From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Mon Jul 01 2002 - 21:21:24 MDT
I wrote on Saturday
>> What about first
>> getting the program to the point that it appears to be able
>> to understand literature, and then having it come to its
>> own conclusions after having read 200,000 books and plays
>> from every culture that touch on issues of morality? I
>> would think that if the machine is able to hold decent
>> conversations with us at that point, that it will have
>> become a veritable fountainhead of knowledge about what
>> is and isn't moral.
Ben answered
> Different people can read the world's literature (or big samples
> thereof) and come to very different conclusions, based on their
> "initial conditions" (their initial belief systems) and their
> cognitive biases.
But I agree instead with what Gordon just wrote:
> Empathy is hard wired in the sense that the potential for empathy to
> arise is hard wired...
> That said, a mind in general would not by default be predisposed to
> empathize. With training, though, I think it would be possible to
> teach empathy content and then empathy skills. Short of that, empathy
> could always be programmed in (and in fact empathy may arise in an
> self-improving AI out of it's ability to understand itself in order
> to improve itself, but that may depend on the specifics of the
> architecture).
Now *that* I understand! So wouldn't it make sense to *first* have
an AI *understand* what many people have believed to be "moral" and
"ethical" behavior---by reading the world's extensive literature---
before attempting to engage in moral behavior, or even to try to
empathize?
Lee
P.S. Sorry that I have not been at all able to keep up with
the numerous messages here lately.
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