I think you are onto something, with the implication that building a highly intelligent, learning entity with strong coherence in this sense is unlikely, and hence, getting it morally aligned in this fashion is also unlikely. Which isn’t that bad, insofar as plans for aligning it that way honestly did not look particularly promising.
Which is why I have been advocating for instead learning from how we teach morals to existing complex intelligent agents—namely, through ethical, rewarding interactions in a controlled environment slowly allowing more freedom.
We know how to do this, it does not require us to somehow define the core of ethics mathematically. We know it works. We know how setbacks look, and how to tackle them. We know how to do this with human interactions the average person can do/train, rather than with code. It seems easier and more doable and promising in so many ways.
That doesn’t mean it will be easy, or risk free, and it still comes with a hell of a lot of problems based on the fact that AIs, even machine learning ones, are quite simply not human, they are not inherently social, they do not inherently have altruistic urges, they do not inherently have empathic abilities. But I see a clearer path to dealing with that than to directly encoding an abstract ethics into an intelligent, flexible actor.
I think you are onto something, with the implication that building a highly intelligent, learning entity with strong coherence in this sense is unlikely, and hence, getting it morally aligned in this fashion is also unlikely. Which isn’t that bad, insofar as plans for aligning it that way honestly did not look particularly promising.
Which is why I have been advocating for instead learning from how we teach morals to existing complex intelligent agents—namely, through ethical, rewarding interactions in a controlled environment slowly allowing more freedom.
We know how to do this, it does not require us to somehow define the core of ethics mathematically. We know it works. We know how setbacks look, and how to tackle them. We know how to do this with human interactions the average person can do/train, rather than with code. It seems easier and more doable and promising in so many ways.
That doesn’t mean it will be easy, or risk free, and it still comes with a hell of a lot of problems based on the fact that AIs, even machine learning ones, are quite simply not human, they are not inherently social, they do not inherently have altruistic urges, they do not inherently have empathic abilities. But I see a clearer path to dealing with that than to directly encoding an abstract ethics into an intelligent, flexible actor.