Month: January 2012

Colin Allen thinks [NYT] we need to consider it:

Isn't ethical governance for machines just problem-solving within constraints? If there’s fuzziness about the nature of those constraints, isn’t that a philosophical problem, not an engineering one? Besides, why look to human ethics to provide a gold standard for machines? My response is that if engineers leave it to philosophers to come up with theories that they can implement, they will have a long wait, but if philosophers leave it to engineers to implement something workable they will likely be disappointed by the outcome.

The challenge is to reconcile these two rather different ways of approaching the world, to yield better understanding of how interactions among people and contexts enable us, sometimes, to steer a reasonable course through the competing demands of our moral niche. The different kinds of rigor provided by philosophers and engineers are both needed to inform the construction of machines that, when embedded in well-designed systems of human-machine interaction, produce morally reasonable decisions even in situations where Asimov’s laws would produce deadlock.

Torie Bosch critiques Allen's example of autonomous getaway vehicles used for crimes:

Must any human interested in driving reveal not only the destination, but the plans at that destination, to her autonomous car, in case the driverless car might be unwittingly involved with a criminal scheme? The time between the release of a new technology and its adoption for malfeasance is historically short. Allen makes a strong case for building moral decision-making systems into AI and robotics. But with too many checks, such systems could potentially hobble new technologies as well.

Over the summer, Adam Keiper and Ari Schulman pondered other conundrums for friendly and "moral" machines:

Suppose one person holds a gun to the head of another, and his finger is squeezing the trigger. An armed robot is observing and has only a split second to act, with no technical solution available other than shooting the gunman. Either action or inaction will violate [theorist Eliezer] Yudkowsky’s principle of friendliness. One can easily imagine how the problem fundamentally shifts as one learns more about the situation: Suppose the gunman is a police officer; suppose the gunman claims that the intended victim is an imminent threat to others; suppose the intended victim is a scientist known to be a genius, who claims to have found the cure for cancer but has not yet shared the solution and has clearly gone mad; and so forth ad infinitum…. At the heart of the quest to create perfected moral beings is this blindness to the fact that dilemmas and hard choices are inherent to the lives of moral beings.

Mustafa Akyol recounts it:

Most of these late 19th or early 20th century Muslim liberals — who are commonly known as “Islamic modernists” — looked back at the formative centuries of Islam, and discovered some liberal themes buried under the weight of stagnant traditions. First of all, they found tolerant references in the Quran — verses declaring, “there is no compulsion in religion.” Besides, they noticed that some of the troubling hadiths (sayings attributed to Prophet Muhammad) might not be authentic, and could be representing only the misogyny and the bigotry of some medieval men. They, therefore, wanted to re-read the Quran in the light of the modern age. Quite notably, this was the dominant intellectual trend in the Muslim world a century ago. Yet, again quite notably, it failed. Instead, the authoritarian ideology called “Islamism” gradually dominated the scene, to establish reactionary political parties, tyrannical regimes and even some terrorist offshoots. But why?

Why Islamic modernism failed and gave floor to radical Islamism? My short answer to that big question, which I explore more deeply in my book, is the change in political context: At the end of the first quarter of the 20th century, the Ottoman Empire fell, giving rise to more than a dozen nation-states, almost all of which were colonized by European powers. Colonization inevitably led to anti-colonization, and replaced liberalism with a reactionary collectivism. The question, “How can we be like the West?” got replaced by “How can we resist the West?”

Felix Salmon suggests that churches should team up with bikeshare programs to offer transportation opportunities to the poor:

Churches know their flocks, after all, and might well be interested in giving out memberships to those who need them, and taking on a contingent liability in the process. All you’d need is a single credit card belonging to the church, which could then deal in its own way with any congregant who ran up that $1,000 charge. The Capital Bikeshare scheme has been built in a very cautious manner, carefully constructed so that everybody with a membership needs to have a credit card associated with that membership. That in turn allows Capital Bikeshare to be sure that it can collect $1,000 every time a member loses their bike for whatever reason. This system was set up ex ante, with no indication of how often such a fine would turn out to be necessary — and it has essentially excluded the unbanked from Bikeshare.

(Photo: 'Forever Bicycles,' an installation made from 1,000 bicycles by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. By Sam Yeh/AFP/Getty Images.)

