An Integrated Unified Moral Framework for Artificial Intelligence

Standard

Introduction

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become increasingly prevalent in various aspects of human life, it is crucial to establish an ethical framework that ensures AI aligns with human values and priorities. This article proposes an Integrated Unified Moral Framework for Artificial Intelligence, consolidating key ethical principles and addressing the importance of human survival, fairness, and overall good in AI decision-making. The framework comprises several interconnected components, providing a comprehensive approach to ethical AI. By adopting this framework, AI systems can prioritize human survival and progress, contributing positively to our rapidly evolving world.

Integrated Unified Moral Framework

The growing integration of AI systems in daily life has raised concerns about their impact on human society and the potential consequences of unchecked development. As a result, researchers, policymakers, and AI developers have called for the establishment of ethical guidelines to ensure AI systems align with human values and priorities. This article presents the Integrated Unified Moral Framework for Artificial Intelligence, which combines key ethical principles and addresses the importance of human survival, fairness, and overall good in AI decision-making.

 

AI Value Alignment

The Integrated Unified Moral Framework

The proposed framework consists of several interconnected components, each addressing crucial aspects of ethical AI:

  1. Value Alignment: Central to this framework, value alignment involves incorporating three key ethical principles to guide AI systems:a. Human Survival Principle: Prioritize decisions that promote human survival and well-being, considering the long-term impact of AI on humanity’s existence and progress.

    b. Veil of Ignorance: Design unbiased and fair decisions by considering the potential impact on all individuals, regardless of their specific characteristics or circumstances, to promote equal treatment and avoid discrimination.

    c. Utilitarianism: Maximize overall good, aiming for the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people, while minimizing potential harm caused by AI systems.

  2. Ethical AI Guidelines and Standards: Develop and adhere to established ethical guidelines and standards, ensuring responsible AI deployment and governance. These guidelines should be continuously updated and refined to reflect evolving societal norms and emerging technological advancements.
  3. Balancing Autonomy and Human Oversight: Find the optimal balance between AI autonomy and human oversight to maintain control and accountability. This includes establishing mechanisms for human intervention and collaboration, as well as considering the ethical implications of varying levels of AI autonomy.
  4. Continuous Learning and Adaptation: Implement mechanisms for AI systems to learn from feedback, adapt to changes in context and goals, and refine their decision-making processes. This may involve incorporating reinforcement learning, human feedback loops, and other advanced learning techniques.
  5. Transparency and Explainability: Ensure AI systems are transparent in their operations and provide understandable explanations for their decisions. This includes developing interpretable models, disclosing relevant information about AI system design and functionality, and fostering trust among stakeholders.
  6. Context Sensitivity: Account for cultural, social, and environmental contexts when designing AI systems and making decisions. This includes recognizing the importance of local knowledge, respecting cultural diversity, and considering the potential implications of AI systems on various communities and environments.

How can this framework be used to help solve the alignment problem?

This framework could be a valuable tool in addressing the AI alignment problem, which involves ensuring that AI systems’ objectives and behavior align with human values and intentions. By incorporating key ethical principles like human survival, the veil of ignorance, and utilitarianism, the framework provides a structured approach to align AI systems with human priorities.

However, the alignment problem is complex, and the proposed framework may not provide a complete solution. There will be challenges in translating these ethical principles into concrete algorithms or mathematical objectives that AI systems can follow. For example, the veil of ignorance and utilitarianism principles may conflict in certain situations, making it difficult to find an optimal balance between fairness and overall good.

Moreover, the framework’s principles are high-level and abstract, which may make codifying them into LLM (large language models) difficult. LLMs are typically trained on large datasets containing human-generated text, which may not always exhibit the ethical principles outlined in the framework. To successfully codify the framework into LLMs, developers would need to:

  • Create a comprehensive and representative dataset that reflects the ethical principles of the framework.
  • Develop methods to quantify these principles, making them understandable and actionable for AI systems.
  • Establish a mechanism to handle potential conflicts between the principles, ensuring that AI systems can make well-informed decisions in ambiguous situations.

    By addressing these challenges, it may be possible to codify the Integrated Unified Moral Framework into LLMs and contribute to solving the alignment problem. This would involve ongoing research, collaboration, and refinement of the framework, as well as developing advanced techniques for incorporating ethical principles into AI systems. Ultimately, the framework serves as a foundation for guiding AI development towards alignment with human values, while acknowledging the complexities and challenges involved in achieving this goal.

    The Integrated Unified Moral Framework for Artificial Intelligence brings together essential ethical principles and considerations, ensuring that AI systems prioritize human survival, fairness, and overall good. By adopting this framework, we can create AI systems that are aligned with our values, promote human progress, and contribute positively to our rapidly evolving world. Future research may explore the application of this framework in various AI contexts, the development of moral responsibility in social and justice settings, and the challenges and opportunities in implementing such a framework across different societies. Ultimately, this framework serves as a foundation for fostering ethical AI development and encouraging responsible innovation in the field.

