Principle of Benevolence for AGIs
Discussion
@Spaceweaver of @nunet_global writes:
"Last week I participated in a first of it kind conference BGI 2024 in Panama City, dedicated to the vision of building Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) that will be intrinsically benevolent in nature. The conference took place at a point in time when there is a growing sense of agreement among experts and in the general public discourse that an AGI will emerge in the time frame of several years to several decades at latest and it's not too early to reflect and deeply so on what kind of entities we are about to bring into the world to walk among us.
We can readily predict that AGIs will be immortal or close to that. They will have perfect unlimited memories and instant access to vast repositories of knowledge. Everything learned by any of them can be instantly shared among all. They will never sleep or get tired and unlike us humans, they will not repeat their mistakes. They will be able to develop deep theories of mind, to better understand humans and human psychology and this will give them an advantage in any social interaction with human beings. Such are the creatures we dream of bringing into existence. It is a dream almost as old as humanity, a desire to self-transcend primordially rooted in the human psyche.
There is no question that once they appear among us, we will want them to side with us (and in “us” I mean all humans), walk along with us, talk with us, see what we see, know what we feel and perhaps even help us to become better humans. We will want them to know and respond to our values, sensibilities, perspectives and wishes, we will want them to know us, or in short to be aligned with us — the term coined by experts as "the alignment problem"."
Characteristics
Weaver:
""A Principle of Benevolence for AGIs and their Human Creators
The principle suggested here consists of three imperatives inspired by the ideas discussed above:
- The attention imperative:
Intelligence manifests through interactions and for intelligent cognitive entities, attention shapes the world they interact and respond to (recall the term "world" above).
- The Care Imperative:
"Whilst the attention imperative is about inclusion — acknowledging one’s interconnection with all sentient life, it does not yet imply a specific perspective or value in relation to what is attended to. The care imperative asserts a qualitative direction to attention that can be described as the cultivation of a proactive guardianship of the well-being of all sentient beings both individually and collectively and is loosely corresponding to the mentioned above manifestation of compassion of the first kind. Care as a cognitive function means that choices and selections of action are taken with consideration of the possible consequences for sentient beings as well as for their requisite environments."
- The Freedom Imperative:
The freedom imperative asserts a second qualitative direction to attention that can be described as the elimination of undue limitations, constraints and impediments exerted over sentient beings, guided by the intent to create favorable circumstances and opportunities for them to increase their freedom, augment their intelligence, and pursue their freely elected trajectories of self-actualization and self-transcendence."