@starbreaker

I mean, I can beat people to death with mechanical keyboards. How would that have been prevented?

You can't make safe hammers. If hammers can think, then you still have to decide what constitutes 'safety', and that's hazy.

I'm trying to say: There need to be explicit lines about what is ethically expected of the machine to 'prevent', because *we* can't 'prevent' our own weaponization. We cannot expect our creations to somehow be better at it than us.

@sydneyfalk I've been trying to say that it isn't the machine's job to prevent itself from being misused. It's our job to refuse when asked or commanded to make machines that we know or suspect can be easily weaponized.

We're the human beings. We should damned well know better.

@starbreaker

Well, this:

> Rule 0. Do not design robots capable of harming humanity, or, by inaction, allowing humanity to come to harm.

The last part specifically implies a robot has to prevent its own misuse -- it cannot allow, via inaction, humanity to come to harm.

So it has to *detect* misuse, so it can shut down, retract blades, etc.

> We're the human beings. We should damned well know better.

Well, based on available evidence, we don't, and never did.

@starbreaker

As for the ethics of whether *we* should do things: Yeah, we should be more careful about that. But we "should" do a lot of things and we don't. We, humanity, don't bother. And even the subset of us that *does* bother cannot actually predict and avoid, successfully, all possible work that is detrimental to humanity.

Maybe robots could be designed to not be manipulatable into murder, but humans are basically born for the job, as far as I can tell. :\

@starbreaker

Case in point: Zuckerberg. He didn't design this thinking "what if this becomes a global power tool that can be manipulated into targeted political hacking". He didn't start with an end in mind, and could not have predicted that *his* product, code, etc., would somehow be the thing that *did* do this.

He couldn't know he was gonna Skynet. He was a less dumb fuck who correctly identified a bunch of dumb fucks giving him information.

If not him, someone.

@starbreaker

I agree we *should*.

But nothing about humanity has suggested, from what I can see, that we *will*.

So we're gonna have to build ethical considerations into something that *can* potentially think that *isn't* afflicted with meatbag instincts.

At least, that's what I think *might* have a shot at working.

Humanity has no shame. We have no ability, as a whole, to look at our behavior and reject it as immoral.

We just do what we do and things happen. :\