

Ask HN: How would you create an ethical AI - zitterbewegung

What does HN as a group actually think about how could we design AI that is ethical and how would you do that. By Strong AI I mean an AI that is smarter than human intellect. I will leave my design as a comment to this post.
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zitterbewegung
My idea would be as follows.

1\. The financial system is extremely automated already. Not bitcoin but the
financial system in General. So the first step in this ethical AI system would
be to train it to be an ethical hedonist. I am already an ethical hedonist so
I am the domain expert.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonism)

2\. Then I would say make an agent that would make purchases based on my own
likes and dislikes. This agent would use whatever API's are necessary to do
this.

3\. The last step would be to take the agent that I create and say 'Based upon
your opinion of me and us as a system how can we increase our joint utility'.

4\. The last step would be to create a trust that would make the AI the
executor of the trust and it would work through lawyers to implement the joint
utility function.

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onion2k
I doubt hedonism would work once you have more than 1 AI - there would be
competing goals in the overall system. What represents pleasure to one agent
might make another less happy, so the two would 'fight' and (presumably) both
end up in a less positive position. Instead, I would aim for something more
like Epicureanism; that is to say, maximise your own happiness but only if it
doesn't impact negatively on others. Applying philosophic principles to AI is
quite interesting.

This also raises the question of whether you would want an AI to consider
ethics - if you think of it as something that works for you rather than
humanity as a whole, and assuming that it's so much smarter than you that you
can't comprehend what it's doing, having it do things that your ethical stance
would stop you doing yourself would be distinctly advantageous. You could reap
the benefits of screwing everyone over without even knowing you're doing it.

