Can there be ethics without free will?
The sister-site Harmonia Philosophica @ Blogger provides some insight…
Check out “Philosophy Wire: Ethics without free will… No ethics at all…“.
Somehow making our new robots obey orders doesn’t sound like a good idea. Obeying orders was the foundation of the deepest evil even known to mankind…
Engineer Janelle Shane took to Twitter to lay out some of the telltale giveaways that the script was written by a person pretending to be an AI algorithm for kicks.
You may recognize Shane as the person who trains neural nets to create jokes that devolve into nonsense or paint colors that almost sound real after being trained on thousands of actual examples. Yes, the AI-generated results are absurd, but they also highlight one key fact – the neural nets have no clue what the hell they’re talking about.
“I’d say the clearest giveaways are a really short memory (maybe just a couple of sentences long) and a lack of understanding of meaning and context,” Shane told Futurism. “One characteristic of neural net text is it’ll tend to mimic the surface appearance of things without really getting the meaning behind them. (1)
AI will finally manage to solve the most complex problems humanity faces. From mathematical problems to ways to deal with deadly diseases via innovative medication.
And yet, it would do that blindly.
Without ever knowing what it is doing.
Why should we care? one might argue. At the end, we will benefit from it. So what is the problem?
No problem I say!
Let AI help us! By all means!
The problem is not with AI per se. The problem is with us actually. Because it seems that it is not only AI which does not know what it does and why. It is us as well. We are wandering in the dark looking for solutions to problems without knowing the essence of what we are doing: The Why.
Why do you want to solve the mathematical problems?
Why do you want to live longer?
Why are you afraid of death?
We have forgotten to ask the simple questions. And failing to do so, providing answers to all the complex ones will mean nothing at all…
Except for an AI.
In May 1997, an IBM supercomputer known as Deep Blue beat then chess world champion Garry Kasparov, who had once bragged he would never lose to a machine. Kasparov and other chess masters blamed the defeat on a single move made by the IBM machine. At the beginning of the second game the computer made a sacrifice that seemed to hint at its long-term strategy. Kasparov and many others thought the move was too sophisticated for a computer, suggesting there had been some sort of human intervention during the game. “It was an incredibly refined move, of defending while ahead to cut out any hint of countermoves”, grandmaster Yasser Seirawan told Wired in 2001, “and it sent Garry into a tizzy”.
Fifteen years later, one of Big Blue’s designers says the move was the result of a bug in Deep Blue’s software. Murray Campbell, one of the three IBM computer scientists who designed Deep Blue, said that the machine was unable to select a move and simply picked one at random. (1, 2)
A random move. Regarded as one of the wisest ever.
But how random can such a move be considered? Surely it seems random. At least according to the programmer of Deep Blue. But random within a calculated environment. Random performed by a non-random program with specific logic. Random which resulted from the programming algorithm of Deep Blue as fail-safe in specific cases. Random can generate once-off wise decisions. But only in the context of a non-random environment. And again random can never create poetry or art or philosophical texts or design something from scratch.
And what is more, how “wise” can this move be considered? Surely it seems wise. But wise is doing something while consciously realizing what you actually do. A computer can never do a wise move in chess. Because it is not the computer playing. Because it does not even realize it plays chess.
Can in any case random exist? This case shows that it all comes down to the beliefs a person has for core philosophical issues which are currently unsolved. Fate vs. Free will, Determinism vs. (whatever) etc, they all show that the universe can be understood only through the irrational thinking which accepts all of the above notions at the same time…
Play again Garry.
Irrationally this time.
You cannot lose.
1. g4!
