Monthly Archives: September 2016

Pros and Cons of Artificial Intelligence

29 Thursday Sep 2016

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The Pros and Cons of AI Part Three: Artificial Intelligence

We have already shown in the two previous blogs why it more effective and efficient to replace eating with Artificial Ingestion and to replace sex with Artificial Insemination. In this, the third and final part, we will discuss why human intelligence should be replaced with Artificial Intelligence. The arguments, as we shall see, are mainly simple extrapolations from replacing eating and sex with their more effective and efficient counterparts.

Human “intelligence” is unpredictable. In fact, all forms of human behavior are unpredictable in detail. It is true that we can often predict statistically what people will do in general. But even those predictions often fail. It is hard to predict whether and when the stock market will go up or down or which movies will be blockbuster hits. By contrast, computers, as well know, never fail. They are completely reliable and never make mistakes. The only exceptions to this general rule are those rare cases where hardware fails, software fails, or the computer system was not actually designed to solve the problems that people actually had. Putting aside these extremely rare cases, other errors are caused by people. People may cause errors because they failed to read the manual (which doesn’t actually exist because to save costs, vendors now expect that users should look up the answers to their problems on the web) or because they were confused by the interface. In addition, some “errors” occur because hackers intentionally make computer systems operate in a way that they were not intended to operate. Again, this means human error was the culprit. In fact, one can argue that hardware errors and software errors were also caused by errors in production or design. If these errors see the light of day, then there were also testing errors. And if the project ends up solving problems that are different from the real problems, then that too is a human mistake in leadership and management. Thus, as we can see, replacing unpredictable human intelligence with predictable artificial intelligence is the way to go.

Human intelligence is slow. Let’s face it. To take a representative activity of intelligence, it takes people seconds to minutes to do simple square roots of 16 digit numbers while computers can do this much more quickly. It takes even a good artist at least seconds and probably minutes to draw a good representation of a birch tree. But google can pull up an excellent image in less than a second. Some of these will not actually be pictures of birch trees, but many of them will.

Human intelligence is biased. Because of their background, training and experience, people end up with various biases that influence their thinking. This never happens with computers unless they have been programmed to do something useful in which case, some values will have to be either programmed into it or learned through background, training and experience.

Human intelligence in its application most generally has a conscious and experiential component. When a human being is using their intelligence, they are aware of themselves, the situation, the problem and the process, at least to some extent. So, for example, the human chess player is not simply playing chess; they are quite possibly enjoying it as well. Similarly, human writers enjoy writing; human actors enjoy acting; human directors enjoy directing; human movie goers enjoy the experience of thinking about what is going on in the movie and feeling, to a large degree, what people on the screen are attempting to portray. This entire process is largely inefficient and ineffective. If humans insist on feeling things, that could all be accomplished much more quickly with electrodes.

Perhaps worst of all, human intelligence is often flawed by trying to be helpful. This is becoming less and less true, particularly in large cities and large bureaucracies. But here and there, even in these situations that should be models of blind rule-following, you occasionally find people who are genuinely helpful. The situation is even worse in small towns and farming communities where people are routinely helpful, at least to the locals. It is only when a user finds themselves interacting with a personal assistant or audio menu system with no possibility of a pass-through to a human being that they can rest assured that they will not be distracted by someone actually trying to understand and help solve their problem.

Of course, people in many professions, whether they are drivers, engineers, scientists, advertising teams, lawyers, farmers, police officers etc. will claim that they “enjoy” their jobs or at least certain aspects of them. But what difference does that make? If a robot or AI system can do 85 to 90% of the job in a fast, cheap way, why pay for a human being to do the service? Now, some would argue that a few people will be left to do the 10-15% of cases not foreseen ahead of time in enough detail to program (or not seen in the training data). But why? What is typically done, even now, is to just the let user suffer when those cases come up. It’s too cumbersome to bother with back-up systems to deal with the other cases. So long as the metrics for success are properly designed, these issues will never see the light of day. The trick is to make absolutely sure than the user has no alternative means of recourse to bring up the fact that their transaction failed. Generally, as the recent case with Yahoo shows, even if the CEO becomes aware of a huge issue, there is no need to bring it to public attention.

