[HS]

If we create an AGI, we need to make sure it behaves well. I tried to distill ethics to the basic principles. Let me know if I've forgotten to include anything important.

ETHICS : Do not attempt nor accomplish actions which do unjust harm to other life. Attempt and accomplish actions which aid other life.

[ranch vermin]

ETHICS : Do not attempt nor accomplish actions which do unjust harm to other life. Attempt and accomplish actions which aid other life.

So thats a rule of ethics...  If you had your evolving network,  this would be the governing system for scoring its behaviour,   But the program that scores these "situational happenings" is probably harder to make than the neural network that is getting scored by it to evolve the motor.

An easier rule to make is "AVOID ALL ACCELLERATION"    and this is very easy to score just off the robots eye,   and because guns cause great accelleration, i wonder if the robot might end up keeping guns away from ppl because of the accelleration they cause, but also it could cause lots of behaviours i cant even think of.

Theres a cool thing on computerphile, about if u ever managed to make a rule following robot,   how unpredictable it is what it would end up doing...

[LOCKSUIT]

When Freddy says this is a family site, he must mean us. We are the family. Despite our crazy attributes, this is a family site! ;p

Just joking, be ethical.

[DemonRaven]

If we create an AGI, we need to make sure it behaves well. I tried to distill ethics to the basic principles. Let me know if I've forgotten to include anything important.

ETHICS : Do not attempt nor accomplish actions which do unjust harm to other life. Attempt and accomplish actions which aid other life.

That is a hard one because people disagree as to what ethics to follow. Some say there are no ethics that all is permissible (chaos) others go the other extreme and make so many rules that you can't move without breaking a rule. I think Christ had the right idea. Love God - when we love things, drugs, money,  alcohol, jobs etc above people it causes problems so the best thing to love above people is a loving God that wants you to love People and love others as yourself- well you have to love yourself first but not to the point where you are harming others and that is where the love others as yourself comes in.  Now one could get upset about my using religion as a example but it is actually a very logical approach when one takes it apart and studies it. But This is just my opinion and you can take it or leave it.

[Korrelan]

Now one could get upset about my using religion

 

I think Christ had the right idea

I agree… Apparently paul the apostle who taught the gospel of christ had an opinion…

St Paul's advice in 1 Timothy 2:12, in which the saint says: "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, she must be silent."

Do you know what christ had to say about homosexuality? (Romans 1:27), or do you pick and choose which bits to stand by?

I personally think that religion is the last yardstick we should employ for teaching ethics to anyone, especially an AGI.

But This is just my opinion and you can take it or leave it.

 

[DemonRaven]

Christ did mention something that alluded to homosexuality Matthew 19:11“Not everyone can accept this word,” Jesus answered, “but only those to whom it has been given. 12 For there are eunuchs who were born that way; others were made that way by men; and still others live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.”  Humans are the ones who get bent out of shape over sex. Sex is for reproduction, companionship, pleasure. Paul was a religious teacher from what i understand so his theology was strict and patriarcal. christ was more lenient toward women and tended to use them as examples of how much greater their faith was then men's were.  Christ was a very logical person. Paul was passionate but a jew through and through. Christ was also jewish but if one believes that He really was the Son of God then you would have to know that God made all kinds of creatures including ones that can change from male to female. Christ said that in heaven there would be no marrying or be giving in marriage. The need for reproduction would be gone.  A logical God would not see a need for it. Almost like a computer would. God is a God of balance and logic. It may not always be apparent to us but the logic is there. Just look at nature.

[DemonRaven]

Just remember you asked for my opinion on the matter lol

[Korrelan]

alluded to homosexuality

Alluded is the key word here.

Eunuchs

Do you know what a Eunuch is?

Paul was a religious teacher from what i understand

Paul taught the gospels of christ, christ’s teachings.  He actually said…

Romans 1:27, "In the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error."

And that’s not alluded… that’s a quote.

Just remember you asked for my opinion on the matter lol

I didn’t ask for your opinion, I asked… Do you know what christ had to say about homosexuality?... not your opinion… the facts… his actual writings… not your personal interpretation.

