HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013132.jpg

216
12 The Engineering and Development of Ethics

Once one goes beyond simplistic, childlike notions of fairness ("an eye for an eye" and so forth), applying rational justice in a purely intellectual sense is just as difficult as any other real-world logical inference problem. Ethical quandaries and quagmires are easily encountered, and are frequently cut through by a judicious application of empathic simulation.

On the other hand, empathy is a far more powerful force when used in conjunction with reason: analogical reasoning lets us empathize with situations we have never experienced. For instance, a person who has never been clinically depressed may have a hard time empathizing with individuals who are; but using the power of reason, they can imagine their worst state of depression magnified by several times and then extended over a long period of time, and then reason about what this might be like ... and empathize based on their inferential conclusion. Reason is not antithetical to empathy but rather is the key to making empathy more broadly impactful.

Finally, the enlightened stage of ethical development involves both a deeper compassion and a more deeply penetrating rationality and objectiveness. Empathy with all sentient beings is manageable in everyday life only once one has deeply reflected on one's own self and largely freed oneself of the confusions and illusions that characterize much of the ordinary human's inner existence. It is noteworthy, for example, that Buddhism contains both a richly developed ethics of universal compassion, and also an intricate logical theory of the inner workings of cognition [Stc00], detailing in exquisite rational detail the manner in which minds originate structures and dynamics allowing them to comprehend themselves and the world.

12.4.4 Integrative Ethics and Integrative AGI

What does our integrative approach to ethical development have to say about the ethical development of AGI systems? The lessons are relatively straightforward, if one considers an AGI system that, like CogPrime, explicitly contains components dedicated to logical inference and to simulation. Application of the above ethical ideas to other sorts of AGI systems is also quite possible, but would require a lengthier treatment and so won't be addressed here.

In the context of a CogPrime-type AGI system, Kohlberg's stages correspond to increasingly sophisticated application of logical inference to matters of rights and fairness. It is not clear whether humans contain an innate sense of fairness. In the context of AGIs, it would be possible to explicitly wire a sense of fairness into an AGI system, but in the context of a rich environment and active human teachers, this actually appears quite unnecessary. Experiential instruction in the notions of rights and fairness should suffice to teach an inference-based AGI system how to manipulate these concepts, analogously to teaching the same AGI system how to manipulate number, mass and other such quantities. Ascending the Kohlberg stages is then mainly a matter of acquiring the ability to carry out suitably complex inferences in the domain of rights and fairness. The hard part here is inference control – choosing which inference steps to take – and in a sophisticated AGI inference engine, inference control will be guided by experience, so that the more ethical judgments the system has executed and witnessed, the better it will become at making new ones. And, as argued above, simulative activity can be extremely valuable for aiding with inference control. When a logical inference process reaches a point of acute uncertainty (the backward or forward chaining inference tree can't decide which expansion step to take), it can run a simulation to cut through the confusion – i.e., it can use empathy to decide which

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013132