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12 The Engineering and Development of Ethics

What we can do, in this face of all this uncertainty, is to use our common sense to craft artificial minds that seem rationally and intuitively likely to be forces for good rather than otherwise – and revise our ideas frequently and openly based on what we learn as our research progresses. We have roughly outlined our views on AGI ethics, which have informed the CogPrime design in countless ways; but the current CogPrime design itself is just the initial condition for an AGI project. Assuming the project succeeds in creating an AGI preschooler, experimentation with this preschooler will surely teach us a great deal: both about AGI architecture in general, and about AGI ethics architecture in particular. We will then refine our cognitive and ethical theories and our AGI designs as we go about engineering, observing and teaching the next generation of systems.

All this is not a magic bullet for the creation of beneficial AGI systems, but we believe it's the right process to follow. The creation of AGI is part of a larger evolutionary process that human beings are taking part in, and the crafting of AGI ethics through engineering, interaction and instruction is also part of this process. There are no guarantees here – guarantees are rare in real life – but that doesn't mean that the situation is dire or hopeless, nor that (as some commentators have suggested [Joy00, McK03]) AGI research is too dangerous to pursue. It means we need to be mindful, intelligent, compassionate and cooperative as we proceed to carry out our parts in the next phase of the evolution of mind.

With this perspective in mind, we will conclude this chapter with a list of "Eight Ways to Bias Open-Source AGI Toward Friendliness", borrowed from a previous paper by Ben Goertzel and Joel Pitt of that name. These points summarize many of the points raised in the prior sections of this chapter, in a relatively crisp and practical manner:

1. Engineer Multifaceted Ethical Capabilities, corresponding to the multiple types of memory, including rational, empathic, imitative, etc.
2. Foster Rich Ethical Interaction and Instruction, with instructional methods according to the communication modes corresponding to all the types of memory: verbal, demonstrative, dramatic/depictive, indicative, goal-oriented.
3. Engineer Stable, Hierarchy-Dominated Goal Systems ... which is enabled nicely by CogPrime's goal framework and its integration with the rest of the CogPrime design
4. Tightly Link AGI with the Global Brain, so that it can absorb human ethical principles, both via natural interaction, and perhaps via practical implementations of current loosely-defined strategies like CEV, CAV and CBV
5. Foster Deep, Consensus-Building Interactions Between People with Divergent Views, so as to enable the interaction with the Global Brain to have the most clear and positive impact
6. Create a Mutually Supportive Community of AGIs which can then learn from each other and police against unfortunate developments (an approach which is meaningful if the AGIs are architected so as to militate against unexpected radical accelerations in intelligence)
7. Encourage Measured Co-Advancement of AGI Software and AGI Ethics Theory
8. Develop Advanced AGI Sooner Not Later

The last two of these points were not explicitly discussed in the body of the chapter, and so we will finalize the chapter by reviewing them here.

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