But how do they know Watson would find the expected value of these things positive? Maybe Watson would be a republican. And this all points down a huge rabbit hole of ethical and political philosophy and stuff.
Like, should Watson take into consideration his likelihood of being elected? In that case, much of his neural network should be dedicated to predicting voter outcome. And that seems pretty obviously problematic.
Now that I've gotten that out of the way, I'm going to respond to your counterpoint in character.
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If Republican Watson ran against Democrat Watson, for the first time, we would have a debate purely about issues and policies, and not about personal character. As for the platforms themselves, you might view those political platforms as wrong, but millions of Americans agree with them. This is just the ultimate expression of democracy: a statesman whose views conform to those of the people.
>Every 8-bit CPU I know of can be programmed to look up values in a hash table and spit out the expected results, just like human politicians program their brains to do.
That's true. But if Watson is 1% better than an 8-bit CPU, then that justifies spending millions on the upgrade, since the role of President has such a large effect on how well the government runs.
Pragmatically speaking, I think we could capture the political spectrum in 4 to 5 parties. Watson-left-liberalist mode (for the Sanders crowd), Watson-authoritarian-right (for Trump supporters) etc.
Edit: Sanders correction based on comment below.
The problem is that Watson has been talked up as almost a strong AI, when it's actually a really good classifier, annotator and summarizer. While there's a great role for Watson-style systems in policy development and practice, they are only one in a battery of ML and analytic techniques, none of which can stand alone without a fully human point of view.
Easy enough. If Watson turned out to be a Republican they would start tweaking the parameters until it became a Democrat.
That’s very unlikely.
Any logical system based on the concept that human life is worth existing on its own (no matter what the person has contributed to society) automatically ends up with the necessary conclusion that things like subsidized healthcare are mandatory.
Obviously, one could give the program the basic assumption that human life is not worth anything, and it should instead focus purely on profit, and it might end up with a more republican ideology.
But giving an AI with access to nuclear weapons the assumption that human life isn’t the most important factor is... a bad idea.
It's easy to derive conclusions from moral axioms, but very difficult to do actual politics in a country full of voters, corporations, lobbyists, etc. Artificial intelligence is not a magic solution to that.
Fundamental Republicans believe capitalism and the free market is the system that "works best" to ensure a level playing field for everyone. True republicans work to ensure a fair marketplace for everyone, both for poor individuals and rich corporations, providing citizens the ability to better their condition and increase their freedom.
Fundamental Democrats believe that the freedom of citizens is constantly at risk from outside factors, and that the government is the best agent to maintain citizen's free will.
True republicans believe that human nature is fundamentally good, and that the government increases equality by maintaining a free market, while democrats suggest that human nature is often weak, requiring the government's intervention to protect society from itself.
In reality, very few Republican and Democrat politicians actually represent these values. Often, republican views of the free market disproportionately benefit the rich, and democratic attempt to redistribute wealth, instead of fixing inequality at the source.
Although I consider myself independent, I personally would side with a republican interpretation of health care. Studies have shown that government programs in fields such as healthcare are inefficient when compared to their private counterparts, as a competitive market increases supply, and therefore decreases costs, as opposed to monopolies or government programs that provide a single source of service.
There is no need to choose – you can easily provide a minimum standard to everyone, and let the market handle everything above that.
Which is the concept of the social market economy in general: Everyone gets at least a specified minimum level of service, provided by society, paid by everyone (the social part) – and everything above that level is done with a fair and free market (the market part).
Edit: of course this in practice would devolve to 50+% of the country in essence saying "Whatever I think the bible says should be our acxiom". Completely ruining the discussion.
But then the AI may decide life is suffering, and end suffering by ending life...
Asimov’s laws of robots end up with the previously mentioned axiom, though.
No they really shouldn't. Asimov's Laws of Robotics were a plot device intended to be subverted by the robots in his stories, they were never meant to be taken seriously.
After all, neither of those experiments has ever gone seriously wrong.
And that abortion is illegal. :-)
http://www.biology-online.org/dictionary/Life http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/life
Whether a given bunch of cells may be considered human is still very much an open question but whether a cell or cluster of cells is alive should be pretty easy to agree on.
Actually, a strict utilitarian model would probably conclude that it's not worth aborting to save the mother's life if the baby is viable, since the baby would ultimately produce more value for society than the mother would were she to live out her life.
