Designing People to Serve

I argue that, contrary to intuition, it would be both possible and permissible to design people - whether artificial or organic - who by their nature desire to do tasks we find unpleasant

Machines learning values

Whether it would take one decade or several centuries, many agree that it is possible to create a *superintelligence*---an artificial intelligence with a godlike ability to achieve its goals. And many who have reflected carefully on this fact agree that our best hope for a "friendly" superintelligence is to design it to *learn* values like ours, since our values are too complex to program or hardwire explicitly. But the value learning approach to AI safety faces three particularly philosophical puzzles: first, it is unclear how any intelligent system could learn its final values, since to judge one supposedly "final" value against another seems to require a further background standard for judging. Second, it is unclear how to determine the content of a system's values based on its physical or computational structure. Finally, there is the distinctly ethical question of which values we should best aim for the system to learn. I outline a potential answer to these interrelated puzzles, centering on a "miktotelic" proposal for blending a complex, learnable final value out of many simpler ones

In Defence of the Hivemind Society

The idea that humans should abandon their individuality and use technology to bind themselves together into hivemind societies seems both farfetched and frightening – something that is redolent of the worst dystopias from science fiction. In this article, we argue that these common reactions to the ideal of a hivemind society are mistaken. The idea that humans could form hiveminds is sufficiently plausible for its axiological consequences to be taken seriously. Furthermore, far from being a dystopian nightmare, the hivemind society could be desirable and could enable a form of sentient flourishing. Consequently, we should not be so quick to deny it. We provide two arguments in support of this claim – the axiological openness argument and the desirability argument – and then defend it against three major objections

Belief-desire coherence

Tradition compels me to write dissertation acknowledgements that are long, effusive, and unprofessional. Fortunately for me, I heartily endorse that tradition. First, of course, I want to thank my chair, Eric Lormand. If our marathon advising meetings (of up to six hours) hadn’t guaranteed me many times the usual amount of men-toring a graduate student receives, then the sheer frequency of our sessions would have. I’ve learned an enormous amount of philosophy from him in that time, and though we dis-agree on some key points, it’s against a wide background of his views that I have simply absorbed. More importantly, I have also learned a great deal about how to do philosophy from Eric. In summary: over the years his influence on my philosophical development has run very deep. Besides that, he even came to my improv shows, and copied Muppet tapes for me. Next I want to thank Jessica Wilson. She stepped in a year and a half ago as my second advisor, to advise me on a field that (she claims) is not her specialty. Her help was just what I needed, and I don’t think I could have finished without her. She is a natural mentor—she has a talent for mixing, in ideal proportions, genuine encouragement and enthusiasm wit

Remember the source: Dissociating frontal and parietal contributions to episodic memory

Event-related fMRI studies reveal that episodic memory retrieval modulates lateral and medial parietal cortices, dorsal middle frontal gyrus (MFG), and anterior pFC. These regions respond more for recognized old than correctly rejected new words, suggesting a neural correlate of retrieval success. Despite significant efforts examining retrieval success regions, their role in retrieval remains largely unknown. Here we asked the question, to what degree are the regions performing memory-specific operations? And if so, are they all equally sensitive to successful retrieval, or are other factors such as error detection also implicated? We investigated this question by testing whether activity in retrieval success regions was associated with task-specific contingencies (i.e., perceived targetness) or mnemonic relevance (e.g., retrieval of source context). To do this, we used a source memory task that required discrimination between remembered targets and remembered nontargets. For a given region, the modulation of neural activity by a situational factor such as target status would suggest a more domain-general role; similarly, modulations of activity linked to error detection would suggest a role inmonitoring and control rather than the accumulation of evidence from memory per se. We found that parietal retrieval success regions exhibited greater activity for items receiving correct than incorrect source responses, whereas frontal retrieval success regions were most active on error trials, suggesting that posterior regions signal successful retrieval whereas frontal regions monitor retrieval outcome. In addition, perceived targetness failed to modulate fMRI activity in any retrieval success region, suggesting that these regions are retrieval specific. We discuss the different functions that these regions may support and propose an accumulator model that captures the different pattern of responses seen in frontal and parietal retrieval success regions