A few weeks back I talked about ethics in my journal - particularly its skewed interest in difficult ethics problems rather than the real problems that we face - most require little ethics. The last post to date in that journal is very interesting. It's titled "Ethics is easy, it's justice that's elusive":
[istartedi:]
Ethics is easy. We know there are unethical people, and we know that the people who are charged with reigning them in are also unethical. Money is an easy target, but those targeting it are equally unethical, so dismantling capitalism isn't the answer because unethical people will just take their greed off the balance sheet and stuff it in to warehouses and gulags.
If ethics were society's most pressing problem, we'd be having a hard time finding things that are wrong. We're nowhere near running out of moral failures. Would that we could power the grid with them. Maybe we can, but somebody got paid to say otherwise.
My take is that bolded part is a valuable rule of thumb for telling us when we need to work on ethics rather than moral failures.
Moving on, the latest ethical drama is the present generation of chatbot AI which is presented as some ridiculous threat: helping students create fake papers, criminals plot crimes, scamsters scam, the insane commit suicide, and the PHB be idiots (to name a few recent concerns). No serious moral failures have come up. These are all things that could be a problem, maybe, and when they're illegal or against rules, would stay that way.
Meanwhile we're up to our eyeballs in all kinds of crimes, scams, frauds, and villainy that just isn't that hard to sort out ethically - and certainly not AI-based. We don't have a problem finding things that are wrong. That tells me that we have much bigger ethical problems than AI. And looks to me like how we address that doesn't change or improve no matter what we do to AI research.
So when I see a petition like the letter in AnonTechie's journal that demands a six month pause in AI development globally, I am exasperated. If we really followed through on that letter fully and honestly, how would we have progressed even a little on the problem? We still wouldn't have or understand advanced AI. We still wouldn't have any idea how to fix its problems. We would have just wasted six months of valuable research time and peoples' lives and be back to square one - making the case for yet another six month delay because nothing changed.
Edit: Is it time yet for a Trump update journal? Seems there's several active court cases surrounding him now.
Another failing of ethics
My take is that bolded part is a valuable rule of thumb for telling us when we need to work on ethics rather than moral failures.
Moving on, the latest ethical drama is the present generation of chatbot AI which is presented as some ridiculous threat: helping students create fake papers, criminals plot crimes, scamsters scam, the insane commit suicide, and the PHB be idiots (to name a few recent concerns). No serious moral failures have come up. These are all things that could be a problem, maybe, and when they're illegal or against rules, would stay that way.
Meanwhile we're up to our eyeballs in all kinds of crimes, scams, frauds, and villainy that just isn't that hard to sort out ethically - and certainly not AI-based. We don't have a problem finding things that are wrong. That tells me that we have much bigger ethical problems than AI. And looks to me like how we address that doesn't change or improve no matter what we do to AI research.
So when I see a petition like the letter in AnonTechie's journal that demands a six month pause in AI development globally, I am exasperated. If we really followed through on that letter fully and honestly, how would we have progressed even a little on the problem? We still wouldn't have or understand advanced AI. We still wouldn't have any idea how to fix its problems. We would have just wasted six months of valuable research time and peoples' lives and be back to square one - making the case for yet another six month delay because nothing changed.
Edit: Is it time yet for a Trump update journal? Seems there's several active court cases surrounding him now.
Post Comment