And that's the sort of reasoning that makes everyone hate utilitarian ethics.
Second, Utilitarianism roughly translates to "the greatest good for the greatest number." If a pregnant, utilitarian woman was granted with the power of foresight, she would abort her child only if he/her was to provide a negative net utility to society. If the child was to provide a net benefit to humankind, she would not abort.
Third, your assumption that unborn (and born) children are a burden to society is correct, but that initial investment is small with regards to the average net "benefit" a grown human creates. It must also be noted that the vast majority of humans benefit humankind through their work (although some have greater impact than others).
No person can see the future, however, so most utilitarians would never abort their children, as the probability their offspring benefit humanity as a whole is greater than the chance that they destroy value.
Frankly, I doubt any woman considers the ethical implications of abortion when they undergo one, and are primarily concerned with family, relationship, and personal problems. If one thinks beyond personal convenience, and look at the bigger picture, abortions are morally unjust from almost every popular ethical system.
Think hard about the choice your parents made by not aborting you. Do you think they made the right decision? Whether you're old, young, rich, poor, hopeful or hopeless, I imagine you'll answer yes.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_e...
Worth to whom? A human life has value, but not to everybody. Or at least not the same value for everybody. Keeping people alive at any cost, and imposing to people how much they should contribute for achieving that, is not something everyone can agree with.
Oh, unless the people are politicians, is that what you are saying? Of course, not everyone can agree with that, either. But it is already the norm, so this is just an extension to the rule. So the question is just how much they would agree to contribute.
Essentially, what if maximizing individual human liberty was the basis of the program, not a utilitarian notion of maximizing net-human life.
Caveat: even with human liberty as a basis for developing a political system, you could still end up rationalizing mandatory, subsidized health-care i.e. maximizing freedom entails a poor person shouldn't have to lose his liberty to poor health etc. This is my position, but I don't necessarily think it is the inevitable conclusion of attempting to maximize for human liberty.
If you start solely from that premise: "that human life is worth existing on its own (no matter what the person has contributed to society)" you're very unlikely even to reach taxation (a forced contribution to society) let alone forced subsidies or making anything mandatory. Most of government is based in the notion that someone's only value is in what they contribute to society -- from "tax-dodgers" to "benefit leeches" the vernacular is all about the amount of cash that gets paid into the social coffers.
Much as I appreciate subsidised healthcare, it's not an "automatic conclusion". It is a negotiated compromise, and largely based on nationalism not the value of the individual (eg, the NHS came into existence post-war, as part of the national rebuilding. It's beginnings very much relied on the war effort and large scale conscription having devalued individual freedom amongst the public).
It's become more popular since then because it turns out to work pretty well as a system. Not so much from pure logic, as that healthcare gets more expensive over time (effectively, healthcare can exert a rent on people's lives) and social control of healthcare is a way of putting a cap on its costs at the expense of those in healthcare who could charge much more (eg, watch the NHS junior doctors complaining about the contract changes).
Not just facts - the designers of the AI also choose the underlying assumption and models. Even the very idea of using an AI implies a certain set of biases and intentions.
Characteristics that are truly common enough in humans that can safely be extracted as a factor are rare. Most of the time we try to compromise so we can call our differences "close enough". The process of finding and/or creating those compromises is what we call "politics", and while computers can certainly help as a tool, but the process needs human involvement by definition.
Attempts to turn over any kind of political or social decision-making to an algorithm is simply a way to disguise the concentration of power. The algorithm's designers ultimately end up with the power, while others are denied power.
The racist tactic known as "redlining"[1] is a pre-AI example. Black people aren't denied hosing directly, they simply "don't quality" for a loan, with the real reasons obscured behind a proprietary "credit worthiness" equation.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case...
edit:
Instead of using AI as a decision-maker, a place where AI (and other technology) might actually be useful is as the facilitator and/or part of the "panel of experts" used in Delphi methods[2]. While the people tend to jump on bandwagons and make stupid decisions when unorganized, we have a lot of examples where a general crowd of people make very good decisions when they are focused on a specific goal and have enough structure to allow for iterative refining of ideas.
