On 5/27/07, Stathis Papaioannou <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 28/05/07, Shane Legg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Which got me thinking. It seems reasonable to think that killing a > human is worse than killing a mouse because a human is more > intelligent/complex/conscious/...etc...(use what ever measure you > prefer) than a mouse. > > So, would killing a super intelligent machine (assuming it was possible) > be worse than killing a human? > > If a machine was more intelligent/complex/conscious/...etc... than > all of humanity combined, would killing it be worse than killing all of > humanity? Before you consider whether killing the machine would be bad, you have to consider whether the machine minds being killed, and how much it minds being killed. You can't actually prove that death is bad as a mathematical theorem; it is something that has to be specifically programmed, in the case of living things by evolution.
You're perpetuating a popular and pervasive moral fallacy here. The assumption that the moral rightness of a decision is tied to another's "personhood" and/or preferences is only an evolved heuristic based on its effectiveness in terms of promoting positive-sum interactions between similar agents. Any decision is always only a function of the decider in terms of promoting its own values. The morality of terminating a machine intelligence (or a person) depends not on the preference or intensity of preference of the object entity, but is a function of the decision-making context and expected scope of consequences of the principle(s) behind such a choice. To the extent terminating the object entity would be expected to promote the decider's values then the decision will be considered "good." To the extent such a "good" decision has agreement over a larger context of social decision-making, and to the extent the desired values are expected to be promoted over large scope, the decision will be considered "moral." I now return you to your regular programming... - Jef ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604&user_secret=7d7fb4d8
