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by slibhb 1166 days ago
> Human ethical norms are highly complex, and are the result of a long evolutionary history that will not be shared by any AI. The chances of any arbitrary set of ethical values being compatible with human life is very low.

If AI is trained by a huge corpus of human language, it may very well share our norms/values.
5 comments
swombat 1166 days ago
Our norms and values include that we treat sentient creatures that we deem inferior as if they had no moral value.

So that's not very comforting tbh.

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pas 1156 days ago
Not really. If anything our corpus shows that we're a big fuzzy bunch, not a hivemind. We don't have one set of norms and values.

There are about 1.2 billion hindus, and a lot of them treat cows as "sacred". Which in practice means they make sure not to hit them with cars, and just let them be. If a superhuman AI would treat us like that, that's a pretty okay scenario compared to the extinction-level ones.

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turtleyacht 1166 days ago
Wouldn't it be split along language lines?

English, Russian, Spanish, etc.

I'm not sure how much the LLM has vacuumed up, or whether anyone has appended to their prompts, "in Portuguese."

It would be interesting to see how interpretations differ depending on the "translation," or if there is universal agreement.

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mrob 1166 days ago
I don't think that's likely, because human values came into existence because of the evolved goal of reproductive fitness in an environment of natural selection. LLMs are trained to imitate human language, not to have many descendants. They could well "understand" human language (in whatever meaning you choose to interpret that), but that doesn't mean that imitating human values is the mechanism by which they will do so. The success of current LLMs suggests that there's a much simpler way to do it.
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hiAndrewQuinn 1166 days ago
Nobody wants an AI that shares norms and values with us, though. We just want a machine which does its job as efficiently as possible. Norms are brakes on actions which are fundamentally at odds with the nature of economic activity.
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robwwilliams 1166 days ago
An AI perhaps, but not an AGI.
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