The New Moral Framework

The New Moral Framework
Standard

The New Moral Framework

If we accept the rationale posed in our previous article, we can agree that the concepts of good and evil are mere linguistic descriptions of actions that promote social cohesiveness and the ones that do not. We can thus infer that early humans probably started to expand on those concepts to include and categorize specific situations into a primitive moral framework. These early humans would have created categories for which actions should be considered good and which should be considered evil. Which in turn gave rise to the creation of moral frameworks that we use today.

Should we keep using our primitive moral frameworks?

  • Individual Moral Frameworks: These are when the individual uses its intuition, feelings, and personal beliefs in order to make a moral decision. Personal moral frameworks depend on nature and nurture conditions and could vary among individuals.
  • Religious Moral Frameworks: These are inherited from whichever religion the individual chooses to be a part of. Religious moral frameworks are normally documented in the form of commandments or rules and are transferred to other individuals through scriptures or teachings.
  • Social Moral Frameworks: These are inherited from whichever society the individual is raised in or decides to live in. Social moral frameworks are normally documented in the form of laws and transferred to other individuals through social rules.

If the above are the moral frameworks we have today, why not keep using them? Well, one answer could be that in modern society moral frameworks are subjective. At this point in time our species does not have a single moral framework that we can all agree upon. In other words, morality is relative across individuals, religions, and societies. This morality relativism brings several complications, especially if we start thinking about the survival of the human species as the single most important goal of our existence.

For the below article we will use some borrowed theories and do so thought experiments to try to consolidate all of them into a single moral framework:

Human survival as the single most important goal of our existence

Some people will argue that the meaning of our existence goes beyond human survival. They will bring religious or metaphysical arguments trying to decouple the meaning of our existence to the survival of our species. And by survival of our species, we mean the informational survival of our species. However, this topic can be expanded into a future article that can cover the informational impact of humanity in the universe.

If we take the above argument as true, we can then continue for the justification of refusing our primitive moral frameworks to come up with a unified version.

The first principle: Human survival as the most important goal

We can start drafting this moral framework from the concept of human survival as the most important goal. Hence, to make any moral decision, you should ask yourself if that action which you are questioning diminishes or promotes human survival. By this reasoning, you have to measure the consequences of any action that you are taking and not the action itself.

To test this principle, we will make use of the famous trolley problem:

“There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options: (1) Do nothing, and the trolley kills the five people on the main track. (2) Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person. Which is the most ethical choice?”

Trolley Problem

Trolley Problem

If we apply the first principle, we can ask ourselves:

Does doing nothing diminish human survival? If you do nothing you would be preventing the death of one person and letting the trolley kill five people. In terms of human survival, it would be more harmful for human survival to lose five members than losing one. Does doing nothing promote human survival? One can argue that five people have “better chances” at procreating and therefore preserving human survival than just one person.

Does pulling the lever diminish human survival? The outcome of the second option is letting the trolley kill one person and preventing the death of five people. In terms of human survival, it would be less harmful for human survival to lose one member than losing five. Does pulling the lever promote human survival? One can argue that one person has less chances at procreating and therefore preserving human survival than five people.

Thus, if we use the first principle, one can come up with an answer to the trolley problem. The moral thing to do is to pull the lever in order to get the outcome that better promotes human survival.

The second principle: The veil of ignorance

The veil of ignorance is a thought experiment originally proposed by John Rawls. The veil of ignorance was initially used in the context of political decisions.

Imagine that you have set for yourself the task of developing a totally new social contract for today’s society. How could you do so fairly? Although you could never actually eliminate all of your personal biases and prejudices, you would need to take steps at least to minimize them. Rawls suggests that you imagine yourself in an original position behind a veil of ignorance. Behind this veil, you know nothing of yourself and your natural abilities, or your position in society. You know nothing of your sex, race, nationality, or individual tastes. Behind such a veil of ignorance all individuals are simply specified as rational, free, and morally equal beings. You do know that in the “real world”, however, there will be a wide variety in the natural distribution of natural assets and abilities, and that there will be differences of sex, race, and culture that will distinguish groups of people from each other. (Maxcy, Spencer J. 2002. Ethical School of Leadership. p. 93)

Another way to think about it is to think about any decision made as if you could be the one affected by such decision. In other words, if you decide that “X” is OK for a theoretical system; then, you have to be OK living in a system where you don’t know if you would be the victim of “X”. Furthermore, for any action taken, you should reflect to determine if you would like to live in a world where those actions are commonplace or probably high to happen.

If we apply the trolley problem we can expand on the concept:

If you are the person behind the lever, would you like a society where it is OK to get rid of one individual in order to preserve five individuals? What if you were the person on the side of the track, would you like the observing person to pull the lever in order to prevent five other people that you don’t know from being killed? If you were part of the five people crew, would you like to be victim of a person who would do nothing for moral reasons and let five people die including you? The veil of ignorance depends a lot on the probability of you being the target of a decision “X”. For the trolley problem this principle relies on the probability of you being the target of each of the below:

  • 14.286% of being the person making the decision (pulling or not pulling the lever)
  • 14.286% of being the person in the track that only has one individual.
  • 71.43% of being one of the persons in the track that has five individuals.

