As far as I can tell, Eliezer is concluding that he should trust part of his instincts about morality because, if he doesn’t, then he won’t know anything about it.
There are multiple arguments here that need to be considered:
If one doesn’t know anything about morality, then that would be bad; I wanna know something about morality, therefore it’s at least somewhat knowable. This argument is obviously wrong, when stated plainly, but there are hints of it in Eliezer’s post.
If one doesn’t know anything about morality, then that can’t be morality, because morality is inherently knowable (or knowable by definition). But why is morality inherently knowable. I think one can properly challenge this idea. It seems to be prima facie plausible that morality, and/or its content, could be entirely unknown, at least for a brief period of time.
If one doesn’t know anything about morality, then morality is no different than a tablet saying “thou shalt murder.” This might be Eliezer’s primary concern. However, this is a concern about arbitrariness, and not a concern about knowability. The two concerns seem to me to be orthogonal to each other (although I’d be interested to hear reasons why they are not). An easy way to see this is to recognize that the subtle intuitions Eliezer wants to sanction as “moral”, are just as arbitrary as the “thou shall murder” precept on the tablet. That is, there seems to be no principled reason for regarding one, and not the other, as non-arbitrary. In both cases, the moral content is discovered, and not chosen, one just happens to be discovered in our DNA, and not in a tablet.
So, in view of all three arguments, it seems to me that morality, in the strong sense Eliezer is concerned with, might very well be unknowable, or at least is not in principle always partly known. (And we should probably concern ourselves with the strong sense, even if it is more difficult to work with, if our goal is to be an AI to rewrite the entire universe according to our moral code of choice, whatever that may turn out to be.) This was his original position, it seems, and it was motivated by concerns about “mere evolution” that I still find quite compelling.
Note that, if I understand Eliezer’s view correctly, he currently plans on using a “collective volition” approach to friendly AI, whereby the AI will want to do whatever very-very-very-very smart future versions of human beings want it to do (this is a crude paraphrasing). I think this would resolve the concerns I raise above: such a smart AI would recognize the rightness or wrongness of any arguments against his view, like those I raise above, as well as countless other arguments, and respond appropriately.
As far as I can tell, Eliezer is concluding that he should trust part of his instincts about morality because, if he doesn’t, then he won’t know anything about it.
There are multiple arguments here that need to be considered:
If one doesn’t know anything about morality, then that would be bad; I wanna know something about morality, therefore it’s at least somewhat knowable. This argument is obviously wrong, when stated plainly, but there are hints of it in Eliezer’s post.
If one doesn’t know anything about morality, then that can’t be morality, because morality is inherently knowable (or knowable by definition). But why is morality inherently knowable. I think one can properly challenge this idea. It seems to be prima facie plausible that morality, and/or its content, could be entirely unknown, at least for a brief period of time.
If one doesn’t know anything about morality, then morality is no different than a tablet saying “thou shalt murder.” This might be Eliezer’s primary concern. However, this is a concern about arbitrariness, and not a concern about knowability. The two concerns seem to me to be orthogonal to each other (although I’d be interested to hear reasons why they are not). An easy way to see this is to recognize that the subtle intuitions Eliezer wants to sanction as “moral”, are just as arbitrary as the “thou shall murder” precept on the tablet. That is, there seems to be no principled reason for regarding one, and not the other, as non-arbitrary. In both cases, the moral content is discovered, and not chosen, one just happens to be discovered in our DNA, and not in a tablet.
So, in view of all three arguments, it seems to me that morality, in the strong sense Eliezer is concerned with, might very well be unknowable, or at least is not in principle always partly known. (And we should probably concern ourselves with the strong sense, even if it is more difficult to work with, if our goal is to be an AI to rewrite the entire universe according to our moral code of choice, whatever that may turn out to be.) This was his original position, it seems, and it was motivated by concerns about “mere evolution” that I still find quite compelling.
Note that, if I understand Eliezer’s view correctly, he currently plans on using a “collective volition” approach to friendly AI, whereby the AI will want to do whatever very-very-very-very smart future versions of human beings want it to do (this is a crude paraphrasing). I think this would resolve the concerns I raise above: such a smart AI would recognize the rightness or wrongness of any arguments against his view, like those I raise above, as well as countless other arguments, and respond appropriately.