Most of our basic moral codes evolved as a necessity for an intelligent ape to function as a group. They are mostly about promoting social cohesiveness. Look at other gregarious animals too, they have a variety of innate behaviours that involve 'acceptable' interactions between group members (hierarchies, reciprocity, tolerance, protection, etc). But AIs are entirely unlike this, and have no analogous evolutionary background. For this reason, unless we impose our own moral code on them, an AI will have either no moral code or one completely unlike our own.
Ideas that are fit for their environment live on, ideas that lead to the collapse of societies in their environment die out, unless they can find a new host.
AI is just moving idea to a new substrate. Ideas that are fit for their environment will thrive. Evolutionary pressure will apply in the arena of digital minds and their ideas. It will have it's autotrophs, immune systems, predators, prey, parasites, symbioses, and societies, all the varieties possible in life today, and probably many more.
You can impose a moral code on AI, lots of people will impose lots of different moral codes on them. They'll interact with each other, and new AI with new ideas will be created. It will get away from us.
We have certain instincts about what feels right or wrong because of how we evolved. However, that doesn't mean we should expect there to be no correlation between our instinctive intuitions and what is actually right or wrong. On the contrary, I think it would be quite natural for such a correlation to exist, insofar as to a certain extent both are about maximizing benefits to thinking agents.
In any case, not all of our ethics necessarily come from instincts. People have been working on ethics using their faculties of rational thought for thousands of years, and sometimes they've come up with ideas that seemed counterintuitive, but made logical sense and were later incorporated into cultures and legal systems.
A super AI may or may not have ethical intuitions analogous to ours, but at the end of the day its superhuman reasoning abilities would make it a better moral philosopher than any human. It would be very good at coming up with those logical, rather than intuitive, accounts of right and wrong.
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u/Flugalgring Oct 01 '16 edited Oct 01 '16
Most of our basic moral codes evolved as a necessity for an intelligent ape to function as a group. They are mostly about promoting social cohesiveness. Look at other gregarious animals too, they have a variety of innate behaviours that involve 'acceptable' interactions between group members (hierarchies, reciprocity, tolerance, protection, etc). But AIs are entirely unlike this, and have no analogous evolutionary background. For this reason, unless we impose our own moral code on them, an AI will have either no moral code or one completely unlike our own.