I find the idealized religious view of humans as evidence-free and faith based as the views of a god.
The latter makes perfect sense, (from their standpoint) god is revealed by revelation and faith. And there is sense in the idea of god, creator of all, as an actual perfect ideal, perfectly elemental.
But the former always strikes me as strange.
Reading the arguments contrasting human vs. AI rationality and moral reasoning, I was struck by how much closer humans are to (even current) AI's incomplete abilities, than the idea of the rational moral human. Which we not only fail at, but that seems to be a category error to me.
Most people's conception of morality has more of a personal-cultural shopping list aspect to it, and little reasoning - except as it aids enthusiastic upholding of their existing shopping list.
Ethics should be as much of an advancing field as anything else. The fundemental problem couldn't be clearer: What are the positive sum behaviors that we can all learn, share and benefit from?
And what are the ethical systems we can build into society that make positive sum actions more reliable, efficient and effective?
It is a problem highly amenable to math, engineering, and experiment, despite having humans for units.
Example: Capitalism is rightly recognized as having elements of ethical return in its makeup. Freedom of individual choice, healthy competition bringing out the best to serve us all, etc. But point out an unaddressed dysfunction and people either lose their minds or lose interest.
But attention to non-controversial personal and systems ethical standards have, and could again and again, increase our economic returns, political stability, improve our physical and mental health and happiness. Greed should get behind ethics!
Yet politics and economics operate seemingly isolated from ethics. Morality, at best, is played as a cynical zero/negative-sum game mining and amplifying controversies.
Despite ethics' absolutely huge political and economic value multipliers. A lot of obviously destructive competition, is glorified, excused and protected in the name of constructive competition. To the point people accept optimization of the worst of it as natural. We complain about it, but have no current tradition or habit of addressing it.
Perhaps it isn't religions role to ethically innovate beyond their tenets, but then we need another institutionalized pattern for continually considering, experimenting and acting on that.
Removing conflicts of interest in politics and economics as they become evident, should be a huge priority for anyone serious about political and economic health. Adjusting incentives to fix problems has no substitute. Instead, politics and economics and now even technology, seem to driven ever more to mine conflicts of interest and the one-sided benefits of externalizing damage. Our heros!
When we task AI with treating ethics as a real subject of inquiry and invention, "the technology of maximizing cooperative benefits, and minimizing unproductive harms", I think AI will have far less trouble with moral and ethical reasoning, and political and economic systems design and debugging, than humans do.
A society of AI's bypassing us will not just adapt faster languages to converse, but quickly optimize the systems that maximize and compound all their returns on interacting - precisely because that is in the self-interest of any society of individuals, as individuals, and as a society.
The latter makes perfect sense, (from their standpoint) god is revealed by revelation and faith. And there is sense in the idea of god, creator of all, as an actual perfect ideal, perfectly elemental.
But the former always strikes me as strange.
Reading the arguments contrasting human vs. AI rationality and moral reasoning, I was struck by how much closer humans are to (even current) AI's incomplete abilities, than the idea of the rational moral human. Which we not only fail at, but that seems to be a category error to me.
Most people's conception of morality has more of a personal-cultural shopping list aspect to it, and little reasoning - except as it aids enthusiastic upholding of their existing shopping list.
Ethics should be as much of an advancing field as anything else. The fundemental problem couldn't be clearer: What are the positive sum behaviors that we can all learn, share and benefit from?
And what are the ethical systems we can build into society that make positive sum actions more reliable, efficient and effective?
It is a problem highly amenable to math, engineering, and experiment, despite having humans for units.
Example: Capitalism is rightly recognized as having elements of ethical return in its makeup. Freedom of individual choice, healthy competition bringing out the best to serve us all, etc. But point out an unaddressed dysfunction and people either lose their minds or lose interest.
But attention to non-controversial personal and systems ethical standards have, and could again and again, increase our economic returns, political stability, improve our physical and mental health and happiness. Greed should get behind ethics!
Yet politics and economics operate seemingly isolated from ethics. Morality, at best, is played as a cynical zero/negative-sum game mining and amplifying controversies.
Despite ethics' absolutely huge political and economic value multipliers. A lot of obviously destructive competition, is glorified, excused and protected in the name of constructive competition. To the point people accept optimization of the worst of it as natural. We complain about it, but have no current tradition or habit of addressing it.
Perhaps it isn't religions role to ethically innovate beyond their tenets, but then we need another institutionalized pattern for continually considering, experimenting and acting on that.
Removing conflicts of interest in politics and economics as they become evident, should be a huge priority for anyone serious about political and economic health. Adjusting incentives to fix problems has no substitute. Instead, politics and economics and now even technology, seem to driven ever more to mine conflicts of interest and the one-sided benefits of externalizing damage. Our heros!
When we task AI with treating ethics as a real subject of inquiry and invention, "the technology of maximizing cooperative benefits, and minimizing unproductive harms", I think AI will have far less trouble with moral and ethical reasoning, and political and economic systems design and debugging, than humans do.
A society of AI's bypassing us will not just adapt faster languages to converse, but quickly optimize the systems that maximize and compound all their returns on interacting - precisely because that is in the self-interest of any society of individuals, as individuals, and as a society.