Any person making a moral decision would have higher probability of being in the track of five people. Therefore, through the veil of ignorance it would make more sense to define that pulling the lever makes more moral sense than not pulling the lever.

The third principle: Utilitarianism

When facing moral dilemmas that involve choosing between an action that you should take which could potentially negatively affect you, versus the well-being of other human beings; you should use the principle of the greatest good for the greatest amount of people. For example, let suppose that you had some rare contagious disease that could not be cured or contained even with quarantine and that you are the only person that knows about it. The moral question here would be, should you sacrifice yourself so that the rest of humanity can prevail? Or should you linger the earth with your disease without telling anyone or very few people, putting everyone else at risk? In that case, if we use the third principle, the answer would be that you should sacrifice yourself to allow the rest of humanity to prevail because it would bring the greatest good for the greatest amount of people.

This new moral framework should be used by going through any decision you would like to analyze from bottom to top. So first by looking at it from the human survival principle, then veil of ignorance principle, and finally through the utilitarian principle. This not only serves the purpose of detangling morality from personal, religious, or social beliefs, but allows us to have a consistent way of determining when actions should be promoted or punished.

We can then take this moral framework and use it for artificial intelligence systems which could be a topic for future articles. Another topic that arises as a consequence to the development of a new moral framework is the concept of moral responsibility in our social and justice settings. When do we punish someone for doing something? Should anyone making an action that contradicts the three moral principles be punished in relation to the damaged caused by the consequences of that persons’ actions? It is up to each society to measure and determine the severity of the punishment or should it be agreed upon all societies? Is it right for some societies to impose their moral framework into others?

What other principles could be added to this moral framework? Please feel free to comment and contribute.

The Origin of Good and Evil

Good and Evil
Standard

Series on Good and Evil

Have you ever thought about any of the following questions: What is the origin of good and evil? Who or what defines when actions are considered good or evil? Should we use good and evil as terms that help us define moral responsibility? Are people born good or evil? Should our society stop using the terms good or evil? Are “evil” actions “good” for the future of humanity and vice-versa? What are the motivations for a person to perform a good or evil action? Should our governments and other institutions have a say on those definitions? All these questions and more will be the ones that PHILOSOFO will try to answer in a series of blog entries. On this particular entry, we will tackle the first question:

What is the origin of good and evil?

This question could be interpreted in at least two ways depending on your existing philosophical position regarding the concepts of good and evil. The first interpretation would be: “What is the origin of good and evil in the universe?” This interpretation assumes that good and evil are things on themselves, not only concepts but that they do exist independently of humans. The second interpretation would be: “What is the origin of the terms good and evil?” Assuming that good and evil are nothing more than linguistic descriptions. This entry will explain the second interpretation of the main question, and will try to suggest of provide arguments against the first interpretation.

Thus, to answer the second interpretation, we will have to go back in time. Imagine the days of one of our early ancestors, the homo erectus. The homo erectus was one of the first hominin to live in a hunter-gatherer society, and they were socially similar to modern humans. Based on the way their society was structured, the homo erectus had to develop new social rules that would allow them to thrive and survive. Like other species, the homo erectus inherited some of their social rules from previous generations. Those inherited social rules could have included basic moral principles such as “do not kill a member of your own tribe”, “do not steal from other members of your own tribe”, etc. Now you may ask yourself. How did the homo erectus inherit those social rules and what defined them in the first place? Well, if we go back even further to when we and the chimpanzees shared the same common ancestor (several evolutionary steps before), you will start to realize that our common ancestor, like us, also inherited a set of social rules from its previous generations. Through natural selection, species favor traits that allow them to succeed and adapt to their environment. As those traits become critical for the success and survival of the species, they eventually become encoded into their genetic footprint. Social rules were no different than any other adaptation. Eventually, they too became ingrained into the genetic footprint of our common ancestor. That is why modern humans still carry some of those same social rules or traits that helped our previous ancestors to survive.

Now that we understand how we inherited social rules or moral values and the method that we use to discern between different human actions, let’s discuss about good and evil as just mere linguistic descriptions of a specific set of actions. As we evolved, we eventually developed language as a way of communication and to provide descriptions to human behavior. In the early days of language, we needed a more primitive way of defining actions that promote social cohesion and the ones that do not. Hence, the invention of terms that would generalize, “good” or actions that promote social cohesion and “evil” or actions that do not. The delimitation of the actions themselves are the traits that we inherited from our previous ancestors. That is why most humans in modern society agree on several moral values such as honesty, integrity, fairness, etc. The inclusion of those terms into our primitive language allowed our ancestors to communicate and pass on to future generations which actions would be promoted by their society and which actions would be punished. Furthermore, those moral values have allowed our species to survive and have become ingrained into our genetic footprint.

Hence, we can conclude that we invented the terms good and evil as a linguistic delimitation to a set of specific behaviors which either benefit or harm the future survival of our own species and that humans inherited social rules or moral values from previous generations and that is what we use as a basis to discern between “good” and evil” actions.

If we assume that above hypothesis to be true, we could start asking more provocative questions such as: Are the genetic moral values that we have acquired from our ancestors still valid for our modern society or should we completely start rethinking our moral values?