Search results for "Hume’s guillotine"
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Hume’s guillotine and intelligent technologies
2021
AbstractEmerging intelligent society shall change the way people are organised around their work and consequently also as a society. One approach to investigating intelligent systems and their social influence is information processing. Intelligence is information processing. However, factual and ethical information are different. Facts concern true vs. false, while ethics is about what should be done. David Hume recognised a fundamental problem in this respect, which is that facts can be used to derive values. His answer was negative, which is critical for developing intelligent ethical technologies. Hume’s problem is not crucial when values can be assigned to technologies, i.e. weak ethic…
Designing Ethical AI in the Shadow of Hume’s Guillotine
2020
Artificially intelligent systems can collect knowledge regarding epistemic information, but can they be used to derive new values? Epistemic information concerns facts, including how things are in the world, and ethical values concern how actions should be taken. The operation of artificial intelligence (AI) is based on facts, but it require values. A critical question here regards Hume’s Guillotine, which claims that one cannot derive values from facts. Hume’s Guillotine appears to divide AI systems into two ethical categories: weak and strong. Ethically weak AI systems can be applied only within given value rules, but ethically strong AI systems may be able to generate new values from fac…
Hume’s Guillotine in Designing Ethically Intelligent Technologies
2020
Intelligent machines can follow ethical rules in their behaviour. However, it is less clear whether intelligent systems can also create new ethical principles. The former position can be called weak ethical AI and the latter strong ethical AI. Hume’s guillotine which claims that one cannot derive values from facts appears to be a fundamental obstacle to strong ethical AI. The analysis of human ethical information processes provides clarity to the possibility of strong ethical AI. Human ethical information processing begins with positive of negative emotions associated to situations. Situations can be seen as consequences of actions and for this reason people can define rules about acceptabi…
Hume’s Guillotine Resolved
2020
According to Hume’s guillotine, one cannot derive values from facts. Since intelligent systems are fact processors, one can ask how ethical machines can be possible. However, ethics is a real-life process. People analyze actions and situations emotionally and cognitively. Thus they learn rules, such as “this situation feels good/bad.” The cognitive analysis of actions is associated with emotional analysis. The association of action, emotion and cognition can be termed a primary ethical schema. Through an ethical information process in which emotions and cognitions interact in social discourse, primary ethical schemas are refined into ethical norms. Each component of the process is different…