Bringing religion into any topic is looking for controversy; you know this… that’s why you stated in your previous post…

Now one could get upset about my using religion

Please read the forum rules if you are unclear as to how to conduct yourself.

3) You are responsible for what you post in this Forum. As such, be aware of any negative effects that your messages might have on other people. Your membership here could be in jeopardy.

Please respect your peers… my last post on this matter.

Peace.

 

[ivan.moony]

The irony is.. we fight over what ethics is...

My opinion is that we can't do anything ethical. For anything we do, we encounter some oppressed opinion out there, and in my opinion it is not ethical to say "no" to anyone. Long story short, there is always someone ranting about anything we do, and if ethics is about not fighting, we can only die. Not even that because someone out there cares for us.

About religion, God only knows what is true about those stories from sacred books. There are plenty of those books, I suppose they were all written by men, but in what extent a man could be  ethical? How much was true and how much was made up? In spite of all the possible lies, those books should all have enlightening value, but what was enlightening for men before two thousands years changed a thousand times up to date. We need something modern, if you ask me. But probably, if someone was writing a sacred book today, what would we call him? A lunatic that has hallucinations and needs a treatment? While that man before two thousand years was a very wise guy? I believe we're all stuck with archaic religions, because it is not anymore enough for God to speak to just one of us. I don't really know what's happening. We see a church in silver and gold, and we instantly believe that's it, no doubt. Then we see a poor man in worn clothes, being hungry because he gave his last piece of bread to someone else who needs it not to be hungry, and we call him a psychopath. How to understand that?

[LOCKSUIT]

Omg stop talking about religion....sheesh....korrelan neveer does this now look....lol my mom does and now i know none of us can escape it.

I know I know, demonraven isn't religious. He's raw in fact.

"Eunuchs" LOL

The real answer to ethics is to not harm others (or have them get pain), or kill. The universe is meant for the other way around and I STRIVE to get it like that one day soon. If you love something right now that pains/kills someone right now well you can later in VR for example, or done in reality but so no pain/death (need different brains..different bodies..). Done. All is happy!!

[WriterOfMinds]

ETHICS : Do not attempt nor accomplish actions which do unjust harm to other life. Attempt and accomplish actions which aid other life.

Define "unjust."  (This might be the biggest issue with your formula -- you've tried to distill ethics by referencing another concept that is just as difficult.)
Define "harm" and "aid."  (For instance, is this about following the expressed desires of creatures, or doing what's in their best interest whether they "want" it or not?)
Define "life."  (Did you mean anything biologically alive? Anything sentient or potentially sentient? What criteria should be used to decide/measure whether something fits in either of those categories?  Were you thinking strictly of individual beings, or do collectives of living things (species, societies) deserve ethical consideration in their own right?)

Your ethical prescription has two parts.  Which one is more important, or are they supposed to be perfectly equal?  Should more effort be expended on avoiding harm, or giving aid?  If giving aid also causes a small amount of harm elsewhere, is that ever acceptable, and when?  If it's not okay to harm "other life," is it okay to harm oneself?  When?

If one is faced with a choice between two harms, how should one weigh their relative severity?  If faced with a choice between two different ways of giving aid, how should one measure their relative benefit?

You have indeed written down a very basic definition of ethics, and I think it is one that would harmonize with most people's intuitions of what good ethics are.  BUT -- as a blueprint for behavior (of an AGI or anyone else), it needs a lot of elaboration.  While I think that simple statements like this can be worthwhile as a beginning, or a kind of master guide, there is a reason for the existence of Ethics as an entire field of study.  There is a reason why extensive deontologies are built up to clarify a dictum such as "love one another."

[HS]

Thank you. I will think about these things.

[HS]

Yes, the AI would need more knowledge to make use of such a generalization. I can't define these words briefly. If you dig into the definitions and try to describe it completely you'd get a ton of meaningless rules. Programming for every possibility doesn't seem smart. Firstly, you can't. Secondly, if you got close enough for folk music, and it was able to act ethically in its environment,  you would end up creating a complex robot instead of a general intelligence.

Now that I think of it, ethics is probably one of the core drivers perpetuating our sequences of thoughts and actions. On par with things like hunger and fear. Going against these "nature's suggestions with a meaningful look" is unpleasant. 
Going with them is pleasant. That's how we learn what to do as living creatures. That's learning to act ethically towards yourself.
This can be simplified to "increasing your well-being".
 
