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Comment by krona | Hacker News Reader

> What is today a moral imperative is not the same as what was moral 50/100 years ago and is not the same as what will be morally acceptable 50/100 years from now.

This is a fashionable 'blank-slatist' statement about moral reasoning which became popular a few decades ago.

> Logic would prefer moral derivations over feelings, stakes over etiquette, and a constant scheduled updating of morality based on the derivatives rather than holding onto the rot and pushing back against change as long as possible.

Humans haven't changed in any meaningful way in hundreds of thousands of years, and you're saying the moral landscape is constantly changing? How is this not contradictory?

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I think neither the 'any set of morals is equally correct and workable' nor 'there is one fixed set of morality that is universal across time, place, and culture' is really defensible. It seems like morality is a set of ideas much like any other, and subject to selection pressure: some morals are more capable of surviving and propagating than others, and the common features we see across cultures are representative of that. But also we might expect that they shift with the structure of society and that has changed drastically because while human genetic evolution is progressing on a much longer timescale than recent history, memetic evolution is far faster (though for things like morality, still at generational timescales).

There are cross-cultural differences in moral reasoning, and I think this is very interesting. But that seems to make training a hyper-rational AI, with no meaningful theory of mind, to be 'moral' or 'just' even harder.

What is a human? There is the animal body part of us, the thing that wants to survive, the fight or flight. But there is also another mental part of us that shows different emergent behaviors than an animal. For example if I dropped you off in the woods as a very young child, you would be an animal, you would share very few modern 'thinking' traits with human society. That is human society and what it does emerges from the complexity of our interactions. It doesn't take much research to realize our interactions and behaviors have grown far more complex in the last 10,000 years. And then in the last 500 years there's been further acceleration with the industrial age and the rise of technology.

This is not unique to humans. Animal behavior also emerges from the complexity of their interactions. Look at the "[duck] raised as a [chicken]" genre of videos, for instance.

To return towards the subject of the thread, "AI behavior emerges from the complexity of their training", is the whole point.

Even though humans haven't changed anatomically, culture and society has, which is what defines morality.

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