I guess it depends on how you define “value”. I have definitely changed my stance towards many things in my lifetime, not because I was under social pressure or unaware of it before, but because I changed my mind. I didn’t want this change, it just happened, because someone convinced me, or because I spent more time thinking about things, or because of reading a book, etc. Sometimes I felt like a fool afterward, having believed in stupid things. If you reduce the term “value” to “doing good things”, then maybe it hasn’t changed. But what “good things” means did change a lot for me, and I don’t see this as a bad thing.
I might be misunderstanding- isn’t this what the question was? Whether we should want (/be willing to) change our values?
Sometimes I felt like a fool afterward, having believed in stupid things
The problem with this is: If I change your value system in any direction, the hypnotized “you” will always believe that the intervention was positive. If I hypnotized you to believe that being carnivorous was more moral by changing your underlying value system to value animal suffering, then that version of you would view the current version of yourself as foolish and immoral.
There are essentially two different beings: carnivorous-Karl, and vegan-Karl. But only one of you can exist, since there is only one Karl-brain. If you are currently vegan-Karl, then you wish to remain vegan-Karl, since vegan-Karl’s existence means that your vegan values get to shape the world. Conversely, if you are currently carnivorous-Karl, then you wish to remain carnivorous-Karl for the same reasons.
Say I use hypnosis to change vegan-Karl into carnivorous-Karl. Then the resulting carnivorous-Karl would be happy he exists and view the previous version vegan-Karl as an immoral fool. Despite this, vegan-Karl still doesn’t want to become carnivorous-Karl- even though he knows that he would retrospectively endorse the decision if he made it!
In principle, I agree with your logic: If I have value X, I don’t want to change that to Y. However, values like “veganism” are not isolated. It may be that I have a system of values [A...X], and changing X to Y would actually fit better with the other values, or more or less the same. Then I wouldn’t object that change. I may not be aware of this in advance, though. This is were learning comes into play: I may discover facts about the world that make me realize that Y fits better into my set of values than X. So vegan Karl may be a better fit to my other set of values than carnivorous Karl. In this way, the whole set of values may change over time, up to the point where they significantly differ from the original set (I feel like this happened to me in my life, and I think it is good).
However, I realize that I’m not really good at arguing about this—I don’t have a fleshed-out “theory of values”. And that wasn’t really the point of my post. I just wanted to point out that our values may be changed by an AI, and that it may not necessarily be bad, but could also lead to an existential catastrophe—at least from today’s point of view.
I guess it depends on how you define “value”. I have definitely changed my stance towards many things in my lifetime, not because I was under social pressure or unaware of it before, but because I changed my mind. I didn’t want this change, it just happened, because someone convinced me, or because I spent more time thinking about things, or because of reading a book, etc. Sometimes I felt like a fool afterward, having believed in stupid things. If you reduce the term “value” to “doing good things”, then maybe it hasn’t changed. But what “good things” means did change a lot for me, and I don’t see this as a bad thing.
I might be misunderstanding- isn’t this what the question was? Whether we should want (/be willing to) change our values?
The problem with this is: If I change your value system in any direction, the hypnotized “you” will always believe that the intervention was positive. If I hypnotized you to believe that being carnivorous was more moral by changing your underlying value system to value animal suffering, then that version of you would view the current version of yourself as foolish and immoral.
There are essentially two different beings: carnivorous-Karl, and vegan-Karl. But only one of you can exist, since there is only one Karl-brain. If you are currently vegan-Karl, then you wish to remain vegan-Karl, since vegan-Karl’s existence means that your vegan values get to shape the world. Conversely, if you are currently carnivorous-Karl, then you wish to remain carnivorous-Karl for the same reasons.
Say I use hypnosis to change vegan-Karl into carnivorous-Karl. Then the resulting carnivorous-Karl would be happy he exists and view the previous version vegan-Karl as an immoral fool. Despite this, vegan-Karl still doesn’t want to become carnivorous-Karl- even though he knows that he would retrospectively endorse the decision if he made it!
In principle, I agree with your logic: If I have value X, I don’t want to change that to Y. However, values like “veganism” are not isolated. It may be that I have a system of values [A...X], and changing X to Y would actually fit better with the other values, or more or less the same. Then I wouldn’t object that change. I may not be aware of this in advance, though. This is were learning comes into play: I may discover facts about the world that make me realize that Y fits better into my set of values than X. So vegan Karl may be a better fit to my other set of values than carnivorous Karl. In this way, the whole set of values may change over time, up to the point where they significantly differ from the original set (I feel like this happened to me in my life, and I think it is good).
However, I realize that I’m not really good at arguing about this—I don’t have a fleshed-out “theory of values”. And that wasn’t really the point of my post. I just wanted to point out that our values may be changed by an AI, and that it may not necessarily be bad, but could also lead to an existential catastrophe—at least from today’s point of view.