A few of his comments that are relevant to the use of technology with politics and society:
We have these extraordinarily limiting constraints from a past in which we did not have
the tools to have anything other than extraordinarily limiting constraints. But, now we
do have the tools, and the tools are running away with us faster than the social
institutions can keep up.
...
I think countries ought to set up Departments of the Future. [...] We are on the edge of
having the technology to be able to say, let us run a constant, dynamic, updated review
of everything that science and technology is thinking about [...] then let us use the same
techniques to ask the public in general, not politicians, whether they like that idea,
whether they feel that they could live with that idea. And then, like a Delphi technique,
re-run it until everybody stops changing their mind.
...
Collate all [research laboratories and business R&D] together and process them using stuff
like big data to see what the pattern looks like becoming, and then layering on top of that
social media analytics to say, if this was coming, would you like it, and if not, why not?
In other words, to have a sort of 24 hour a day referendum
... it’s no longer important to teach people to be chemists or physicists or anything ‘ists
because those jobs are gone, and if they’re not gone today they’re gone tomorrow. And unless
we know the old tools of critical thinking and logic and such, we will not be able to handle
what follows. So, we’re wasting our time training people to be things that will no longer
exist in 10, 15, 20 years time.
...
Every single value structure is meaningless [...] commercial society will be destroyed
at a stroke. The trouble is the transition period [...] how we get from here to there.
The vested interests, I mean, we’re going to have to shoot every one of them – nobody,
nobody is going to give way to this. [...] All cultural values relate to scarcity, ultimately.
It is absolutely normal to have an establishment and an elite that influences the governments and the presidents decisions.
Only in the most dictatorial and absolutist types of governments you would see a lone person at the top deciding on issues without consulting with anyone.
But I'm not sure that such a thing has ever existed. Even maniacs with a cult following behind them like Hitler had to balance the interests of different factions within the system.
What we have to get rid off is certain categories of influencing decisions that have a negative impact for the majority. (bribery)
My main point though is that we tend to place too much emphasis on how much new tech can help solve age-old, human nature driven problems.
The game backstory is that during cold war, it became a hot war, nukes were launched, and in the US was built one (or more) underground cities, that are administrered by a paranoid computer that hates and fear communists.
My current Paranoia character works on "TechServices" and sometimes make his opinion known (something that is actually illegal to do) that "The Friend Computer" ins't the real ruler, his designers and programmers are.
It is fun to see the implications in the game, specially as the mindset of players affect their characters and behaviour, some people are loyal to the computer, some people consider the computer the enemy, and some people consider the computer only a tool, and are loyal (or enemy) of the "High Programmers" that have access to the administration computer code.
The end result is a rather byzantine situation where everyone (including The Computer) is plotting against everyone else, all being sufficiently paranoid.
Granted, it may not work out so rosily in real life- the reasoning log would likely be liberally redacted due to factors classified from public knowledge (just as some of Obama's more puzzling stances may, charitably, be explained by things he's not allowed to tell us)- but that's its own problem.
Having AI's as advisers, that would be totally different. In the end we can still hold responsible the people that listened to that advice as it's their responsibility to check if the advice from their AI advisers is real.
That doesn't change the AI, though - since it still is physical hardware in some place, even if you could verify the software you can still exploit the hardware.
This has so much potential for a Phillip-K-Dick-ian rabbit hole of paranoia and insanity that it made me chuckle. I think you might be hand-waving away a lot of complexity here. :)
Insert a layer of expert representatives (akin to congresspersons) to generate the PRs?
Making the system resilient doesn't sound like anything more than another engineering problem to me.
I interpreted @mtgx's statement as referring to the information that would be input into the IA. Namely that if presidents are getting bad advice from advisors already, replacing the president with an AI might not improve things, if the same bad advice is still being fed in.
This was literally the best usage of AI as comedy ever made.
"Anyone smart enough to be a good president wouldn't want to be president."
This, because of the pressure and stress involved...
Watson, with human advisers, should be relatively stress-proof...a possible plus...
I guess then the joke would evolve to: "Anyone smart enough to be a good adviser wouldn't want to be."
... unless there's leverage against the elected, something that would subjectively seem to compromise the integrity more than the slowly gotten used to corruption.
At least with a human president, there is the chance that they will grow up and shrug off the orders they are given. The power actually lies with the person that was elected, not the invisible people who paid to get them the job.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/01/ibms-w...