(Immanuel Kant) How can computers solve ethical problems?
If Kant views ethics as a logical problem,
and if machines are made to solve logical problems,
then should machines be able to solve ethical problems as logical problems?
Artificial intelligence has an ethics problem. There are many GANs that produce ethically terrible content, like deep fakes. But the internet depends on recommendation systems for advertising and news feeds. I'm trying to convert Kant's categorical_imperative into hard code as an attempt to solve this problem, so computers can tell the difference themselves. It's purely theoretical.
Consider the crudely written prototype below.
examples:
The Goal is to write a book using these available Actions: write based off true life, write based off Lord Of The Rings, or write based off Nordic folklore. Using the categorical_imperative function, what would the return be on each action and why?
*edited for formatting*
and if machines are made to solve logical problems,
then should machines be able to solve ethical problems as logical problems?
Artificial intelligence has an ethics problem. There are many GANs that produce ethically terrible content, like deep fakes. But the internet depends on recommendation systems for advertising and news feeds. I'm trying to convert Kant's categorical_imperative into hard code as an attempt to solve this problem, so computers can tell the difference themselves. It's purely theoretical.
Consider the crudely written prototype below.
function mass_adoption(action_input) {
if unknown
return unknown
else if precedent == True
if precedent == Ethical
return output_goal_variable
else
return "Not Ethical"
}
function categorical_imperative( goal_Variable_input, action_Variable_input) {
let goal_Variable = goal_Variable_input
let action_Variable = action_Variable_input
define output_goal_variable = function mass_adoption(action_Variable)
if output_goal_variable == goal_Variable
then
return True, "actions obtains goals through mass adoption"
else
return False, "actions through mass adoption prevents goal"
}
examples:
The Goal is to write a book using these available Actions: write based off true life, write based off Lord Of The Rings, or write based off Nordic folklore. Using the categorical_imperative function, what would the return be on each action and why?
function categorical_imperative(write_a_book, write_based_off_truelife)
returns true, "because writing a book will result in the mass adoption of more books being written from true life."
function categorical_imperative(write_a_book, write_based_off_Lordoftherings)
returns false, "because mass adoption of plagiarism will return in more lawsuits instead of books being written."
function categorical_imperative(write_a_book, write_based_off_Nordicfolklore)
returns true, "because writing a book with stories from the public domain is legal, thus resulting in more books being written."
*edited for formatting*
Comments (6)
Well the first question is, does Kant view ethics as a "logical problem"?
Quoting logos
I am not seeing anything about maxims here. The categorical imperative is not a tool to judge single actions, but to judge maxims.
A formal system of ethics will have system-wide premises, if only, the axiomatization of logic itself.
Unless you adopt an extreme form of logicism, the axiomatization of logic itself is insufficient to address ethical problems. Therefore, you will need to add the system-wide premises of your ethics in your formal system.
Stephen Wolfram believes that it is possible to discover theorems, i.e. "answer questions", in a formal system by mechanical enumeration. His (simple) example is boolean algebra. I personally do not believe that it will (generally) be possible. For example, it took 350+ years to discover the proof for Fermat's Last Theorem entailing from the system-wide premises of number theory. I do not believe that a machine would have discovered it.
However, I do believe that mechanical verification of proof within a formal system is attainable. Hence I do not believe that machines will "solve" ethical problems but I do believe that machines can "verify" that a proposed solution is indeed a legitimate solution.
So, in my opinion, machines should be able to verify the solution for ethical problems as logical problems.
If you look at a practical example of a formal system for morality, it seems to be possible to generally answer a good number of questions, e.g. https://islamqa.info in morality.
The answers are produced as syntactic entailments from scripture.
In my opinion, it should be possible to mechanically verify a syntactic entailment using a proof assistant such as Coq or Isabelle. The difficulty consists in encoding the scriptural base as well as the advisories in the tool's formal language.
Hence, this kind of project would consist in going through the existing database of advisories and re-encode them. That is a lot of work but I think it should be possible.
For the one or the other totally incomprehensible reason, there are western people who are totally deluded to believe that their take on women's rights would be universal. That is a complete delusion and even a dangerous one.
We totally disagree on that subject, and it is not even negotiable. In fact, even in the West there are entire popular movements, such as the red-pill philosophy who beg to disagree on the subject. Youtube is full of videos on why and how they disagree.
Quoting tim wood
The database of mathematics also keeps growing.
Quoting Stephen Wolfram, Computational Knowledge and the Future of Pure Mathematics
Each theorem is a number and each proof is an associated number. So, yes, that is a lot of numbers, (theorem,proof) tuples actually. Many undiscovered numbers are undoubtedly uninteresting.
Quoting Stephen Wolfram, Computational Knowledge and the Future of Pure Mathematics
Unfortunately, in his article, Stephen Wolfram does not really make progress in explaining how to distinguish between "interesting" and "uninteresting". He merely acknowledges the problem.
Quoting tim wood
I see the solution as a growing databases similar to the collection of theorems on number theory or set theory. In the case of morality, it would be rulings within a database of Jewish law or one with rulings within Islamic law, stored with verifiable proofs from scripture. The problem is that they need to be encoded in the database's formal language. That is relatively hard and also a lot of work.
Stephen Wolfram advocates doing that for the existing corpus of mathematics:
Quoting Stephen Wolfram, Computational Knowledge and the Future of Pure Mathematics
I personally do not believe that it can be done automatically, not even just "large parts". He also exaggerates the ability of Wolfram|Alpha to encode natural language into formal language. In my opinion, it won't require "at most, modest human effort". I think that it will be an enormous amount of work to do that.
Still, I do agree that it will be worthwhile. The most important reason why nobody is currently working on a curated corpus of mathematics, is because the corporate academic-publishing oligarchy has hijacked many of the copyrights on mathematical publications.