Mathematics, Morality & Machines

[Philosophy Now]

William Byers, mathematician, and Michael Schleifer, moral theorist, use their judgement to calculate the improbability of a machine thinking like a human being.

http://philosophynow.org/issues/78/Math ... d_Machines

[Dunce]

I wonder if there are chessmasters who are poor bridge players. If so, are they the sort of people who become computer programmers? Is the gap between their sort of intelligence and artificial intelligence smaller than that between the intelligence of the best bridge players and artificial intelligence?

[Rortabend]

Three equally hot, but differently shaped, potatoes.

[Arising_uk]

Can't say I disagree much with the authors conclusions that if a 'moral' machine was invented(created?) then it won't be 'moral' as we understand it, i.e. human morality.

I'd be interested in their thoughts about Peter Danielson's work Artificial morality:
virtuous robots for virtual games and the idea, not that he'd say so I think, that our institutions 'morals' could be implemented as a 'moral machine' and that this might be 'better' as it's generally the human element that causes immoral behaviour.

What I do think is a bit iffy is this bit;

... The second important failure in AI is related to the failure to get computers to play the game of bridge at a high level – despite over fifty years of trying. A condensed version of our argument is as follows: AI has succeeded remarkably at chess; since 1999 some computers have beaten the highest-ranked human beings. But unlike chess, the game of bridge requires a large dose not just of logic, but of judgment. We maintain that computers will never play high-level bridge as experienced humans can precisely because of this irreducible element of judgment. Thus the example of bridge illustrates the limits of programmable rules, and the importance of human judgment.

The more competent the bridge player, the more often the decision to bid or not, and what to bid, is based on factors such as ‘table feel’, which encompasses noticing the almost imperceptible pauses and hesitations which human beings display when bidding or not bidding. These nuanced factors are not extraneous to the game but are part of bridge competence. The top players are those who can bring into play these abilities, which go beyond reasoning, inferences, deductions, memory of a system, or the rules. In bidding, as in the other more difficult aspects of bridge (defense and how to play the hand), that extra something which goes beyond reasoning is best captured by the concept of ‘judgment’. Judgment is crucial for bridge, but computers are not capable of judgment, because judgment is not an algorithmic, rule-based procedure. A computer can play bridge, but not the way a human can. Similarly, a computer can do morality and math, but not the human varieties. ...

As they appear to be talking about what is called in poker the 'tells', i.e. the reading of the other players intentions and how the game is going, although I may be wrong here as I'm not a bridge-player. If it is something like this then, whilst I agree these things could not be coded in the sense of fixed rules, why could we not add 'senses' to a machine, linked to learning algorithms that build an 'understanding' or model of body reactions and responses to the flow of the game. I'm sure I'm not being clear here but what I mean is why is it not possible, for example, to have a camera that links to a neural net that learns facial responses, etc, and links that to another net that assigns a 'psychological' weight to its perceptions based upon training examples? We could even 'cheat' and add infra-red to read skin variations, etc. Again I know I'm not being clear but at the present this is the best I can do.