I have one basic question on friendly AI - suppose we work and work and eventually figure out how to code in a friendly value system in a foolproof way, given any definition of &quot;friendly&quot;. Great. But given that ability, how do you even define what &quot;friendly&quot; or &quot;good&quot; is?<p>As a layman, I so far can only see it in terms of basic philosophy and normative ethics. By definition, a friendly AI is one that doesn&#x27;t merely deal with facts, but also with &quot;should&quot; statements.<p>Hume&#x27;s Guillotine says you can&#x27;t derive an ought statement from is statements alone. Some folks like Sam Harris disagree but they&#x27;re really just making strenuous arguments that certain moral axioms should be universally accepted.<p>Münchhausen Trilemma says that when asking why, in this case why something should or should not be done, you&#x27;ve only got three choices - keep asking why forever, resort to circular reasoning, or eventually rely on axioms. In this case, moral axioms or value statements.<p>So it seems like any friendly AI is going to have to rely on moral axioms in some sense. But how do you even define what they are? Normative ethics is generally seen to have three branches. For consequentialism (like utilitarianism) you make your decision based on its probable outcome, using some utility function. For deontology, you rely on hardcoded rules. For value ethics, you make decisions based off of whether they align with your own self-perception of being a good person.<p>But all three have flaws - in consequentialism, it&#x27;s like putting on blinders to other system effects, and the proposed actions are often deeply unsettling (like pushing a guy off a bridge to block a trolley from killing three others). In deontology and value ethics, actions and the principles they are derived from can be deeply at odds - whether it&#x27;s hypocrisy in deontology or &quot;road to hell being paved by good intentions&quot; in value ethics. In general, deeply counterintuitive effects can be derived from simple principles, as anyone familiar with systems dynamics knows.<p>But even beyond that, even if we had a reasonable, consistent AI controlled by solid values, and even if the people judging the AI could <i>accept</i> the conclusions&#x2F;actions that the AIs derive from those values, how would we ever get consensus on what those values should be? For instance, even in our community there&#x27;s a fair amount of disagreement among these basic root-level utility functions:<p>- Maximize current life (people alive today), like Bill Gates believes.
 - Maximize future life (survival of species)
 - Maximize health of planet<p>etc, etc - those utility functions lead to different &quot;should&quot; conclusions, often in surprising ways.