All things considered, it seems that “Artificial Intelligence” has a huge advantage over “Natural Intelligence.” AI can simply be defined to be 100% successful. It can save money and than money can be appropriately partitioned to top company management, shareholders, workers, and consumers. A good general formula to use in such cases is the 90-10 rule; that is, 90% of the increased profits should go to the top management and 10% should go to the shareholders.

As against increased profits, one could argue that people get enjoyment out of the thinking that they do. There is some truth to that, but so what? If people enjoy playing doctor, lawyer, and truck driver, they can still do that, but at their own expense. Why should people pay for them to do that when an AI system can do 85% of the job at nearly zero costs? Instead of worrying about that, we should turn our attention to a more profound problem: what will top management do with that extra income?

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Pros and Cons of Artificial Insemination

27 Tuesday Sep 2016

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The Pros and Cons of AI: Part Two (Artificial Insemination).

Animal husbandry and humane human medical practice offer up many situations where artificial insemination is a useful and efficient technique. It is often used in horse breeding, for example, to avoid the risk of injury that more natural breeding might engender. There are similarly many cases where a couple wants to get pregnant and the “ordinary” way will not work. This could be due to physical problems with the man, the woman, or both. In some cases, it will even be necessary to use sperm from someone who is not going to be the legal father. Generally, the couple will decide it is more acceptable emotionally if the sperm donor is anonymous and the insemination is not done via intercourse.

But what about all those cases where the couple tries and indeed, succeeds, the “old-fashioned way.” An argument could certainly be made that all intercourse should be replaced with AI (artificial insemination).

First, the old-fashioned way often produces emotional bonding between the partners. (Some even call it “making love.”) No-one has ever provided a convincing quantitative economic analysis of why this is beneficial. It is certainly painful when pair-bonded individuals are split apart by divorce or death. AI would not prevent all pair bonding, but it could help reduce the risk of such bonds being formed.

Second, the old-fashioned way risks the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases. Even when pairs are not trying to get pregnant and even when they have the intention of using forms of “protection”, sometimes passion overtakes reason and people, in the heat of the moment, “forget” to use protection. AI provides an opportunity for screening and for greatly reducing the risk of STDs being spread.

Third, the combinations of genes produced by sexual intercourse are random and uncontrolled. While it is currently beyond the state of the art, one can easily imagine that sometime in this century it will possible to “screen” sperm cells and only chose the “best” for AI.

Fourth, traditional sex if often quite expensive in terms of economic costs. Couples will often spend hours engaging in procreational activities than need only take minutes. Beyond that, traditional sex if often accompanied by special dinners, walks on the beach, playing romantic music, and often couples continue to stay together in essentially unproductive activities even after sex such as cuddling and talking.

There are probably additional reasons why AI makes a lot of sense economically and why it is a lot better than the old-fashioned alternative.

Of course, one could take the tack of considering life as something valuable for the experiences themselves and not merely as a means to an end of higher productivity. This seems a dangerously counter-cultural stand to take in modern American society, but in the interest of completeness, and mainly just to prove its absurdity, let us consider for a moment that sex may have some intrinsic and experiential value to the participants.

Suppose that lovers take pleasure in the sights, sounds, smells, feels, and tastes associated with their partners. Imagine that the sexual acts they engage in provide pleasure in and of themselves. There seems to be a great deal of uncertainty about the monetary value of these experiences since the prices charged for artificial versions of these experiences can easily vary by a factor of ten or more. In fact, there have been reports that some people will only engage in sex that is not paid for directly.

So, on the one hand, we have the provable efficiency and effectiveness of AI. On the other hand, we have human experiences whose value is problematic to quantify. The choice seems obvious. Sometime in this century, no doubt, all insemination will be done artificially so that everyone (or at least some very rich people)  can enjoy the great economic benefits that will come about from the increased efficiency and effectiveness of AI as compared with “natural” sex.

As further proof, if it is needed, imagine two island countries alike in every way in terms of climate, natural beauty, current economic opportunity, literacy and so on. In fact, the only way these two islands differ is that on one island (which we shall call AII for Artificial Insemination Isle) all “sex” is limited to AI whilst on the other island (which we shall call NII for Natural Insemination Isle) sex is natural and people can spend as much or as little time as they like doing it. Now, people are given a choice about which island to live on. Certainly, with its greater prospects of economic growth and efficiency, everyone would choose to live on AII while NII would be virtually empty. Readers will recognize that this is essentially the same argument as to why “Artificial Ingestion” should surely replace “Natural Ingestion” — cheaper, faster, more reliable. If readers see any holes in this argument, I’d surely like to be informed of them.

