Joscha Bach on ethical progress, and AI – it’s fascinating to think ‘What’s the ultimate utility function?’ – should we seek the answer in our evolved motivations?
Discussion points:
0:07 Future directions in ethical progress
1:13 Pain and suffering – concern for things we cannot regulate or change
1:50 Reward signals – we should only get them for things we can regulate
2:42 As soon as minds become mutable ethics dramatically changes – an artificial mind may be like a Zen master on steroids
2:53 The ultimate utility function – how can we maximize the neg-entropy in this universe?
3:29 Our evolved motives don’t align well to this ultimate utility function
4:10 Systems which only maximize what they can consume – humans are like yeast
Joscha Bach, Ph.D. is an AI researcher who worked and published about cognitive architectures, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, and multi-agent systems. He earned his Ph.D. in cognitive science from the University of Osnabrück, Germany, and has built computational models of motivated decision making, perception, categorization, and concept-formation. He is especially interested in the philosophy of AI and in the augmentation of the human mind.
Joscha has taught computer science, AI, and cognitive science at the Humboldt-University of Berlin and the Institute for Cognitive Science at Osnabrück. His book “Principles of Synthetic Intelligence” (Oxford University Press) is available on amazon.
