Philosophical Discussion on the Golden Rule and AGI Ethics

220 12 The Engineering and Development of Ethics role), is the lack of any clear formulation of what "justice" means. This section explores this issue, via detailed consideration of the “Golden Rule” folk maxim do unto others as you would have them do unto you — a classical formulation of the notion of fairness and justices — to AGI ethics. Taking the Golden Rule as a starting-point, we will elaborate five ethical imperatives that incorporate aspects of the notion of ethical synergy discussed above. Simple as it may seem, the Golden Rule actually elicits a variety of deep issues regarding the relationship between ethics, experience and learning. When seriously analyzed, it results in a multifactorial elaboration, involving the combination of various factors related to the basic Golden Rule idea. Which brings us back in the end to the potential value of methods like CEV, CAV or CBV for understanding how human ethics balances the multiple factors. Our goal here is not to present any kind of definitive analysis of the ethics of justice, but just to briefly and roughly indicate a number of the relevant significant issues — things that anyone designing or teaching an AGI would do well to keep in mind. The trickiest aspect of the Golden Rule, as has been frequently observed, is achieving the right level of abstraction. Taken too literally, the Golden Rule would suggest, for instance, that a parent should not wipe a child’s soiled bottom because the parent does not want the child to wipe the parent’s soiled bottom. But if the parent interprets the Golden Rule more intelligently and abstractly, the parent may conclude that they should wipe the child’s bottom after all: they should “wipe the child’s bottom when the child can’t do it themselves”, consistently with believing that the child should “wipe the parent’s bottom when the parent can’t do it themselves” (which may well happen eventually should the parent develop incontinence in old age). This line of thinking leads to Kant’s Categorical Imperative [Kan64] which (in one inter- pretation) states essentially that one should “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." The Categorical Imperative adds precision to the Golden Rule, but also removes the practicality of the latter. Formaliz- ing the “implicit universal law” underlying an everyday action is a huge problem, falling prey to the same issue that has kept us from adequately formalizing the rules of natural language grammar, or formalizing common-sense knowledge about everyday object like cups, bowls and grass (substantial effort notwithstanding, e.g. Cyc in the commonsense knowledge case, and the whole discipline of modern linguistics in the NL case). There is no way to apply the Categorical Imperative, as literally stated, in everyday life. Furthermore, if one wishes to teach ethics as well as to practice it, the Categorical Imper- ative actually has a significant disadvantage compared to some other possible formulations of the Golden Rule. The problem is that, if one follows the Categorical Imperative, one’s fellow members of society may well never understand the principles under which one is acting. Each of us may internally formulate abstract principles in a different way, and these may be very difficult to communicate, especially among individuals with different belief systems, different cognitive architectures, or different levels of intelligence. Thus, if one’s goal is not just to act ethically, but to encourage others to act ethically by setting a good example, the Categorical Imperative may not be useful at all, as others may be unable to solve the “inverse problem” of guessing your intended maxim from your observed behavior. On the other hand, one wouldn’t want to universally restrict one’s behavioral maxims to those that one’s fellow members of society can understand — in that case, one would have to act with a two-year old or a dog according to principles that they could understand, which would clearly be unethical according to human common sense. (Every two-year-old, once they grow up, would be grateful to their parents for not following this sort of principle.) HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013136