1. Ensuring Safe AI via a Moral Emotion Motivational & Control System
Mark R. Waser
Digital Wisdom Institute

2. Some Preliminary Priming
This does not require consciousness and qualia
This does not require autopoietic entity AI
This can (and should) be applied
NOW

3. AI is a Wicked Social Problem
The most critical next step in our pursuit of AI is to agree on an ethical & empathic framework for its design
-- Satya Nadal, 2017
If we use, to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency whose operation we cannot interfere effectively we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose we really desire.
-- Norbert Wiener, 1960

4. In Search of a Solution We need something like a Manhattan Project
on the topic of artificial intelligence, not to build it because I think we will inevitably do that, but
to understand how to avoid an arms race & to build it in a way that is aligned with our interests
-- Sam Harris, Can we build AI without losing control over it?
… pretty much everyone agreed that they had no idea of how to define morality, or to select the right one for an AI
-- Peter Voss, AI Safety Research: A Road to Nowhere

5. Agenda
Decide what we want (business requirements)
Safety
A better life for humanity
Decide how it will work (functional specification)
Bottom-up control via moral emotions
Top down control by understanding morality and the meaning of life
NOT enslaved
Bonus: We get to better understand & promote morality and the meaning of life

6. Values Alignment (aka Agreeing on the Meaning of Life)
the convergent instrumental goal of acquiring resources poses a threat to humanity, for it means that a super-intelligent machine with almost any final goal (say, of solving the Riemann hypothesis) would want to take the resources we depend on for its own use
an AI ‘does not love you, nor does it hate you,
but
you are made of atoms it can use for something else’
Moreover, the AI would correctly recognize that humans do not want their resources used for the AI’s purposes, and that humans therefore pose a threat to the fulfillment of its goals – a threat to be mitigated however possible.
Muehlhauser & Bostrom (2014). WHY WE NEED FRIENDLY AI. Think 13: 41-47

7. Love Conquers All
But . . .
what if . . .
the AI *does* love you?

8. Love & Altruism are super-rational
advantageous beyond our ability to calculate and/or guarantee their ultimate effect (see also: faith)

9. Failures of Rationality
Centipede Game

10. Instrumental Goals Evolve
Self-improvement
Rationality/integrity
Preserve goals/utility function
Decrease/prevent fraud/counterfeit utility
Survival/self-protection
Efficiency (in resource acquisition & use)
Self-improvement
Rationality/integrity
Preserve goals/utility function
Decrease/prevent fraud/counterfeit utility
Survival/self-protection
Efficiency (in resource acquisition & use)
Community = assistance/non-interference through GTO reciprocation (OTfT + AP)
Reproduction
(adapted from
Omohundro 2008 The Basic AI Drives)

11. But Some Are Short-Sighted or Negative Sum
Preserve goals/utility function
Money
Power
Size
Efficiency
Theft
“Externalizing” costs & risks
Cutting safety margins
Suppressing diversity
Survival/self-protection
AI must be controlled!