Mind and Machine - Notes

By Wayne Brown

Provably Beneficial AI | Stuart Russell

  • Single valued "value" function
  • Optimizing model
  • Role in whole society is simplified to the point of a cartoon
  • No mention of fundamental issues either of values or computation
We see a lot of speakers talking about somehow programming ethics into the machine. To me, this is essentially the same problem as programming ethics into a bureaucracy. The Bureaucracy uses the computer and becomes more efficiently evil in the process.

Problems with "optimization" ...

  • "Value" is relative - dependent on who is doing the valuing and even when the valuing takes place. It is not subject to amalgamation, averaging or optimization over populations. 
  • Money is a bad proxy for "value" but is often assumed to be identical with value. I have a whole blog on this.
Whatever you are trying to do and whatever goals you are trying to model, both the machine and the individual must be considered to be embedded in society (or even the environment as a whole). For example, any rough analogue of "optimization" must at least take into account things like the cost of the technology, the impact (typically "externalized), the feasibility of deploying the technology, security, market factors, politics and on and on. In a practical case, assumptions can be simplified but only if we explicitly acknowledge what we know is relevant but has been left out.

To mention just one factor that is typically swept under the carpet: the "cost" of human time is almost always reduced to dollars and the cost of re-shuffling society to move the individual to a new situation is typically "externalized". In my own practical experience, this process usually ignores the valuable skills that the individual brings to the organization and concentrates only on the portion of those skills that are used to perform whatever the computer is supposed to do. It usually turns out that human judgment was 90% of the job and this work needs to be shuffled on to somebody else or lost entirely.

"Mind and Machine" - Links that use the working title




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