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The Monday Morning Memo

Will it be obvious when robots have free will?

I think the first evidence will be if robots start communicating with each other counterfactually, like “You should have done better.” If a team of robots playing soccer starts to communicate in this language, then we’ll know that they have a sensation of free will. “You should have passed me the ball — I was waiting for you and you didn’t!” “You should have” means you could have controlled whatever urges made you do what you did, and you didn’t. So the first sign will be communication; the next will be better soccer.

Now that you’ve brought up free will, I guess I should ask you about the capacity for evil, which we generally think of as being contingent upon an ability to make choices. What is evil?

It’s the belief that your greed or grievance supersedes all standard norms of society. For example, a person has something akin to a software module that says “You are hungry, therefore you have permission to act to satisfy your greed or grievance.” But you have other software modules that instruct you to follow the standard laws of society. One of them is called compassion. When you elevate your grievance above those universal norms of society, that’s evil.

Read the whole article at QuantaMagazine.org

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Random Quote:

“We had won the town and it was early morning and still no one had eaten nor had anyone drunk coffee and we looked at each other and we were all powdered with dust from the blowing up of the barracks, as powdered as men are at a threshing, and I stood holding the pistol and it was heavy in my hand and I felt weak in the stomach when I looked at the guards dead there against the wall; they all as gray and as dusty as we were, but each one was now moistening with his blood the dry dirt by the wall where they lay. And as we stood there the sun rose over the far hills and shone now on the road where we stood and on the white wall of the barracks and the dust in the air was golden in that first sun and the peasant who was beside me looked at the wall of the barracks and what lay there and then looked at us and said, ‘Vaya, a day that commences.'”

“Now let us go and get coffee,’ I said.”

- Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls, p. 102. Did you notice that the first paragraph was a single, impossibly long sentence? This is very unusual for Hemingway. He was known for short, tight, declarative sentences.

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