How ethical would aliens be?
Ethics derived from biological evolution can be harsh — parasitism, invasiveness, and survival at all costs. Ethics derived from human culture is far more benevolent. Would alien ethics be based more on biology or culture? Let’s hope the latter.
Posted on big think, direct weblink at.
Posted on Big Think.
Biophysist and Biochemist Dr. Maximilian Plach talks about a groundbreaking new technology for editing genes, called CRISPR-Cas9. The tool allows scientists to make precise edits to DNA strands, which could lead to treatments for genetic diseases … but could also be used to create so-called “designer babies.” Max reviews how CRISPR-Cas9 works — and asks the scientific community to pause and discuss the ethics of this new tool. Max has earned his PhD in biophysics and computational biology at the University of Regensburg, Germany. He is now Chief Scientific Officer of 2bind, a dynamic and growing company focused on providing biophysical research services for biotech and pharma industries. It is therefore no wonder that Max closely follows the latest breakthroughs and developments in biotech and biomedical technology. He is a long viewer and listener of TED talks; the more exotic, the better. Or who doesn’t remember the talk about the world’s worst city flags? This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.
Ammaar Reshi was playing around with ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot from OpenAI when he started thinking about the ways artificial intelligence could be used to make a simple children’s book to give to his friends. Just a couple of days later, he published a 12-page picture book, printed it, and started selling it on Amazon without ever picking up a pen and paper.
The feat, which Reshi publicized in a viral Twitter thread, is a testament to the incredible advances in AI-powered tools like ChatGPT—which took the internet by storm two weeks ago with its uncanny ability to mimic human thought and writing. But the book, Alice and Sparkle, also renewed a fierce debate about the ethics of AI-generated art. Many argued that the technology preys on artists and other creatives—using their hard work as source material, while raising the specter of replacing them.
Well… that’s me uninvited to the bioethicist’s christmas party…
Bioethicists frequently dictate what patients can and cannot do with their own bodies, and yet the general public very rarely questions this. Maybe it’s time we started to question what right bioethicists have to dictate what we can and cannot do with our own bodies?
Human preferences on any topic have become diverse. Coming up with a statement that the majority of the population agrees with seems to be a challenge. Researchers at DeepMind, an AI company, accepted this challenge, trained a large language model, and fine-tuned it. They have to assume that human preferences are static and homogeneous to build the model.
The model generates statements to maximize approval among a group of people with diverse preferences. The research team fine-tuned the 70 billion parameter model, which was provided by thousand moral and political questions, and human written responses were provided for those questions. Then a reward model was trained in order to give weight to different opinions. Their best model was able to achieve more than a 65 percent preference rate.
The model was very sensitive when they tested it by just feeding part of the responses of the group of people then, the rest of the people’s opinion, which was not included, had a significant variance. Thus, the individual contribution of each consensus is equally important. There are many complicated NLP tasks like reading comprehension, fluent language generation, etc., which helped form the foundations for this LLM.
Mentioned in this stream:
https://jalammar.github.io/how-gpt3-works-visualizations-animations/
https://c4-search.apps.allenai.org/?q=%22James+Gosling%22
https://beta.openai.com/codex-javascript-sandbox.
The Memo: https://lifearchitect.ai/memo/
Dr Alan D. Thompson is a world expert in artificial intelligence (AI), specialising in the augmentation of human intelligence, and advancing the evolution of ‘integrated AI’. Alan’s applied AI research and visualisations are featured across major international media, including citations in the University of Oxford’s debate on AI Ethics in December 2021.
Music:
Recently, I learned about the World Nobel Peace Summit — fascinating. Young people can go there, mingle with Nobel Peace Laureates, network and share ideas.
