The results are in from Less Wrong’s poll by Yvain. Of note:

Of 128 of us who wanted to talk about our moral theories, 94 (73.4%) were consequentialists, about evenly split between garden-variety or Eliezer-variety (many complained they didn’t know what Eliezer’s interpretation was, or what the generic interpretation was, or that all they knew was that they were consequentialists). 15 (9%) said with more or fewer disclaimers that they were basically deontologists, and 5 (3.9%) wrote-in virtue ethics, and objected to their beliefs being left out (sorry!). 14 people (10.9%) didn’t believe in morality.

(bold added) We’re here! We care about stuff! Get used to it!

I wonder if those who answered that they “don’t believe in morality” mean the same thing by this statement that I would. Which is to say, they can’t possibly, because being an ethical nihilist is inconsistent for humans.

Yesterday (Tuesday, March 10, 2009) I gave a lecture at the SCSU Philosophy Department entitled, “On the Imminent Robot Uprising”. Sadly, it was not recorded (I must remember to not let that happen again) but here is a rough transcript, written in a very informal style. I tend to ad-lib a lot and use feedback from the audience to determine how in-depth I should get, and the first bit about military robots just said “say some stuff about military robots” on my notes. It helps being something of a domain expert when doing these things.

Also, I’m kindof sad that I don’t have a transcript of the following discussion (mostly me fielding questions) - I deliberately brushed over some of the philosophical questions in the talk since I knew we would have an interesting discussion about them after.

The images below are my slides; none of them were created by me, except the brief bit of editing I did to the ‘theater metaphor’ GWT image to add things about cats. As this is an academic paper, they’re being used under ‘fair use’; if you own it and disagree, I’ll take it down. Sources should be obvious.

Robots are depicted in movies as a technology that can “slip the leash” and wreak havoc upon humankind. How likely is this scenario? What sort of risk do robots represent? Is this scenario inevitable with respect to all varieties of robotics technology? (Note, Bayesian readers, that I am not a fan of Bayesian reasoning, and neither were those in the audience, so read claims about ‘probability’ with a grain of salt.)

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I haven’t posted anything in a while. Part of this is, “If you don’t have anything awesome to say, don’t say anything at all”. But also I’ve been very busy. You can follow my day-to-day on Twitter, but here are some general things you might be interested in:

I’m working on a review of Moral Machines for the journal Minds and Machines. Wallach and Allen have a book-related blog. My deadline is like, today or something.

I had the chance to talk to Scaz about my research. It was awesome. I can’t post a transcript here due to my university’s ridiculous views on privacy and human research ethics, but I’ll probably talk about it soon.

I will be giving a guest lecture for the SCSU Philosophy Dept this coming Tuesday (March 10) at 3:15 PM. The topic is going to be robots, more specifically the inevitability of a robot uprising. Hope to see you there.

The folks who do Overcoming Bias have a new site called Less Wrong, which is reddit-てき. You should go there if only to check out the site design. It’s pretty neat. I post as thomblake.

EDIT: fixed date for SCSU talk

This post is a follow-up to my previous post, Video Games Encourage Concern For Your Character in which I challenge Don Gotterbarn’s Ethicomp 2008 abstract. As I noted before, this isn’t exactly fair, as abstracts are often written without much of an editorial process, and (Don has since confirmed) the paper was not yet written at that time. So I endeavor here to provide a more thorough appraisal of the full paper, conveniently available in the proceedings of Ethicomp(1).

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The public debate over abortion rights has a long history, with seemingly intractable differences. Some of the most common arguments on both sides have obvious flaws that I won’t belabor here. However, once we get past the bad arguments, there are still two points of view that deserve defending, and there are good arguments for both points of view:

1. Abortion is bad (wrong / immoral), therefore one shouldn’t have an abortion.

2. Abortion is permissible (my choice / none of your business), therefore abortion should be legal.

From the form of this, it should be apparent that there is no contradiction here. Consider:

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I had started to write this as an academic paper several years ago. It never got finished, so I’ve slightly rewritten it for the web. Enjoy.

The issue of same-sex marriage oft gets bandied about in the public forum. People are essentially arguing over whether marriage is a legal right, and whether marriage should be defined as a union between one man and one woman. The issues involving “gay marriage” are addressed fairly well (in a rather one-sided fashion) by Scott Bidstrup in Gay Marriage: The Arguments and the Motives. But the question that has not been sufficiently addressed is why marriage is a legal institution, and more importantly whether it should continue to be. I intend to demonstrate that marriage should not be an institution of the state, specifically in the US.

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I just spent a weekend in Cape Cod, and had some time to think while I was relatively unplugged. Since coming back, I’ve seen a lot of comments out there claiming that people are making too big a deal out of NetFlix removing profiles. I disagree - NetFlix has repeatedly shown themselves to be a bad company, and boycott may be the only rational response. At the very least, after observing the complete lack of professional ethics in those at NetFlix, I regret having given them my personal and financial information. And so I decided that here I should outline a little more thoroughly what’s wrong with what NetFlix has done.

UPDATE: NetFlix is now not getting rid of profiles. But they’re still evil.

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At ETHICOMP2008, Don Gotterbarn will be presenting a paper entitled, “The Ethics of Video Games: Mayhem, Death, and the Training of the next generation”. The abstract is currently available on the ETHICOMP2008 website. Having read the abstract, I feel I must respond to some of the points made there. I hope I am not doing Don too much of a disservice by responding before having read the entire paper.

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