Turing’s Nightmares

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The Pros and Cons of AI: Part One

24 Saturday Sep 2016

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This is the first of three connected blog posts on the appropriate uses and misuses of AI. In this blog post, I’ll look at “Artificial Ingestion.” (Trust me, it will tie back to another AI, Artificial Intelligence).

While ingestion, and therefore “Artificial Ingestion” is a complex topic, I begin with ingestion because it is a bit more divorced from thought itself. It is easier to think of digestion as separate from thinking; that is, to objectify it more than artificial intelligence because in writing about intelligence, it is necessary to use intelligence itself.

Do we eat to live or live to eat? There is little doubt that eating is necessary to the life of animals such as human beings. Our distant ancestors could have taken a greener and more photosynthetic path but instead, we have collectively decided to kill other organisms to garner our energy. Eating has a utilitarian purpose; indeed, it is a vital purpose. Without food, we eventually die. Moreover, the quality and quantity of the food we eat has a profound impact on our health and well-being. Many of us live in a paradoxical time when it comes to food. Our ancestors often struggled mightily to obtain enough food. Our brains are thus genetically “wired” to search for high sugar, high fat, high salt foods. Even though many of us “know” that we ingest too many calories and may have read and believe that too much salt and sugar are bad for us, it is difficult to overcome the “programming” of countless generations. We are also attracted to brightly colored food. In our past, these colors often signaled foods that were especially high in healthful phytochemicals.

Of course, in modern societies of the “Global North” our genetic predispositions toward high sugar, high fat, high salt, highly colored foods are manipulated by greedy corporate interests. Foods like crackers and chips that contain almost nothing of real value to the human diet are packaged to look like real foods. Beyond that, billions of dollars of advertising dollars are spent to convince us that if we buy and ingest these foods it will help us achieve other goals. For example, we are led to believe that a mother who gives her children “food” consisting of little other than sugar and food dye will be loved by her children and they will be excited and happy children. Children themselves are led to believe that ingesting such junk food will lead them to magical kingdoms. Adult males are led to believe that providing the right kinds of high fat, high salt chips will result in male bonding experiences. Adult males are also led to believe that the proper kinds of alcoholic beverages will result in the seduction of highly desirable looking mates.

Over time, the natural act of eating has been enhanced with rituals. Human societies came to hunt and gather (and later farm) cooperatively. In this way, much more food could be provided over a more continuous basis. Rather than fight each other over food, we sit down in a “civilized” manner and enjoy food together. Some people, through a combination of natural talent and training become experts in the preparation of foods. We have developed instruments such as chopsticks, spoons, knives and forks to help us eat foods. Most typically, various cultures have rituals and customs surrounding food. In many cases, these seem to be geared toward removing us psychologically from the life-giving functionality of food toward the communal enjoyment of food. For example, in my culture, we wait to eat until everyone is served. We eat at a “reasonable” pace rather than gobbling everything down as quickly as possible (before others at the table can snatch our portion). If there are ten people at the table and eleven delicious deserts, people turn many social summersaults in order to avoid taking the last one.

For much of our history, food was confined to what was available in the local region and season. Now, many people, but by no means all, are well off enough to buy foods at any season that originally were grown all over the world. When I was a child, very few Americans had even tried sushi, for example, and the very idea of eating raw fish turned stomachs. At this point, however, many Americans have tried it and most who have enjoy it. Similarly, other cuisines such as Indian and Middle Eastern have spread throughout the world in ways that would have been impossible without modern transportation, refrigeration, and modern training with cookbooks, translations, and videos supplementing face to face apprenticeships.

Some of these trends have enabled some people to enjoy foods of high quality and variety. We support many more people on the planet than would have been possible through hunting and gathering. These “advances” are not without costs. First, there are more people starving in today’s world than even existed on the planet 250,000 years ago. So, these benefits are very unevenly distributed. Second, while fine and delicious foods are available to many, the typical diet of many is primarily based on highly processed grains, soybeans, fat, refined sugar, salt and additives. These “foods” contain calories that allow life to continue; however, they lack many naturally occurring substances that help provide for optimal health. As mentioned, these foods are made “palatable” in the cheapest possible way and then advertised to death to help fool people into thinking they are eating well. In many cases, even “fresh” foods are genetically modified through breeding or via genetic engineering to provide foods that are optimized for cheap production and distribution rather than taste. Anyone who has grown their own tomatoes, for example, can readily appreciate that home grown “heirloom” tomatoes are far tastier than what is available in many supermarkets. While home farmers and small farmers have little in the way of government support, at least in the USA, mega-farming corporations are given huge subsidies to provide vast quantities of poor quality calories. As a consequence, low income people can generally not even afford good quality fresh fruits and vegetables and instead are forced through artificially cheap prices to feed their families with brightly packaged but essentially empty calories.

