They say “God created human beings in his own image.” I will not opine on the meaning or even the definitions of the terms in this statement, nor on its implications. But one thing I can say for sure, based on the observations of the current state of humanity and how flawed us human beings are in character and priorities, that not only we do not need to, but also we should not even attempt to create AI in our own image.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Before anyone jumps the gun that why I say us human beings are flawed, and who decides what is flawed and what is not, or maybe my devout capitalist friends assert that only the self regulating free markets can decide what is flawed and what is not (while Adam Smith turns in his grave), allow me to explain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
First, let’s note that evolution is just an explanation for how we have gotten here; it’s not an instruction manual for how we should advance, or develop new technologies. Then let’s consider the notion of ethics. These days, if someone dares to even bring up the subject, they will be summarily dismissed as being backwards or an ideologue. But the fact is that ethics, while admittedly being an integral part of most religions, are not necessarily tied to any religion or ideology. They are a distillation of the accumulated experiences of humanity over thousands of years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Realizing early on in their history as we know, that the natural laws of evolution governing the relationships among living beings, commonly summarized in the phrase “survival of the fittest,” are not necessarily the best possible laws that one could think of, human beings separated themselves from the crude natural and evolution-guided environment, and created societies governed by their own laws. Note, for example, that there are no natural laws against killing other living beings. In fact, that happens constantly, possibly as a side effect or maybe even the enforcer of the notion of the survival of the fittest. Admittedly, the happening is not as common among the individuals from the same species. But even if it did, nature probably wouldn’t mind it at all. But within a human society, murder has been a crime for as long as the written history can tell, regardless of whether the society is built based on any religion or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now, let’s think about what really made human species so different from the others. Language is commonly known to be one of the most important, if not the most important, difference. But note that it is not just the form of language that facilitates communication of requests and responses. There are likely other species that are also capable of that, to some extent. But the more important aspect of the language is enabling the transfer of knowledge and experiences. When a mother tells her son to not touch the fire or he will burn, she is not just stating a request or issuing a command; she is transferring an experience, either personal or acquired through another transfer. That’s why despite being born with probably the least amount of instincts and intrinsic abilities, by the time they reach their teens, human children are much more knowledgeable than any other species.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the above example, I doubt any sane person would argue that the mother is forcing her opinion on her child or is limiting the child’s freedom to experience things for himself and then make decisions. The mother’s ability to pass her experiences down to her son is the very reason the human species has accomplished so much in just a few tens of thousands of years, while the young of species that are billions of years old must still experience everything for themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now, back to my claim above; the reason I say ethics are a distillation of accumulated experiences of humanity is exactly the combination of the above two points: human beings through transferring knowledge and experiences to new generations realized, early on, that they needed to define new rules, separate from what the nature or evolution would probably dictate, to have a peaceful and prosperous society, and then over generations, those experiences and rules have been distilled into ethics. Ethics are not some abstract or fantastical ideas for religious books; they shape the constitutions and the very practical laws of almost all nations. Of course, not all human societies have the exact same distillation of the experiences, or ethics. But the most important ones are pretty common across the board. Even the most advanced notions in the constitutional laws of the United States, including freedom of the press, speech, and assembly, the establishment clause, or laws regarding due process, are based on centuries of experience and common laws in Europe. You might say those are not ethics, and you may be right in the strict linguistic sense. But, for the sake of this conversation, let’s refer to all such ideas as ethics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One thing that immediately stands out is the fact that those ethical concepts and the resulting laws in human societies are not necessarily aligned with the human nature as evolved according to the laws of evolution. The laws against stealing someone else’s property are not necessarily consistent with the more natural temptation that if you are bigger and stronger, you should try to acquire more resources, even through stealing, to increase your chances of survival. That’s why human societies also require law enforcement and justice systems to ensure proper execution of the laws. But one can imagine that if instead of “do whatever you can to increase your chances of survival,” we were also wired to automatically consider “except for stealing,” then probably we wouldn’t need a big chunk of the court systems and law enforcement resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now compare the creation and training of advanced AI models to that mother trying to raise her son as best as she can. Is really telling the model that it is not allowed to plagiarize others’ work or fabricate false information that much different than the mother telling her son to not put his hand in the fire? You might say “but the model is given all sorts of data during training, including data on plagiarism.” And you are right. But what does that mean? The model also sees many many instances of plagiarism in its training data without any apparent consequences. So, what do we expect it to do? Claiming that we give the model all the information that we have, including all the junk on the Internet, and will let it try different things and learn what it should do and what it should not, is like telling that mother to let her son burn his hand so that he knows to not put his hand in the fire the next time. Only, the model can do much more harm, and not just to itself. Note that the typical reinforcement phase of the training during which human operators or possibly other models try to encourage the model to provide useful and accurate information and discourage it from doing anything else, is also a mostly stochastic approach to establishing guardrails. It is almost an impossibility to test all possible scenarios and ensure that the model is sufficiently discouraged from unethical behavior. In contrast, each nation’s laws are very precise and deterministic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you are still not convinced, consider the following: if\/when humanoid robots equipped with versions of these AI models and capable of performing physical activities are introduced into different facets of the society, would you want them to also be free to use their own judgement on anything and everything? Would you be comfortable around them if you knew that they did not have a strict notion of respecting others’ safety, or did not believe that they were subject to the laws of the land including not harming others?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is no denying that understanding and interpreting some of the more complex and domain-specific laws can be very difficult, and that it may also be a challenge to incorporate a system of rigid laws into the more fluid training and stochastic behavior of a model. But difficulty is usually no excuse for evading the laws.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These are extraordinary times; probably the single most important opportunity in the entire history of humanity to create other, potentially smarter, beings. It would be a loss at best, or a catastrophe at worst, to miss this opportunity to make sure that those beings are not just smarter than us, but also better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
They say “God created human beings in his own image.” I will not opine on the meaning or even the definitions of the terms in this statement, nor on its implications. But one thing I can say for sure, based on the observations of the current state of humanity and how flawed us human beings […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,56,7,10],"tags":[241,308,309,312,311,310],"class_list":["post-770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-legal-system","category-society","category-technology","tag-ai","tag-ethics","tag-evolution","tag-humanity","tag-laws","tag-society"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jaberborran.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jaberborran.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jaberborran.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jaberborran.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jaberborran.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=770"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/jaberborran.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":780,"href":"https:\/\/jaberborran.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770\/revisions\/780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jaberborran.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jaberborran.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jaberborran.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}