Abstract
Most ethical work is done at a low level of formality. This makes practical moral questions inaccessible to formal and natural sciences and can lead to misunderstandings in ethical discussion. In this paper, we use Bayesian inference to introduce a formalization of preference utilitarianism in physical world models, specifically cellular automata. Even though our formalization is not immediately applicable, it is a first step in providing ethics and ultimately the question of how to "make the world better" with a formal basis.
Highlights
Ethical imperatives are not formulated with sufficient precision to study them and their realization mathematically. (McLaren 2011, p. 297; Gips 2011, p. 251) In particular, it is impossible to implement them on an intelligent machine to make it behave benevolently in our universe, which is the subject of a field known as Friendly AI or machine ethics
– We describe the problem of informality in ethics and the shortcomings of previous dualist approaches to formalizing utilitarian ethics (Sect. 2)
We introduce some very basic notation and terminology of cellular systems, a generalization of classic cellular automata, setting the scene for our ethical imperative
Summary
Ethical imperatives are not formulated with sufficient precision to study them and their realization mathematically. (McLaren 2011, p. 297; Gips 2011, p. 251) In particular, it is impossible to implement them on an intelligent machine to make it behave benevolently in our universe, which is the subject of a field known as Friendly AI (e.g. see Yudkowsky 2001, p. 2) or machine ethics (e.g. see Anderson and Anderson 2011, p. 1). Whereas existing formalizations of utilitarian ethics have been successfully applied to economics, they are incomplete due to the nature of their dualistic world model in which agents are assumed to be ontologically fundamental. We take the following steps towards a workable and simple formalization of preference utilitarianism in physical world models:. – We describe the problem of informality in ethics and the shortcomings of previous dualist approaches to formalizing utilitarian ethics – We justify cellular automata as a world model, use Bayes’ theorem to extract utility functions from a given space-time embedded agent and introduce a formalization of preference utilitarianism – We compare our approach with existing work in ethics, game theory and artificial intelligence Our formalization is novel but relates to a growing movement to treat agents as embedded into the environment
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