Digifesto

An intriguing chapter that follows naturally from Nick Bostrom’s core argument is his discussion of machine ethics writ large. He asks: suppose one could install into an omnipotent machine ethical principles, trusting it with the future of humanity. What principles should we install?

What Bostrom accomplishes by positing his Superintelligence (which begins with something simply smarter than humans, and evolves over the course of the book into something that takes over the galaxy) is a return to what has been called “the God’s eye view”. Philosophers once attempted to define truth and morality according to perspective of an omnipotent–often both transcendent and immanent–god. Through the scope of his work, Bostrom has recovered some of these old themes. He does this not only through his discussion of Superintelligence (and positing its existence in other solar systems already) but also through his simulation arguments.

The way I see it, one thing I am doing by challenging the idea of an intelligence explosion and its resulting in a superintelligent singleton is problematizing this recovery of the God’s Eye view. If your future world is governed by many sovereign intelligent systems instead of just one, then ethics are something that have to emerge from political reality. There is something irreducibly difficult about interacting with other intelligences and it’s from this difficulty that we get values, not the other way around. This sort of thinking is much more like Habermas’s mature ethical philosophy.

I’ve written about how to apply Habermas to the design of networked publics that mediate political interactions between citizens. What I built and offer as toy example in that paper, @TheTweetserve, is simplistic but intended just as a proof of concept.

As I continue to read Bostrom, I expect a convergence on principles. “Coherent extrapolated volition” sounds a lot like a democratic governance structure with elected experts at first pass. The question of how to design a governance structure or institution that leverages artificial intelligence appropriately while legitimately serving its users motivates my dissertation research. My research so far has only scratched the surface of this problem.