While some people enjoy some of the best food that ever existed, others have very mediocre food and still others have little food of any kind. What comes next? On the one hand, there is a move toward ever more efficient means of production and distribution of food. The food of humans has always been of interest to a large variety of other animals including rats, mice, deer, rabbits, birds, and insects. Insect pests are particularly difficult to deal with. In response, and in order to keep more of the food for “ourselves”, we have largely decided it is worth the tradeoff to poison our food supply. We use poisons that are designed to kill off insect pests but not kill us off, at least not immediately. I grow a little of my own food and some of that food gets eaten by insects, rabbits, and birds. Personally, I cannot see putting poison on my food supply in order to keep pests from having a share. However, I am lucky. I do not require 100% of my crop in order to stay alive nor to pay off the bank loan by selling it all. Because I grow a wide variety of foods in a relatively small space, there is a lively ecosystem and I don’t typically get everything destroyed by pests. Farmers who grow huge fields of corn, however, can be in a completely different situation and a lot of a crop can fall prey to pests. If they have used pesticides in the past, this is particularly true because they have probably poisoned the natural predators of those pests. At the same time, the pests themselves continue to evolve to be resistant to the poisons. In this way, chemical companies perpetuate a vicious circle in which more and more poison is needed to keep the crops viable. Luckily for the chemical companies, the long-term impact of these poisons on the humans who consume them is difficult to prove in courts of law.

There are movements such as “slow food” and eating locally grown food and urban gardens which are counter-trends, but by and large, our society of specialization has moved to more “efficient” production and distribution of food. More people eat out a higher percentage of the time and much of that “eating out” is at “fast food” restaurants. People grab a sandwich or a bagel or a burger and fries for a “quick fix” for their hunger in order to “save time” for “more productive” pursuits. Some of these “more productive” pursuits include being a doctor to cure diseases that come about in part from people eating junky food and spending most of their waking hours commuting, working at a desk or watching TV. Other “more productive” pursuits include being a lawyer and suing doctors and chemical companies for diseases. Yet other “more productive pursuits” include making money by pushing around little pieces of other people’s money. Still other “more productive pursuits” include making and distributing drugs to help people cope with lives where they spend all their time in “more productive pursuits.”

Do we live to eat or eat to live? Well, it is a little of both. But we seem to have painted ourselves into a corner where most people most of the time have forgone the pleasure of eating that is possible in order to eat more “efficiently” so that we can spend more time making more money. We do this in order to…? What is the end game here?

One can imagine a society in which eating itself becomes a completely irrelevant activity for the vast majority of people. Food that requires chewing takes more time so let’s replace chewing with artificial chewing. Using a blender allows food with texture to be quickly turned to a liquid that can be ingested in the minimum necessary time. One extreme science fiction scenario was depicted in the movie “Soylent Green” which, as it turns out, is made from the bodies of people killed to make room for more people. The movie is set in 2022 (not that far away) and was released in 1973. Today, in 2016, there exists a food called “soylent” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_(food)) whose inventor, Rob Rhinehart took the name from the movie. It is not made from human remains but the purpose is to provide an “efficient” solution to the Omnivore’s Dilemma (Michael Pollan). More efficient than smoothies, shakes, and soylent are feeding tubes.

Of course, there are medical conditions where feeding tubes are necessary as a replacement or supplement to ordinary eating as is being “fed” via an IV. But is this really where humanity in general needs to be headed? Is eating to be replaced with “Artificial Ingestion” because it is more efficient? We wouldn’t have to “waste our time” and “waste our energy” shopping, choosing, preparing, chewing, etc. if we could simply have all our nutritional needs met via an IV or feeding tube. With enough people opting in to this option, I am sure industrial research could provide ever less invasive and more mobile forms of IV and tube feeding. At last, humanity could be freed from the onerous task of ingestion, all of which could be replaced by “Artificial Ingestion.” The dollars saved could be put toward some more worthy purpose; for example, making a very few people very very rich.