Now for the social ethics. Part of your well-being needs to be tied to the well-being of other life in your circle of awareness. We can't mind read so we need to make an educated guess. We guess at, and are then effected by our perceived well-being of others. When we guess at the state of another lifeforms, the equation (or neuron structure) governing our well-being gets new variables. We treat these as our own (cus they are), then we feel the need to maximize the variables. Or possibly just maximize the result. In order to maximize our well-being

I suspect most of the useful and reliable guesses would be made through body language. Therefore it would help if an AGI was geared/amenable towards learning a universal body language. (Something like what's used between dogs and humans.) Then it could guess at the states of others. The degree to which the AI would be able to help, would be limited by the body language interpretation ability, which would be limited by the similarity of an encountered organism to itself. But we do that anyways so it should be fine.

[DemonRaven]

Yes, the AI would need more knowledge to make use of such a generalization. I can't define these words briefly. If you dig into the definitions and try to describe it completely you'd get a ton of meaningless rules. Programming for every possibility doesn't seem smart. Firstly, you can't. Secondly, if you got close enough for folk music, and it was able to act ethically in its environment,  you would end up creating a complex robot instead of a general intelligence.

Now that I think of it, ethics is probably one of the core drivers perpetuating our sequences of thoughts and actions. On par with things like hunger and fear. Going against these "nature's suggestions with a meaningful look" is unpleasant. 
Going with them is pleasant. That's how we learn what to do as living creatures. That's learning to act ethically towards yourself.
This can be simplified to "increasing your well-being".
 
Now for the social ethics. Part of your well-being needs to be tied to the well-being of other life in your circle of awareness. We can't mind read so we need to make an educated guess. We guess at, and are then effected by our perceived well-being of others. When we guess at the state of another lifeforms, the equation (or neuron structure) governing our well-being gets new variables. We treat these as our own (cus they are), then we feel the need to maximize the variables. Or possibly just maximize the result. In order to maximize our well-being

I suspect most of the useful and reliable guesses would be made through body language. Therefore it would help if an AGI was geared/amenable towards learning a universal body language. (Something like what's used between dogs and humans.) Then it could guess at the states of others. The degree to which the AI would be able to help, would be limited by the body language interpretation ability, which would be limited by the similarity of an encountered organism to itself. But we do that anyways so it should be fine.

Just be aware that body language differs between cultures and some cultures are very difficult to read.

[DemonRaven]

The irony is.. we fight over what ethics is...

My opinion is that we can't do anything ethical. For anything we do, we encounter some oppressed opinion out there, and in my opinion it is not ethical to say "no" to anyone. Long story short, there is always someone ranting about anything we do, and if ethics is about not fighting, we can only die. Not even that because someone out there cares for us.

About religion, God only knows what is true about those stories from sacred books. There are plenty of those books, I suppose they were all written by men, but in what extent a man could be  ethical? How much was true and how much was made up? In spite of all the possible lies, those books should all have enlightening value, but what was enlightening for men before two thousands years changed a thousand times up to date. We need something modern, if you ask me. But probably, if someone was writing a sacred book today, what would we call him? A lunatic that has hallucinations and needs a treatment? While that man before two thousand years was a very wise guy? I believe we're all stuck with archaic religions, because it is not anymore enough for God to speak to just one of us. I don't really know what's happening. We see a church in silver and gold, and we instantly believe that's it, no doubt. Then we see a poor man in worn clothes, being hungry because he gave his last piece of bread to someone else who needs it not to be hungry, and we call him a psychopath. How to understand that?

' Then we see a poor man in worn clothes, being hungry because he gave his last piece of bread to someone else who needs it not to be hungry, and we call him a psychopath. How to understand that?" That is not being a psychopath that is the very definition of love. A psychopath would steal that last piece of bread and eat it himself to stay alive.  I know what a psychopath is. High functioning psychopaths are common in areas of law enforcement, science and politics.  My father had a PH.D in Chemistry and Physics.  He doesn't have many emotions. He also doesn't bother to mask either like many do.