From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sun Apr 28 2002 - 17:28:01 MDT
Samantha writes
> > You may mean that a sufficiently intelligent and objective
> > AI must deduce as a logical or scientific truth that a
> > certain ethical system is correct. I've never seen any
> > evidence that such exists.
>
> Do you then eschew ethics? If not, then do you believe a vastly
> more intelligent being without your evolutionary programming would?
I do not eschew ethics. But the reason that I do not has
nothing to do with my intelligence, but with other ways
that I happened to have been programmed by natural selection.
I derived from thousands of generations of hunter/gatherers
whose environment, it turns out, happened to often favor the
evolution of what we call ethical behavior. Equivalently,
we may succeed in programming an AI to behave as if it also
had an ethical system we admire.
So a vastly more intelligent being that happens to obtain
from some puny humans writing a lot of code (that they
really don't understand) may or may not behave itself.
If we're lucky, it will take over and be very nice.
Nice not because it reasons that it should be, but
because its internal structure mandates that it
wants to be.
> I pin my hopes on all sentients of however much raw power coming
> to a mutual cooperative peace through realizing that they can
> all benefit much more from such an arrangement than from thinly
> veiled mutual distrust and soft (sometimes hard) war.
Sometimes circumstances favor cooperation. In modern times,
for example, nations find it uneconomic and fruitless to
wage war. But a thousand years ago circumstances were
different, and often the best way to gain wealth was to
take someone else's. Any tribe or nation that eschewed
conflict got chewed up pretty quick.
Lee
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