Discussion of Goal Systems in Ethical AGI Design (CogPrime)

12.3 The Value of an Explicit Goal System 209 12.3 The Value of an Explicit Goal System One of the subtle issues confronted in the quest to design ethical AGIs is how closely one wants to emulate human ethical judgment and behavior. Here one confronts the brute fact that, even according to their own deeply-held standards, humans are not all that ethical. One high-level conclusion we came to very early in the process of designing CogPrime is that, just as humans are not the most intelligent minds achievable, they are also not the most ethical minds achievable. Even if one takes human ethics, broadly conceived, as the standard — there are almost surely possible AGI systems that are much more ethical according to human standards than nearly all human beings. This is not mainly because of ethics-specific features of the human mind, but rather because of the nature of the human motivational system, which leads to many complexities that drive humans to behaviors that are unethical according to their own standards. So, one of the design decisions we made for CogPrime — with ethics as well as other reasons in mind — was not to closely imitate the human motivational system, but rather to craft a novel motivational system combining certain aspects of the human motivational system with other profoundly non-human aspects. On the other hand, the design of ethical AGI systems still has a lot to gain from the study of human ethical cognition and behavior. Human ethics has many aspects, which we associate here with the different types of memory, and it’s important that AGI systems can encompass all of them. Also, as we will note below, human ethics develops in childhood through a series of natural stages, parallel to and entwined with the cognitive developmental stages reviewed in Chapter 11 above. We will argue that for an AGI with a virtual or robotic body, it makes sense to think of ethical development as proceeding through similar stages. In a CogPrime context, the particulars of these stages can then be understood in terms of the particulars of CogPrime’s cognitive processes — which brings AGI ethics from the domain of theoretical abstraction into the realm of practical algorithm design and education. But even if the human stages of ethical development make sense for non-human AGIs, this doesn’t mean the particulars of the human motivational system need to be replicated in these AGIs, regarding ethics or other matters. A key point here is that, in the context of human intelligence, the concept of a "goal" is a descriptive abstraction. But in the AGI context, it seems quite valuable to introduce goals as explicit design elements (which is what is done in CogPrime ) — both for ethical reasons and for broader AGI design reasons. Humans may adopt goals for a time and then drop them, may pursue multiple conflicting goals simultaneously, and may often proceed in an apparently goal-less manner. Sometimes the goal that a person appears to be pursuing, may be very different than the one they think they’re pursuing. Evolutionary psychology [BDL93] argues that, directly or indirectly, all humans are ultimately pursuing the goal of maximizing the inclusive fitness of their genes — but given the complex mix of evolution and self-organization in natural history [Sal93], this is hardly a general explanation for human behavior. Ultimately, in the human context, "goal" is best thought of as a frequently useful heuristic concept. AGI systems, however, need not emulate human cognition in every aspect, and may be architected with explicit "goal systems." This provides no guarantee that said AGI systems will actually pursue the goals that their goal systems specify — depending on the role that the goal system plays in the overall system dynamics, sometimes other dynamical phenomena might intervene and cause the system to behave in ways opposed to its explicit goals. However, we submit that this design sketch provides a better framework than would exist in an AGI system closely emulating the human brain. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013125