AI and the Need for Human Values

Stuart Russel, professor in Berkeley  and who wrote the standard book on artificial intelligence with Peter Norvig, speculates  about the future of AI.

He has no doubts that AI will change the world. "In future, AI will increasingly help us live our lives", he said, "driving our cars and acting as smart virtual assistants that know our likes and dislikes and that will manage our day." The technology is already there that is more accurate in analyzing and monitoring a plethora of documents to forecast events or provide us with hints to make our lives easier. "Looking further ahead, it seems there are no serious obstacles to AI making progress until it reaches a point where it is better than human beings across a wide range of tasks."

In the Best of all cases "[W]we could reach a point, perhaps this century, where we're no longer constrained by our difficulties in feeding ourselves and stopping each other from killing people, and instead decide how we want the human race to be."

Ob the other side he also sees a great danger. Autonomous weapons may reveal as great threat. "Five guys with enough money can launch 10 million weapons against a city," he said.

He demands serious plans how to core with that. "A system that's superintelligent is going to find ways to achieve objectives that you didn't think of. So it's very hard to anticipate the potential problems that can arise." Therfore, "there will be a need to equip AI with a common sense understanding of human values."

He suggests the only absolute objective of autonomous robots should be the maximising the values of humans as a species.

This is all well said. But did the human species already reach a point to agree upon a common set of values? Who will be the one to decide how we want the human race to be? How would we teach those to AI? I fear that this remains a nice vision and that we will reach the point where we would have needed such an integration of values too early.