The Myth of AI - Hackdot

Re:The Myth of AI by anigbrowl on Friday November 14, 2014 @04:52PM (#8609718)

Moral dilemmas are easy to solve if you have perfect information. In the train-track problem you reference, the utility of saving 10 people at the expense of 1 life is obvious and I would do so without hesitation (though not without regret). But life rarely presents us with cases where the utilitarian calculus is so clear; our powers of foresight and analysis are so limited that we get better results by establishing and promulgating rules that cover the most common situations - imperfectly, but with tolerably low error levels.

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Re:The Myth of AI by defen on Friday November 14, 2014 @05:11PM (#8609820)

> In the train-track problem you reference, the utility of saving 10 people at the expense of 1 life is obvious and I would do so without hesitation (though not without regret)

Even if it were your own child?

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Re:The Myth of AI by anigbrowl on Friday November 14, 2014 @07:29PM (#8610376)

That's an entirely different problem, though, since I have a selfish interest in preserving my own lineage at the expense of others'. It's an interesting moral problem - just how many people's lives would I be willing to sacrifice to save a member of my own family? - but orthogonal to the point I was making.

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Re:The Myth of AI by sp332 on Friday November 14, 2014 @05:18PM (#8609848)

Even if the answer is no, how does that relate to anigbrowl's point? (or were you just curious?)

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Re:The Myth of AI by defen on Saturday November 15, 2014 @03:49AM (#8611232)

From a "purely utilitarian" perspective your relation to the people involved is not relevant. That's assuming the existence of some "universal" utility, not one specific to the person deciding.

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Re:The Myth of AI by chnx on Friday November 14, 2014 @05:25PM (#8609877)

Five mortally ill patients are in care at a hospital, all of whom will soon die. At the same time, a sixth man is undergoing a routine checkup at the same hospital. A transplant surgeon in residence finds that the only medical means of saving the five ailing patients would be to slay the sixth and transplant into them his healthy organs. Legal ramifications and other peripheral matters disregarded, it morally right to do so?

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Re:The Myth of AI by anigbrowl on Friday November 14, 2014 @07:56PM (#8610442)

Ah, I was hoping someone would bring this one up. My answer there is no, because it's not a zero-sum issue like the points on the train track. Let's analyze the differences. For consistency, I'll assume the version of the train track problem where 5 people are going to die if I do nothing and let the train continue on its present course, vs 1 if I reach out and actively switch the train onto a different track. (There are other versions of the problem but this has the most similarity to the transplant problem.)

Now it's true that if I divert the train I'm actively choosing to end the life of the single person on track B in order to save a greater number of people on track A. But the key difference is the external force of the train; it's going to hit someone, so we might as well ensure it hits as few as possible. In the transplant situation, you have 5 patients who are dying from 5 different illnesses of their own; they're not going to die because they're in hospital, they're in hospital because they're going to die. Likewise, they won't be saved by the death of the healthy patient, but by the harvest of his healthy organs. And this harvesting would have to be conducted by the transplant surgeon - and getting killed by an overzealous surgeon is qualitatively very different from getting killed by liver failure or whatever.

Oddly, nobody ever seems to consider the possibilities in letting one of the mortally ill patients die and then sharing out that person's organs among the 4 remaining patients, which is obviously a less good result than saving all 5 of them but also much less troubling than murdering patients who aren't planning on donating their own organs.Assuming they needed 5 different organs and were all equally close to death (such that we couldn't wait around for one of them to die at random and save the other four), then you run into the question of whether it's morally acceptable to kill one of the terminally ill patients in order to save the other four (again assuming imminence of death and perfect knowledge of outcomes and so on, which is rarely the case in the real world). Most people would still say no, but I'd be inclined to say yes.

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Re:The Myth of AI by JoeAltmaier on Friday November 14, 2014 @05:41PM (#8609950)

That's often used as an obvious parallel situation that makes it clear. But its not quite true: the healthy patient is not really involved with the situation of the other 5. Unlike the child, who is inevitably linked to the outcome of the others on the tracks. This new feature means the doctor is forcing the healthy person to play the game, which is certainly not right, and is the forcing issue that makes it clearly wrong.

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