GIẢI ĐỀ READING CAM 18 TEST 2 PASSAGE 2

Powerful artificial intelligence (AI) needs to be reliably aligned with human values, but does this mean AI will eventually have to police those values?

This has been the decade of AI, with one astonishing feat after another… many experts believe this restriction is very temporary. By mid-century, we may have artificial general intelligence (AGI) – machines that can achieve human-level performance on the full range of tasks that we ourselves can tackle.

If so, there’s little reason to think it will stop there. Machines will be free of many of the physical constraints on human intelligence. Our brains run at slow biochemical processing speeds… they may be as far from the physical limits of thought as our eyes are from the Webb Space Telescope.

…the more powerful AI becomes, the more important it will be to specify its goals with great care. Folklore is full of tales of people who ask for the wrong thing, with disastrous consequences – King Midas, for example, might have wished that everything he touched turned to gold, but didn’t really intend this to apply to his breakfast.

So we need to create powerful AI machines that are ‘human-friendly’ – that have goals reliably aligned with our own values. One thing that makes this task difficult is that we are far from reliably human-friendly ourselves. We do many terrible things to each other and to many other creatures… If superintelligent machines don’t do a lot better than us, we’ll be in deep trouble.

For safety’s sake, then, we want the machines to be ethically as well as cognitively superhuman. We want them to aim for the moral high ground… Luckily they’ll be smart enough for the job. If there are routes to the moral high ground, they’ll be better than us at finding them, and steering us in the right direction.

However, there are two big problems with this utopian vision. The ‘getting started’ problem is that we need to tell the machines what they’re looking for… we are tribal creatures and conflicted about the ideals ourselves. We often ignore the suffering of strangers, and even contribute to it, at least indirectly.

As for the ‘destination’ problem, we might, by putting ourselves in the hands of these moral guides and gatekeepers, be sacrificing our own autonomy… We might lose our freedom to discriminate in favour of our own communities, for example.

Loss of freedom to behave badly isn’t always a bad thing… But are we ready for ethical silicon police limiting our options? They might be so good at doing it that we won’t notice them; but few of us are likely to welcome such a future.

These issues might seem far-fetched, but they are to some extent already here. AI already has some input into how resources are used in our National Health Service (NHS) here in the UK… However, we’d be depriving some humans (e.g. senior doctors) of the control they presently enjoy.

…It is not yet clear whether this is possible, but if it is, it will require a cooperative spirit, and a willingness to set aside self-interest.