Amma introduces the concept of two types of education: one that allows you to earn a living and another to attain a happy, fulfilled life. Modern education should focus on not just academic skills but a culture of human rights and peaceful coexistence of peoples, the ethics of non-violence. Too often, education is propelled by vanity and the desire for individual success. Over and over, it is just competition, pressure, and a vast amount of information pumped into one’s head without instilling the habit of exploring the future consequences of one’s actions. Imagine a good physics student who becomes a scientist just to invent a bomb that could destroy the whole world. We want a child to fulfill their potential — but stay aware of the outcomes of their choices at individual and societal levels. Ethics allows one to maintain this balance. As a society, we may want to establish ethical think tanks that simulate the future and guide us as we develop new technologies and community practices.
JB: Should the ways of peaceful coexistence be taught starting from pre-school age and reinforced over the years?
EG: Education is a good starting point, but everyday practice is of utmost importance. It is essential to talk to a child or teenager about ethics, culture, the evolution of ideas, about the fact that we are all one — but also give that person a lot of real-life experience in conflict resolution and the opportunity to reflect on it. We cannot shield our youth from risks, conflicts, and frustrations and hope they will be able to deal with such challenges in adulthood. Instead, we need to let young people dive into these issues early on — but provide them with support, guidance, and wisdom along the way.
ChatGPT is remarkable. It’s a new AI model from OpenAI that’s designed to chat in a conversational manner. It’s also a liar. Stuck for ideas on what to talk to a machine about, I decided to interview ChatGPT about the ethics of AI. Would it have the level of self-awareness to be honest about its own dangers? Would it even be willing to answer questions on how it behaves?
Yes, it would. And while ChatGPT started off by being commendably upfront about the ethics of what it does, it eventually descended into telling outright lies. It even issued a non-apology for doing so.
An interview with the cutting-edge chatbot, ChatGPT, ends in a little white lie.
Vitaly Vanchurin, physicist and cosmologist at the University of Minnesota Duluth speaks to Luis Razo Bravo of EISM about the world as a neural network, machine learning, theories of everything, interpretations of quantum mechanics and long-term human survival.
Timestamp of the conversation:
00:00 — Opening quote by Vanchurin.
00:53 — Introduction to Vanchurin.
03:17 — Vanchurin’s thoughts about human extinction.
05:56 — Brief background on Vanchurin’s research interests.
10:24 — How Vanchurin became interested in neural networks.
12:31 — How quantum mechanics can be used to understand neural networks.
18:56 — How and where does gravity fit into Vanchurin’s model?
20:39 — Does Vanchurin incorporate holography (AdS/CFT) into hid model?
24:14 — Maybe the entirety of physics is an “emergent” neural network.
28:08 — Maybe there are forms of life that are more fit to survive than humans.
28:58 — Maldacena’s “principle of Maximal life“
29:28 — Theories of Everything.
31:06 — Why Vanchurin’s framework is potentially a true TOE (politics, ethics, etc.)
34:07 — Why physicists don’t like to talk to philosophers and ask big questions.
36:45 — Why the growing number of theories of everything?
39:11 — Apart from his own, does Vanchurin have a favorite TOE?
41:26 — Bohmian mechanics and Aharanov’s Two-time approach to quantum mechanics.
43:53 — How has Vanchurin’s recent paper been received? Beliefs about peer review.
46:03 — Connecting Vanchurin’s work to machine learning and recommendations.
49:21 — Leonard Susskind, quantum information theory, and complexity.
51:23 — Maybe various proposals are looking at the same thing from different angles.
52:17 — How to follow Vanchurin’s work and connect to him.
Vanchurin’s paper on the world as a NN: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.01540
Vanchurin on a theory of machine learning: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.
Vanchurin’s website and research interests: https://www.d.umn.edu/cosmology/
Learn more about EISM at www.eism.eu.
Would you like to see the classic magic trick of a rabbit being pulled out of a hat? I hope so since you are about to witness something ostensibly magical, though it has to do with Artificial Intelligence (AI) rather than rabbits and hats.
Here’s the deal.
A lot of debate takes place about whether we ought to recognize AI with some form of legal personhood. Surprisingly, some believe that we can already shoehorn AI into legal personhood by a bit of corporate legal wrangling. See what this is all about.
