[manux]

> The real problem with ethics is that it's not a science

This is simply untrue. The goal of AI ethics research is (also) to build algorithms where one of the _inputs_ is a set of ethics. It doesn't matter what those ethics are. It just so happens that the "set of ethics" currently fed in tends to have a particular flavor ("woke liberal" ethics), which you seem to disagree with. Finding the algorithms matters, and it's likely that the standard ethics put in are going to come from some dominant ideology, but we still need the algorithms if we are to understand how to make AI that aligns with humanity's interests (however they are defined).

I'd call that computer science.

[tanseydavid]

>> I'd call that computer science.

Yes it's Computer Science but it's implementing normative-ethics.

Why not provide the AI descriptive-ethics instead and let it decide for itself?

[LunaSea]

As you pointed out, people don't agree on a set of rules, so what's the point of the algorithm and field?

[manux]

Here's an analogy: laws vary from country to country, from state to state, city to city.

But we understand the principle of law-making, what laws mean and how they're applied. This is fairly uniform. What really changes from place to place is the content of those laws.

AI ethics and AI safety are attempting to give us a set of "law-making" rules but for AI. We get to decide (democratically ideally), in countries, states, cities, what "ethics" (what laws) we want, but AI Ethics as a field gives us tools to achieve that regardless of what the ethics/laws are.

For example, how do we encode the trolley problem in self-driving cars? We could decide democratically that cars should act and kill 1 instead of 5. Or the opposite. But then how do we translate that into ifs and else? No one really knows how to do that.