Is there no room for ethics outside of the law? It is not illegal to tell a lie or make a child cry, but AI should understand that those actions conflict with human preferences. Work on imbuing ethical understanding in AI systems therefore seems valuable.
There is definitely room for ethics outside of the law. When increasingly autonomous systems are navigating the world, it is important for AI to attempt to understand (or at least try to predict) moral judgements of humans encountered.
However, imbuing an understanding of an ethical framework for an AI to implement is more of a human-AI alignment solution, rather than a society-AI alignment solution.
The alignment problem is most often described (usually implicitly) with respect to the alignment of one AI system with one human, or a small subset of humans. It is more challenging to expand the scope of the AI’s analysis beyond a small set of humans and ascribe societal value to action-state pairs. Society-AI alignment requires us to move beyond “private contracts” between a human and her AI system and into the realm of public law to explicitly address inter-agent conflicts and policies designed to ameliorate externalities and solve massively multi-agent coordination and cooperation dilemmas.
We can use ethics to better align AI with its human principal by imbuing the ethical framework that the human principal chooses into the AI. But choosing one out of the infinite possible ethical theories (or an ensemble of theories) and “uploading” that into an AI does not work for a society-AI alignment solution because we have no means of deciding—across all the humans that will be affected by the resolution of the inter-agent conflicts and the externality reduction actions taken—which ethical framework to imbue in the AI. When attempting to align multiple humans with one or more AI system, we would need the equivalent of an elected “council on AI ethics” where every affected human is bought in and will respect the outcome.
In sum, imbuing an understanding of an ethical framework for an AI should definitely be pursued as part of human-AI alignment, but it is not an even remotely practical possibility for society-AI alignment.
There is definitely room for ethics outside of the law. When increasingly autonomous systems are navigating the world, it is important for AI to attempt to understand (or at least try to predict) moral judgements of humans encountered.
However, imbuing an understanding of an ethical framework for an AI to implement is more of a human-AI alignment solution, rather than a society-AI alignment solution.
The alignment problem is most often described (usually implicitly) with respect to the alignment of one AI system with one human, or a small subset of humans. It is more challenging to expand the scope of the AI’s analysis beyond a small set of humans and ascribe societal value to action-state pairs. Society-AI alignment requires us to move beyond “private contracts” between a human and her AI system and into the realm of public law to explicitly address inter-agent conflicts and policies designed to ameliorate externalities and solve massively multi-agent coordination and cooperation dilemmas.
We can use ethics to better align AI with its human principal by imbuing the ethical framework that the human principal chooses into the AI. But choosing one out of the infinite possible ethical theories (or an ensemble of theories) and “uploading” that into an AI does not work for a society-AI alignment solution because we have no means of deciding—across all the humans that will be affected by the resolution of the inter-agent conflicts and the externality reduction actions taken—which ethical framework to imbue in the AI. When attempting to align multiple humans with one or more AI system, we would need the equivalent of an elected “council on AI ethics” where every affected human is bought in and will respect the outcome.
In sum, imbuing an understanding of an ethical framework for an AI should definitely be pursued as part of human-AI alignment, but it is not an even remotely practical possibility for society-AI alignment.