HackingTheUniverse

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In our popular literature genre of Science Fiction, we love to experience space drama that involves extrapolations of our past social conflicts. Some of the most dramatic moments in our historical wartime conflicts have involved mighty ships and fast fighter craft. Based on this, our Sci-Fi presents us with great ships in space and dogfight […]

As we begin to embed ethical principles into machines and software that can make decisions, we need to examine the use cases involved. The ethical codes needed in a powerful and dangerous machine that can easily cause life threatening damage are quite different from those needed in a software agent that makes grocery purchasing choices […]

We often measure the success of processes with numbers that represent some state of the output or operation of the process. Financial organizations tend to use a “bottom line” number of profitability. But nation-states and some other groups have different purposes and need different measures. When the purpose of a group is to sustain or […]

Ethics is the consideration of what action is the best. This can be fairly straightforward when we only consider ourselves and there aren’t any significant unknown factors. But even under these restrictions, an ethical analysis can become complex. Consider this scenario: We can travel for one day to a location where there is one gallon […]

Recent news stories have echoed worries that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a threat to us. In fact, AI is our only salvation. There are numerous existential threats on our immediate horizon, including: nuclear weapons, bio-genetic weapons, nanotechnology weapons, robotic weapons, and more possibilities. Nuclear and robotic weapons pale in comparison to bio-genetic weapons and nanotechnology […]

Intelligence is a complex concept and can be difficult to define. How we define it will determine how we go about attempting to detect it. If we use a simplistic definition that only includes computation speed and accuracy and amount of information, we will use those factors to determine whether or not we have detected […]

Intelligence is often presented as a simple linear scale that ranges from some description of “low” to some description of “high”. In fact, intelligence takes on different forms. The linear scale is often used to describe factors like: computational speed, computational accuracy, and amount of knowledge stored. While these all should be included in an […]

We indulge ourselves with science fiction stories and movies that portray aliens as strong and evil threats to human civilization. But our history shows that we are the most dangerous threat to other species around us. We have rolled over species and even entire environments in a destructive and ignorant fashion. We don’t think of […]

Awareness of a problem is always one of the first prerequisites to finding a solution. In everyday life, many people are grossly unaware of many threats around them. Technology always amplifies things and that happens without discrimination or moral clauses. It amplifies both good and bad. It can make our information more safe and less […]

In order to predict what will happen in our future, we look at how we can describe our present, how we got there from the past, and then extend the trend lines we can observe into the future. One way to do that is to break out some categories of ethical concern. Ethics dictates that […]