There are, of course, a few problematic issues. For one thing, despite years of research, we are still discovering nutrients and their impacts. Any attempt to completely replace food with a uniform liquid supplement would almost certainly leave out some vital, but as yet undiscovered ingredients. But a more fundamental question is to what end would we undertake this endeavor in the first place? What if the purpose of life is not, after all, to accomplish everything “more efficiently” but rather, what if the purpose of life is to live it and enjoy it? What then?

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Rules and Standards nearly Dead? 

04 Sunday Sep 2016

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Ever get a speeding ticket that you thought was “silly”? I certainly have. On one occasion, when I was in graduate school in Ann Arbor, I drove by a police car parked in a gas station. It was a 35 mph zone. I looked over at the police car and looked down to check my speed. Thirty-five mph. No problem. Or, so I thought. I drove on and noticed that a few seconds later, the police officer turned his car on to the same road and began following me perhaps 1/4 to 1/2 mile behind me. He quickly zoomed up and turned on his flashing light to pull me over. He claimed he had followed me and I was going 50 mph. I was going 35. I kept checking because I saw the police car in my mirror. Now, it is quite possible that the police car was traveling 50, because he caught up with me very quickly. I explained this to no avail.

The University of Michigan at that time in the late 60’s was pretty liberal but was situated in a fairly conservative, some might say “redneck”, area of Michigan. There were many clashes between students and police. I am pretty certain that the only reason I got a ticket was that I was young and sporting a beard and therefore “must be” a liberal anti-war protester. I got the ticket because of bias.

Many years later, in 1988, I was driving north from New York to Boston on Interstate 84. This particular section of road is three lanes on both sides. It was a nice clear day and the pavement was dry as well as being dead straight with no hills. The shoulders and margins near the shoulders were clear. The speed limit was 55 mph but I was going 70. Given the state of my car, the conditions and the extremely sparse traffic, as well as my own mental and physical state, I felt perfectly safe driving 70. I got a ticket. In this case, I really was breaking the law. Technically. But I still felt it was a bit unjustified. There was no way that even a deer or rabbit, let alone a runaway child could come out of hiding and get to the highway without my seeing them in time to slow down, stop, or avoid them. Years earlier I had been on a similar stretch of road in Eastern Montana and at that time there was no speed limit. Still, rules are rules. At least for now.

“The Death of Rules and Standards” by Anthony J. Casey and Anthony Niblett suggests that advances in artificial intelligence may someday soon replace rules and standards with “micro-directives” tuned to the specifics of time and circumstance which will provide the benefits of rules without the cost of either. “…we suggest…a larger trend toward context specific laws that can adapt to any situation.” This is an interesting thesis and exploring it helps shine some light on what AI likely can and cannot do as well as making us question why we humans have categories and rules at all. Perhaps AI systems could replace human bias and general laws that seem to impose unnecessary restrictions in particular circumstances.

The first quibble with their argument is that no computer, however powerful, could possibly cover all situations. Taken literally, this would require a complete and accurate theory of physics as well as human behavior as well as a knowledge of the position and state of every particle in the universe. Not even post-singularity AI will likely be able to accomplish this. I hedge with the word “likely” because it is theoretically possible that a sufficiently smart AI will uncover some “hidden pattern” that shows that our universe which seems so vast and random can in fact be predicted in detail by a small set of laws that do not depend on details. In this fantasy future, there is no “true” randomness or chaos or butterfly effect.

Fantasies aside, the first issue that must be dealt with for micro-directives to be reasonable would be to have a good set of “equivalence classes” and/or to partition away differences that do not make a difference. The position of the moons of Jupiter shouldn’t make any difference as to whether a speeding ticket should be given or whether a killing is justified. Spatial proximity alone allows us as humans to greatly diminish the number of factors that need to be considered in deciding whether or not a give action is required, permissible, poor, or illegal. If I had gone to court about the speeding ticket on I-84, I might have mentioned the conditions of the roadway and its surroundings immediately ahead. I would not have mentioned anything whatever about the weather or road conditions anywhere else on the planet as being relevant to the safety of the situation. (Notice though, that it did seem reasonable to me, and possibly to you, to mention that very similar conditions many years earlier in Montana gave rise to no speed limit at all.) This gives us a hint that what is relevant or not relevant to a given situation is non-trivially determined. In fact, the “energy crisis” of the early 70’s gave rise to the National Maximum Speed Law as part of the 1974 Federal Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act. This enacted, among other things, a federal law limiting the speed limit to 55 mph. A New York Times article by Robert A. Hamilton cites a study done of compliance on Connecticut Interstates in 1988 showing that 85% of the drivers violated the 55 mph speed limit!

