Ethics

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Understood to be fair for all stakeholders in context. Good for the whole.

Ethics expressed as unambiguously prioritized rules.

Ethical rules define constraints on the variety of actions and have a higher priority than the goals for purpose. By always obeying the relevant highest priority rules, the regulator is guaranteed to act ethically within the scope of the ethical schema, which provides a model of acceptable (ethical) behaviour. The ethical rules have the power of veto over possible actions and strategies, which makes it safe for AI to generate candidate strategies and actions algorithmically, without having to worry whether it might generate unethical possibilities.

Ethics must be expressed as unambiguously prioritized laws, regulations, and rules that codify **constraints and imperatives**, for example, Isaac Asimov’s First Law of Robotics: “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” [11], but ideally, expressed unambiguously in a formal language such as XML, which can be understood by humans and computers.

Since ethical schemas vary between different cultures, in machines, they must be handled like plug-in software modules. And because an ethical schema can encode any ethics, good or evil, each ethical schema must be anchored explicitly in the laws of a legislative jurisdiction. When a person or system crosses a state or national border it is necessary to activate a different set of ethical schemas, i.e., a different set of laws, regulations, and rules. And the ethics modules must be prioritized so that it is unambiguous which module has precedence in the event of a conflict, for example, between national and state laws. The highest-level laws could be encoded in hardware to be unhackable.

A taxonomy of ethics modules can provide rules for all conceivable situations. For example, gun-law, traffic-rules, child-care, tax-law, contract-law, maritime-law, drone-flying, police-regulations, and warfare-rules-of-engagement. And the ethics modules can be treated like device drivers, so that to be fully operational, a hypothetical gun-carrying robot that can drive on roads requires valid ethics modules for gun-law and traffic-rules. Without the necessary ethics modules for the appropriate legal jurisdiction, the robot’s gun or driving capabilities are automatically disabled.

By legislating that all autonomous artificial intelligence systems must obey appropriate ethics modules that are issued by an organization that is run by humans, we can establish a control mechanism that should ensure that intelligent machines are always subject to human ethics; without unduly restricting the freedom of AI researchers. In fact, it will free up AI researchers and knowledge engineers to focus on the more challenging requisites of truth, variety, predictability, and intelligence.

# When we introduce ethics, the effectiveness function must be modified because the effect of behaving ethically is that it reduces the variety of options that are available, by removing all possibilities that are unethical.

Thus, if A is an ethical politician and B is an unethical politician, we get something like the following: EffectivenessA = PurposeA × TruthA × (VarietyA − EthicsA) × PredictabilityA × IntelligenceA × InfluenceA (2)

EffectivenessB = PurposeB × TruthB × VarietyB × PredictabilityB × IntelligenceB × InfluenceB (3)

which captures the reality that politicians and businessmen who lie and cheat have an advantage over ones that are ethical.

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Consider JDG’s eight ethical principles in

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