The interactions between enhancement and dignity as a quality are complex and link into fundamental issues in ethics and value theory. What properties should we want a proposal for an AI governance pathway to have? Dignity and Enhancementĭoes human enhancement threaten our dignity as some have asserted? Or could our dignity perhaps be technologically enhanced? After disentangling several different concepts of dignity, this essay focuses on the idea of dignity as a quality (a kind of excellence admitting of degrees). Public Policy and Superintelligent AI: A Vector Field Approach It has applications in technology policy and many other areas. To combat this problem, we propose a principle of conformity. In cases where several altruistic agents each have an opportunity to undertake some initiative, a phenomenon arises that is analogous to the winner's curse in auction theory. Is aggregative ethics doomed? The Unilateralist's Curse: The Case for a Principle of Conformity We explore a variety of potential cures, and discover that none works perfectly and all have serious side-effects. Aggregative consequentialism (and many other important ethical theories) are threatened by total paralysis.
Since an infinite cardinal quantity is unchanged by the addition or subtraction of a finite quantity, it looks as though you can't change the value of the world.
But you can presumably do only a finite amount of good or bad. Given some assumptions, aggregative ethics implies that such a world contains an infinite amount of positive value and an infinite amount of negative value.
Infinite EthicsĬosmology shows that we might well be living in an infinite universe that contains infinitely many happy and sad people. These are resources that an advanced civilization could have used to create value-structures, such as sentient beings living worthwhile lives. Suns are illuminating and heating empty rooms, unused energy is being flushed down black holes, and our great common endowment of negentropy is being irreversibly degraded into entropy on a cosmic scale. Hebrew, Italian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovak,Īstronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development Recounts the Tale of a most vicious Dragon that ate thousands of people every day, and of the actions that the King, the People, and an assembly of Dragonologists took with respect thereto. We apply this heuristic to the case of cognitive enhancements, and argue that the consequentialist case for this is much stronger than commonly recognized. We present a heuristic for correcting for one kind of bias (status quo bias), which we suggest affects many of our judgments about the consequences of modifying human nature. The Reversal Test: Eliminating Status Quo Bias in Applied Ethics Strategic Implications of Openness in AI DevelopmentĪn analysis of the global desirability of different forms of openness (including source code, science, data, safety techniques, capabilities, and goals). Humans are relatively expensive but absolutely cheap. Ethics & Policy Sharing the World with Digital Minds