So,not only would I not received a ticket in Montana in 1972 for driving under similar conditions;  I also would not have gotten a ticket on that same exact stretch of highway for going 70 in 1972 or in 1996. And, in the year I actually got that ticket, 85% of the drivers were also breaking the speed limit. The impetus for the 1974 law was that it was supposed to reduce demand for oil; however, advocates were quick to point out that it should also improve safety. Despite several studies on both of these factors, it is still unclear how much, if any, oil was actually saved and it is also unclear what the impact on safety was. It seems logical that slower speeds should save lives. However, people may go out of their way to get to an Interstate if they can drive much faster on it. So some traffic during the 55 limit would stay on less safe rural roads. In addition, falling asleep while driving is not recommended. Driving a long trip at 70 gets you off the road earlier and perhaps before dusk while driving at 55 will keep you on the road longer and possibly in the dark. In addition, lowering the speed limit, to the extent there is any compliance does not just impact driving; it could also impact productivity. Time spent on the road is (hopefully) not time working for most people. One reason it is difficult to measure empirically the impact of slower speeds on safety is that other things were happening as well. Cars have had a number of features to make them safer over time and seat belt usage has gone up as well. They have also become more fuel efficient. Computers, even very “smart” computers are not “magic.” They cannot completely differentiate cause and effect from naturally occurring data. For that, humans or computers have to do expensive, costly, and ethically problematic field experiments.

Of course, what is true about something as simple as enforcing speed limits is equally or more problematic in other areas where one might be tempted to utilize micro-directives in place of laws. Sticking to speeding laws, micro-directives could “adjust” to conditions and avoid biases based on gender, race, and age, but they could also take into account many more factors. Should the allowable speed, for instance, be based on income? (After all a person making $250K per year is losing more money by driving more slowly than one making $25K/year). How about the reaction time of the driver? How about whether or not they are listening to the radio? As I drive, I don’t like using cruise control. I change my speed continually depending on the amount of traffic, whether or not someone in the nearby area appears to be driving erratically, how much visibility I have, how closely someone is following me and how close I have to be to the car in front and so on. Should all of these be taken into account in deciding whether or not to give a ticket? Is it “fair” for someone with extremely good vision and reaction times to be allowed to drive faster than someone with moderate vision and slow reaction times? How would people react to any such personalized micro-directives?

While the speed ticket situation is complex and could be fraught with emotion, what about other cases such as abortion? Some people feel that abortion should never be legal under any circumstances and others feel it is always the woman’s choice. Many people, however, feel that it is only justified under certain circumstances. But what are those circumstances in detail? And, even if the AI system takes into account 1000 variables to reach a “wise” decision, how would the rules and decisions be communicated?

Would an AI system be able to communicate in such a way as to personalize the manner of presentation for the specific person in the specific circumstances to warn them that they are about to break a micro-directive? In order to be “fair”, one could argue that the system should be equally able to prevent everyone from breaking a micro-directive. But some people are more unpredictable than others. What if, in order to make it so person A is 98% likely to follow the micro-directive, the AI system presents a soundtrack of a screaming child but in order to make person B 98% likely to follow the micro-directive, it only whispers a warning. Now, person B ignores the micro-directive and speeds (which would happen according to the premise 2% of the time). Wouldn’t person B, now be likely to object that if they had had the same warning, they would have not ignored the micro-directive? Conversely, person A might be so disconcerted by the warning that they end up in an accident.

Anyway, there is certainly no argument that our current system of using human judgement is prone to various kinds of conscious and unconscious biases. In addition, it also seems to be the case that any system of general laws ends up punishing people for what is actually “reasonable” behavior under the circumstances and ends up letting people off Scott-free when they do despicable things which are technically legal (absurdly rich people and corporations paying zero taxes comes to mind). Will driverless cars be followed by judge-less and jury-less courts?

Turing’s Nightmares