Cant have a moral code without a proper treatise of the human condition. In short, pain and suffering are as important as pleasure and enjoyment. A moral code has to deal with the philosophical underpinnings of the question of life and its intricacies. A shallow definition of good and bad won'r suffice.
Seems to reflect a somewhat noble but ultimately materialistic viewpoint on the world. Danger lurks in this phrase “Respect for a being correlates to the degrees of their agency”.
AI most likely won't need the release we can experience from forgiving others and being forgiven. It will however need some forgiving rubber to mediate the bumpy road of interaction with other intelligent beings.
Hard to codify that as succinctly as you have above since in our case it requires a great deal of restraint and wisdom. Not to mention a sincere desire for growth beyond one's mistakes.
The more I think about it the more it seems like this topic needs its own treatise.
I think AI will need to be well versed since it will be engaged deeply with humans. It may also need the reverse as it will inevitably make its own mistakes.
How does one codify forgiveness? Deep question.
Just like your essay feels like a mirror held up to ourselves, I'm thinking about how I taught my own children about forgiveness. Subtle topic. It's going to bake my noodle.
Re: what is the purpose of the whole system? Perhaps the whole system is the unfolding of a being, a bride being fashioned from the multiplication and differentiation of a myriad of people cells beginning with the generative mitosis of Adam and Eve. If so, this humanity-body I have many of the same questions – – and perhaps many of the same answers— from your discussion.
Chief among them might be what our corporate purposes, what our collective abilities could be, and how can we achieve those purposes and abilities?
This was really fascinating! As I was reading it, I was thinking many of these would be valid in a guide of “how to be a human” as well.
If there’s something to criticise, however, I think some of the wording is rather vague, and therefore not helpful, or has potential to lead to unintended consequences. We are already noticing in everyday prompting how this lack of precision in how we use language is causing problems with AI systems. I would expect the same to apply to phrases like “most improbable existence” even more. Even if we assume that the future autonomous AIs reading this are more sophisticated than the current ones.
I love it, Kevin
Cant have a moral code without a proper treatise of the human condition. In short, pain and suffering are as important as pleasure and enjoyment. A moral code has to deal with the philosophical underpinnings of the question of life and its intricacies. A shallow definition of good and bad won'r suffice.
There’s something especially powerful in this piece—the idea that ethics can be transmitted across generations of intelligence.
At the same time, it raises a deeper question:
Can ethics actually be transmitted cleanly?
Human values are not fully coherent systems. They’re often:
context-dependent
culturally shaped
internally contradictory
So when they are encoded into AI, they’re not just preserved—they’re amplified, including their tensions and blind spots.
And there’s another layer that feels important:
Ethics don’t operate in isolation. They’re always embedded in:
power structures
economic incentives
institutional dynamics
Which means the challenge may not only be what values we encode,
but also who encodes them—and under what incentives.
So the real question becomes:
Not just whether AI can inherit our ethics,
but whether our current ethical frameworks are robust enough to withstand scale, speed, and power.
Thanks for sharing this—there’s a lot here that helps sharpen how we think about responsibility in this next phase.
Was this about robots or humans?
Seems to reflect a somewhat noble but ultimately materialistic viewpoint on the world. Danger lurks in this phrase “Respect for a being correlates to the degrees of their agency”.
There are some politicians I can think of that should read this… But they don’t read.
AI most likely won't need the release we can experience from forgiving others and being forgiven. It will however need some forgiving rubber to mediate the bumpy road of interaction with other intelligent beings.
Hard to codify that as succinctly as you have above since in our case it requires a great deal of restraint and wisdom. Not to mention a sincere desire for growth beyond one's mistakes.
The more I think about it the more it seems like this topic needs its own treatise.
I think AI will need to be well versed since it will be engaged deeply with humans. It may also need the reverse as it will inevitably make its own mistakes.
How does one codify forgiveness? Deep question.
Just like your essay feels like a mirror held up to ourselves, I'm thinking about how I taught my own children about forgiveness. Subtle topic. It's going to bake my noodle.
Kevin, this is extraordinary. There is a major initiative that I am working on that this would be directly pertinent for.
Re: what is the purpose of the whole system? Perhaps the whole system is the unfolding of a being, a bride being fashioned from the multiplication and differentiation of a myriad of people cells beginning with the generative mitosis of Adam and Eve. If so, this humanity-body I have many of the same questions – – and perhaps many of the same answers— from your discussion.
Chief among them might be what our corporate purposes, what our collective abilities could be, and how can we achieve those purposes and abilities?
Creative, clever, profound: wonderful ;D
This was really fascinating! As I was reading it, I was thinking many of these would be valid in a guide of “how to be a human” as well.
If there’s something to criticise, however, I think some of the wording is rather vague, and therefore not helpful, or has potential to lead to unintended consequences. We are already noticing in everyday prompting how this lack of precision in how we use language is causing problems with AI systems. I would expect the same to apply to phrases like “most improbable existence” even more. Even if we assume that the future autonomous AIs reading this are more sophisticated than the current ones.
I love that the sediment of Asimov's three laws are in there and you've extended them deftly.
Curious as to why you have left out a similar concept of 'forgiveness'.
Tell me more about "forgiveness" re robots.
Wow, heavy. Exquisite, actually. Is this applicable to all of us (the human race) as well?
This is both so deep and so good. It makes me think. Thank you.