish between the participant perspective (subjective experience: first person perspective) and the observer perspective (objective experience: third person perspective) in phenomenogical and hermeneutic terms. From the observer (i.e., third person) perspective, Ricoeur's approach of modeling acts (actions) without the subjective action is possible. There it seems the Automatic Machines can act on their own without moral values being assigned to them. Paul Ricoeur thinks about the dialectic of a self-identity (Ipse-Identity) and about the same-identity (Idem-Identity). Based on the philosophy of Rene Descartes ("I think, therefore, I am") Ricoeur refers to the two aspects of personal identity, where these two aspects refer to "I think - I am". This is all that cannot be doubted, according to Descartes. And, the self-executable thoughts in thinking and execution, is a category of existence and a category of thought to be parallel to each other. Thus, the starting point is the question of execution of Thoughts (Denken). According to the failure of a materialistic anthropology we can determine human-beings (Menschen) only by their execution of Thoughts, which is in thereby a execution of "I" at the same time.
More:
For artificial intelligence to become true intelligence, it must become artificial soul and not be limited to a pure mind or pure cognition. In addition, it's necessary to understand that feeling and motivation actually contribute to the increase of intelligence to a considerable degree and that they are possible in the computer.
Opaque, italicized and capitalized philosophical dribble-words, check. Reviews of Descartes' thinking as if we had never heard of it before reading this paper, check. Conception of emotions as a detached mindstuff-object supervening on normal cognition rather than an inevitable product of incremental evolution from pre-intelligent descendents, check. Repudiation of posthumanism in the conclusion, check.
Why is it so hard to make concrete progress on the problem of how to write an intelligent software program that behaves such that we don't regret creating it? A lack of experimental evidence is certainly a contributing factor, but theoretical progress is certainly possible, and we already know of dozens of immediate roadblocks that screw peoples' ideas up before they even get started. Blatant anthropocentrism, unfamilarity with cognitive science, confusing metaphorical statements for ontological statements, mistaking words and phrases for the structure of cognitive content, etc. I could list dozens of common errors that get in the way when we ask the simple question, "how would we build a machine that acts a certain way?"
Over the past six years, I've heard hundreds of proposals for approaches to building intelligent machines that are on humanity's side. Sadly, it remains the case that the only proposals that have any real value are those coming out of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. The problem is certainly not solved, and any solution will likely require the efforts and input of many more geniuses than the number that are currently working at SIAI.
What is Friendly AI? There is a good place to start asking this question, and it can be found on the Singularity Institute's website. However, to make matters simpler, I will post it here. The tagline of this short list of 24 definitions is "looking at the issue of AI morality from enough different angles to at least try and show what the question is":
- Friendly AI is the art of designing and constructing minds that play a positive role in the universe.
- A "Friendly AI" is an AI that takes actions that are, on the whole,
beneficial to humans, humanity, and sentient life; actions that are
benevolent rather than malevolent, nice rather than hostile.
- Friendly AI is the means by which we ensure that transhuman
intelligence in AIs is linked to transhuman morals, altruism, wisdom,
and philosophy.
- A Friendly seed AI is one such that the resulting Singularity is at
least as good as a Singularity sparked by any individual human or
combination of humans.
- Friendliness is a "metawish" - a way of saying to an AI: "When you
grow up, grow into what we would have made you to be, if we were as
smart as you."
- A Friendly AI is an AI that wants to be Friendly - one which, like
Martin Luther King or Gandhi, is altruistic not because someone is
forcing it to be altruistic but because that is the AI's own choice.
Gandhi had the power to stop being altruistic at any time, but chose
not to do so.
- Friendly AI is an attempt to get rid of the concept of "Asimov Laws" (a
science-fictional plot device invented in the 1940s) and replace it
with a serious discipline.
- Friendly AI is an attempt to get rid of the concept of "Asimov Laws"
(external programmatic constraints on an AI) and replace it with a
solution which works even if the AI has unrestricted access to its own
source code.
- Friendly AI is an attempt to get rid of the concept of "Asimov Laws"
(coercive restrictions placed on AIs, by humans, for essentially
selfish purposes) and get past the "us vs. them" attitude that
currently permeates discussion of AI.
- Friendly AI is the set of technical and moral issues involved with
standing, not just in loco parentis, but in loco evolution, to a new
intelligent species.
- Friendly AI is a channel for transferring human morality which obeys
the constraint that each statement communicated, on any matter of fact
or morality, is honestly believed or personally held by the
programmer(s) making the statement.
- Friendly AI is the art of constructing an AI morality such that the
final result is not sensitive to the choice of which particular
programmers built the AI, as long as the programmers had the basic
belief that an AI should try to avoid sensitive dependency on the
choice of initial programmer.
- Friendly AI is a strategy for ensuring that the personal quirks and
philosophical errors of the original programmers don't remain fixed in
the mind of the AI after it grows up.
- A Friendly AI is a mind that, as it grows, grows into whatever a human
upload would grow into as intelligence approached infinity as a limit.
(If it makes a difference, this can be further qualified by specifying
that the human upload starts out with a philosophical commitment to
rationality and altruism, or even that the human upload starts out as a
pure altruist.)
- Friendly AI is a strategy for ensuring that the Singularity transcends
the quirks and errors of whichever technological civilization first
creates self-improving minds (i.e: only two generations ago in the
United States, blacks rode in the back of the bus; we don't know what
deep and shallow mistakes may persist in our contemporary conceptions
of morality).
- A Friendly AI is an AI that is "on the side" of sentient life.
- Friendly AI is the technological pathway required to defend the
integrity of the class of Singularities originally sparked by an AI.
- A Friendly AI is a human-equivalent philosopher.
- Friendly AI is the strategy by which the basic challenge of
constructing an AI morality is transferred over to the AI itself, so
that the problem can be handled or reconsidered by the transhuman
intelligence of an AI that surpasses human intelligence.
- Friendly AI is a way of transferring to a transhuman AI the question "What morality should be given to a transhuman AI?"
- Friendly AI is an attempt to create an AI, which, when it grows into a
transhuman, will be capable of dealing with issues that exhibit
dependency on the philosophical question: "What is good, what is evil,
and how should we be asking this question?"
- Friendly AI is the attempt to describe the complex functional
adaptations underlying metamorality - the forces that influence how
humans think when faced with a choice between alternative moral or
philosophical systems.
- Friendly AI is the attempt to describe the structure of human cognition
about metamorality in sufficient detail to include all structural
properties underlying our intuitive understanding of the metawish "Be
the best AI we could have constructed you to be."
- Friendly AI is the attempt to construct a nonanthropocentric theory of
cognitive processes underlying moral and metamoral reasoning, with
sufficient generality to predict the differential results of different
AI designs.
For more on Friendly AI, see 'Beyond anthropocentrism'.