Mike LaBossiere expands on Pinker's thesis:

A rather interesting factor to consider is natural selection. Societies tend to respond to violent crimes with violence, often killing such criminals. Wars also tend to kill the violent. As such, centuries of war and violent crime might be performing natural selection on the human species-the more violent humans would tend to be killed, thus leaving those less prone to crime and violence to reproduce more. Crudely put, perhaps we are killing our way towards peace.

In an unrelated post, Pinker explores religion's role in the decreased violence. Earlier posts on Pinker's book here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

"Days" by Phillip Larkin:

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Continued here. 

(Image of Woody Guthrie New Years resolutions for 1942 via Letters Of Note)

Susan Jacoby rejects the Christianist misappropriation of the phrase:

Twenty years ago, I could be reasonably sure, if I opened a fundraising appeal mentioning religious liberty on the envelope, that the notice came from a group like Americans United for Separation of Church and State or the ACLU. Now such appeals come from the likes of Focus on the Family and the Catholic hierarchy. They have no shame, and they want religious liberty only for themselves. If secularists are to succeed in making any inroads on the default position of religion, they must reclaim the original definition of religious liberty, as exemplified by those who passed [the 1786 Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom.] … The first state law to officially draw a line between government and religious institutions was written when religious conservatives in Virginia attempted to tax citizens for Christian teaching in public schools. This act would become the template for the federal Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Baltimore, Maryland, 12.08 pm

Richard Marshall reviews Alex Rosenberg's new book, The Atheist's Guide To Reality:

Rosenberg talks about having fun. Nice nihilism implies that attributing meaning to our lives is just an introspective illusion selected by blind evolutionary processes, caused by photons and fermions blindly operating, working in real time in our brains, that has helped us survive. We attach meaning by these determined operations in our brain which give the illusion that there are actual purposes. But there are no such things.

As I said, the illusion is explained by natural selection: it has been heavily selected for so that everyone is within two standard deviations of the mean of a happy normal life – the fun life – in the biosphere we find ourselves in. We flourish, or rather, have fun, because we are naturally selected to do so. We trick out statements of purpose but they are illusions. Naturalism cannot solve the problem of philosophy in ways that satisfy those seeking confirmation of a reality that gives purpose because there is no purpose.

Leon Wieseltier [pay-walled] calls it the worst book of the year.

Steven Pinker doesn't care whether self interest or morality is fueling the decline in violence: 

With any humanitarian advance, there are always cynics who insist that no one … ever acts out of true morality, that there always must be some self-serving interest (the Quakers opposes slavery because they were bankers who financed the industrial revolution; the British stopped the slave trade because their French rivals were getting rich from their Caribbean plantations, and so on).  …

I don’t care.  My book is about the decline of violence, not a putative increase in virtue. I don’t think the chickens [who are more humanely treated] (or the slaves) care about whether their better treatment was motivated by an altruism that is pure in the eyes of God or other moralistic judges, as long as they suffer less. And if we set up institutions that allow people to be less cruel and destructive as they pursue their interests, that is a sign of progress–God help us if every advance in human welfare depended on Christ-like levels of moral purity.

Earlier posts on Pinker's book here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Maria Bustillos, a lapsed Catholic, shares a poignant memory from her grandfather's funeral:

[I]n advance of a Catholic funeral a rosary is read, which, a rosary is this necklace of beads and each bead signifies a prayer. But it's just the same two prayers, over and over: Aves, or Hail Marys, and Paters, or Our Fathers. Ten Aves, one Pater. You do this fifteen times. And during each decade of ten Aves you are technically supposed to be contemplating a specific joyful, sorrowful or glorious Mystery, such as the Annunciation, or the Resurrection; there's a set order to it… well anyway, there is all this stuff you are meant to be thinking about. But who is to know what you are thinking about as you repeat these words? And they're really easy words to remember and repeat because you've known them all your life and magically everyone gets right out of your face and it's quiet in your head, finally.

There is murmuring like doves, a rustling stillness, and suddenly instead of hating on all these people to an almost unbelievable degree I realized it was my grief, sadness and rage that had been making me feel so uncharitable, and that I really was (and not just "should be") grateful to these people (any of whom might indeed have known and loved my grandfather as much I did, at some stage in his long life) for coming all this way to participate in this sad occasion with my family, when they could have been home making pancakes. That was the first time a religious ritual had really worked for me—like a charm, in the event—and though it didn't alter my essential lapsedness I felt a pang, that I had been so summarily dismissive about this thing that had, clearly, its uses. For a lot of people. 

Never again did I express scorn or open disbelief in any kind of spiritual practice, after that day.

(Photo by Flickr user Miqul)