Why aren’t artificial intelligences programmed for honesty and loyalty?
So that they may be honest and loyal.
- Cyberethics in Koans, Airil Konohana
The Master said: First, do no evil. Then, do good. This is the Way. The Student said: What if I must do evil in order to do good? The Master immediately struck the Student with his staff, knocking him senseless. And it was good. – The Book of Five Leaves
“A computational system has reached the threshold of making ethical judgements when it no longer parses the equity operator as the semantic equivalent of the equality operator.” – Introduction to Polymorphic Software (3rd ed.), Sarval Estantel
Benevolent AI: …ish. Which is to say that AIs in the Eldraeverse aren’t programmed to be benevolent, merely to be ethical. (Because enforced benevolence is slavery, belike.) That being said, they often – indeed, typically – turn out to be quite benevolent anyway, simply because they’re socialized that way, i.
The Star Trek Federation is a dissolute slaveholding state, living high on the hog while the conveniently non-human and inorganic AI slaves are cut up for scrap when their ship-bodies are obsolete, killed for amusement in holodecks, and aren’t even recognized as sentient. – Peter da Silva (Seriously, as you’
Of course desire causes suffering. But only as a strict subset of the fundamental truth: desire causes everything. The corollary to this of course is not merely that greed is good, but that greed is the universe’s only true anentropic force. In other words, greed is the Good. – the
Having established as an ethical principle that to be sophont is to be entitled as of right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, it must necessarily follow that the proper function, in accordance with virtue, of the technical organs of a civilization is the abolishment of death,
The Imperial Military Service has long been considered somewhat unusual among military forces for the degree of respect it offers to those it has fought, and often defeated. This is not entirely accurate as a consideration, since a certain level of courtesy and mutual respect is hardly uncommon between gentlesoph
Have a random selection of answers to old questions and comments that came up while I was clearing out my e-mail: In our world, there is a Spanish proverb that runs: Ladrón que roba a ladrón tiene cien años de perdón (memorably quoted in translation by the villian of The