Many researchers in AI think we should make AI capable of ethical inquiry. We can’t teach it all the ethical rules; that’s impossible. Instead, we should teach it to ethically reason, just as we do children. But my guest thinks this strategy makes a number of controversial assumptions, including how ethics works and what actually is right and wrong.
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Reid Blackman: So Tris I take it that one of the things that people have in their heads or as their goals when they're training up an AI, especially if they're talking about something like AGI is they want to make it sensitive to ethical values. They want to make it a moral agent in some sense, and I take it that one way you might try to do that is to try to get it to be like us.
Try to engage in ethical inquiry to figure out what's morally right and wrong. And if we can do that, then we'll have solved this fear that AI is going to go off and destroy us all. And from what I gather, you think that is a kind of a deeply problematic endeavor for a variety of reasons.
Is that right?
Tristram McPherson: Yeah, that's pretty close. Let me just talk a little bit about where I'm coming from. I'm somebody who spends most of my time thinking about very abstract theoretical questions and the foundations of ethics. And when I think about this issue, one of the first things that strikes me is How many assumptions in the foundations of ethics that you need to make in order for that strategy to go smoothly.
And so I'll just talk about a couple of those assumptions. And then the second thing I'd like to talk about if we get there is I think even if you get all those assumptions in place, we still have some things to worry about that I think are actually really interesting.
For the rest of the conversation, go to the podcast episode wherever you listen to your podcasts:
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Tristram McPherson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Ohio State University. David Plunkett is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Dartmouth College.
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