Morality: Orthogonal, at a Distance and Capitalistic

your Saturday roundup

• Moral Orthogonality and Alignment. Key to understanding the risk of artificial general intelligence (AGI) is knowing the nature of ethics. Is ethics a separate domain of knowledge to other general intelligence problem solving? Can one be smart and immoral? Is there a truth about ethics to reason about or discover? The optimistic view is that another intelligent being will converge to the same moral truth. “A general intelligence cannot be confined to one domain of knowledge… a general intelligence cannot be made not to think about certain questions. If it has boundless creativity, then it will have the capacity to think on all matters, including moral and even aesthetic questions.” But what if there are different intrinsic values that are not derived from reason? Then morality and intelligence can be “orthogonal” and you could have a superintelligent being with no or a very different morality. If we cannot expect AGI to figure out ethics on its own, we need to program our goals into the system in the first place. You’ll hear this described as “alignment” research.

• Morality at a Distance. We study conquers and sometimes admire them. (If you’re into that kind of thing, listen to the podcast How to Take Over the World.) Historians think about the reign afterwards, the spread of knowledge and generally take a broad, consequentialist and less than outraged view. If someone stole his neighbors stuff and killed the whole family, we’d be sure that was wrong. If a conquer does that with 100,000s of people centuries ago we change perspectives. Or take the Boston Tea Party for example. US Patriots today celebrate this prelude to righteous revolution. But if someone today were to destroy private property as part of a political protest against the government, how would those same patriots feel? Is it just that victors write history? Or is it that “a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic”?

• Freedom to Flourish? A loyal reader suggested I listen to a recent EconTalk podcast with Professor Munger (how many times has he been on the show?!) but at the end they have a great discussion about the moral arguments of capitalism. With the end of the cold war, making the moral case for capitalism seems less pressing. How do you think about it? Capitalism has strong arguments about freedom to flourish and property rights. There are also theoretical and empirical reasons to believe we get more of the material goods we want with capitalism. The price signal is amazing way of sharing information and allocating goods and services. But how should we handle the fact that people start out with different amounts of money? What should I read about the moral arguments for and against capitalism?

with DALL-E

Until next week,

Miles