In terms of what kinds of things might be helpful:
1. Object-level stuff:
Things that help illuminate core components of ethics, such as “what is consciousness,” “what is love,” “what is up in human beings with the things we call ‘values’, that seem to have some thingies in common with beliefs,” “how exactly did evolution end up producing the thing where we care about stuff and find some things worth caring about,” etc.
Some books I kinda like in this space:
Martin Buber’s book “I and thou”;
Christopher Alexander’s writing, especially his “The Nature of Order” books
The Tao Te Ching (though this one I assume is thoroughly in any huge training corpus already)
(curious for y’all’s suggestions)
2. Stuff that aids processes for eliciting peoples’ values, or for letting people elicit each others’ values:
My thought here is that there’re dialogs between different people, and between people and LLMs, on what matters and how we can tell. Conversational methodologies for helping these dialogs go better seem maybe-helpful. E.g. active listening stuff, or circling, or Gendlin’s Focusing stuff, or … [not sure what—theory of how these sorts of fusions and dialogs can ever work, what they are, tips for how to do them in practice, …]
3. Especially, maybe: stuff that may help locate “attractor states” such that an AI, or a network of humans and near-human-level AIs, might, if it gets near this attractor state, choose to stay in this attractor state. And such that the attractor state has something to do with creating good futures.
Confucius (? I haven’t read him, but he at least shaped for society for a long time in a way that was partly about respecting and not killing your ancestors?)
Hayek (he has an idea of “natural law” as sort of how you have to structure minds and economies of minds if you want to be able to choose at all, rather than e.g. making random mouth motions that cause random other things to happen that have nothing to do with your intent really, like what would happen if a monarch says “I want to abolish poverty” and then people try to “implement” his “decree”).
In terms of what kinds of things might be helpful:
1. Object-level stuff:
Things that help illuminate core components of ethics, such as “what is consciousness,” “what is love,” “what is up in human beings with the things we call ‘values’, that seem to have some thingies in common with beliefs,” “how exactly did evolution end up producing the thing where we care about stuff and find some things worth caring about,” etc.
Some books I kinda like in this space:
Martin Buber’s book “I and thou”;
Christopher Alexander’s writing, especially his “The Nature of Order” books
The Tao Te Ching (though this one I assume is thoroughly in any huge training corpus already)
(curious for y’all’s suggestions)
2. Stuff that aids processes for eliciting peoples’ values, or for letting people elicit each others’ values:
My thought here is that there’re dialogs between different people, and between people and LLMs, on what matters and how we can tell. Conversational methodologies for helping these dialogs go better seem maybe-helpful. E.g. active listening stuff, or circling, or Gendlin’s Focusing stuff, or … [not sure what—theory of how these sorts of fusions and dialogs can ever work, what they are, tips for how to do them in practice, …]
3. Especially, maybe: stuff that may help locate “attractor states” such that an AI, or a network of humans and near-human-level AIs, might, if it gets near this attractor state, choose to stay in this attractor state. And such that the attractor state has something to do with creating good futures.
Confucius (? I haven’t read him, but he at least shaped for society for a long time in a way that was partly about respecting and not killing your ancestors?)
Hayek (he has an idea of “natural law” as sort of how you have to structure minds and economies of minds if you want to be able to choose at all, rather than e.g. making random mouth motions that cause random other things to happen that have nothing to do with your intent really, like what would happen if a monarch says “I want to abolish poverty” and then people try to “implement” his “decree”).