Lifelong recursive self-improver, on his way to exploding really intelligently :D
More seriously: my posts are mostly about AI alignment, with an eye towards moral progress and creating a better future. If there was a public machine ethics forum, I would write there as well.
An idea:
We have a notion of what good is and how to do good
We could be wrong about it
It would be nice if we could use technology not only to do good, but also to also improve our understanding of what good is.
The idea above, and the fact that I’d like to avoid producing technology that can be used for bad purposes, is what motivates my research. Feel free to reach out if you relate!
At the moment I am doing research on agents whose behaviour is driven by a reflective process analogous to human moral reasoning, rather than by a metric specified by the designer. See Free agents.
Here are other suggested readings from what I’ve written so far:
-Naturalism and AI alignment
-From language to ethics by automated reasoning
-Criticism of the main framework in AI alignment
Hey! I’ve had a look at some parts of this post, don’t know where the sequence is going exactly, but I thought that you might be interested in some parts of this post I’ve written. Below I give some info about how it relates to ideas you’ve touched on:
I am not sure about the views of the average non-naturalist realist, but in my post (under Moral realism and anti-realism, in the appendix) I link three different pieces that give an analysis of the relation between metaethics and AI: some people do seem to think that aspects of ethics and/or metaethics can affect the behaviour of AI systems.
It is also possible that the border between naturalism and non-naturalism is less neat and clear than how it appears in the standard metaethics literature, which likes classifying views in well-separated buckets.
I argue in my post that this idea heavily depends on agent design and internal structure. As how I understand things, one way in which we can get a moral agent is by building an AI that has a bunch of (possibly many) human biases and is guided by design towards figuring out epistemology and ethics on its own. Some EAs, and rationalists in particular, might be underestimating how easy it is to get an AI that dislikes suffering, if one follows this approach.
If you know someone who would like to work on the same ideas, or someone who would like to fund research on these ideas, please let me know! I’m looking for them :)