The way I have instilled my four human children with the values that I prefer
is mostly not by preaching at them what’s right and what’s wrong, that’s
not very effective, especially for people with a contrarian personality, which somehow
all my kids ended up with.
I don’t know how.
So the way I inculcated them with some approximation of the values that are important to me is
just by spending time with them in various situations.
And if your children enter into various situations with you and see how you respond to various
things and how you guide them to respond to various things in real life then your kids
pick up sort of by osmosis.
I mean they pick up due to their desire to imitate and to learn and to follow, they pick
up the practicalities of your values and your culture.
And interestingly this can stick with them on an implicit level even if on the surface
level many values change.
One of my sons became a Sufi Muslim at one point and some of his values are on the surface
very different than mine.
Now I’m not Muslim, I’m not religious in any conventional sense.
On the other hand he’s very compassionate kind of hearted person, he’s very intellectual,
he’s a scholar so if you look at a practical level the vast bulk of the values and culture
that he got from myself and his mom when he was growing up it’s implicit rather than
a list of rules, but it’s all still there.
For and AI I think we need to take an approach somewhat similar to what we do with human
children, we need to have AIs working and playing side-by-side with us in real situations.
We need to give the AIs a desire to imitate us on a basic level and to understand why
we’re reacting how we react in this after this after this concrete situation.
And then the AI can get a practical model of our values and our culture as it’s manifested
in a hundred thousand or a million real life situations.
And this doesn’t guarantee the AIs will always respond the way we want, but it will
give it a real foundation, which you’re not going to get from giving a list of like
the three or ten laws of being a good human or a good human like mind.
An important thing to remember when you talk about getting human values into an AI is that
human values are very much a moving target.
I mean much of what we do in our every day lives would have been considered horrendously
immoral by the average human of the Middle Ages in Europe or even for that matter a lot
of the things we take for granted as being moral and right now were considered horrendously
immoral by almost everyone I went to elementary school with in the 1970s in suburban in New
Jersey.
Like my mom is gay and because of that in the 1970s we got our car turned over, we got
all the windows of our house smashed in like that was completely unacceptable in the 1970s
in Southern New Jersey.
Now gay marriage is being legalized everywhere.
I mean human values even in our lifetime have changed a lot so when you get to a technological
singularity with brain computer interfacing and mind uploading and superhuman AIs and
we’re able to clone our body over and over again, our values are not going to remain
precisely the same as they are now even for us humans so it’s absurd to think we can
start an AI with our current human values and they’re going to stick with our 2018
human values forever, our own values are going to drift.
So all we can ask for is the AI starts out with the values that we hold dear now and
as its values grow and evolve this growth and evolution is coupled with our own growth
and evolution who’s direction we cannot foresee at this time.