The Petrov dilemma: Moral responsibility in the age of ChatGPT

Julian Savulescu

NUS News

Originally published 13 FEB 23

Here is an excerpt:

3. Act ethically

What is to act ethically has been debated for thousands of years. But at its heart is a simple answer: add value to the lives of other people. For Lt-Col Petrov, doing nothing was the hardest choice: “All I had to do was to reach for the phone; to raise the direct line to our top commanders – but I couldn’t move. I felt like I was sitting on a hot frying pan.”

ChatGPT is an extremely powerful technology with enormous potential for human benefit. It can distill human knowledge and wisdom, quickly create factual and normative content, enable communication between speakers of different languages, and ultimately enhance or even surpass human creativity.

As with any powerful technology, there are significant risks. At present, there are numerous mistakes and false claims, but these presumably will be ironed out. Longer term, risks include to threats to privacy; large-scale perpetuation of biases; plagiarism; displacement of human workers and creativity; deception and malicious use.

Acting ethically requires realising the value of technology while ensuring the risks are reasonable. Institutional or structural changes may be necessary, for example, labelling and creation of watermarks to prevent plagiarism.

To be human is to make your own ethical decisions

One ethical question that confronts regulators and industry is: should a driverless car swerve and sacrifice an innocent bystander (pedestrian or cyclist) to save a greater number of lives in the vehicle? I asked ChatGPT whether it is right to kill one to save five. Here is the answer:

“Whether or not it is right to kill one person to save five people is a complex ethical question. Some people may argue that taking one life to save five is the more logical option, and is therefore justified. However, it is also important to consider the ethical principle of respect for autonomy.

“This principle states that all individuals have an inherent right to make autonomous and informed decisions about their lives, including their own death. Taking this into consideration, it may not be morally right to force someone to accept the sacrifice of their life in order to save the lives of five other people. Ultimately, the answer to this question is subjective and depends on one’s own ethical and moral beliefs.”

But as driverless cars are rolled out, we won’t have the luxury of remaining on the fence, or relying on drivers’ reflexes to get us out of a decision. We will have to make moral choices and give reasons, and apply them consistently to programming the vehicles. This requires deep – and human – ethical thinking and expertise.

The info is here.

Tribalism is Human Nature

Cory Clark, Brittany Liu, Bo Winegard, and Peter Ditto
Pre-print

Abstract

Humans evolved in the context of intense intergroup competition, and groups comprised of loyal members more often succeeded than those that were not. Therefore, selective pressures have consistently sculpted human minds to be "tribal," and group loyalty and concomitant cognitive biases likely exist in all groups. Modern politics is one of the most salient forms of modern coalitional conflict and elicits substantial cognitive biases. Given the common evolutionary history of liberals and conservatives, there is little reason to expect pro-tribe biases to be higher on one side of the political spectrum than the other. We call this the evolutionarily plausible null hypothesis and recent research has supported it. In a recent meta-analysis, liberals and conservatives showed similar levels of partisan bias, and a number of pro-tribe cognitive tendencies often ascribed to conservatives (e.g., intolerance toward dissimilar others) have been found in similar degrees in liberals. We conclude that tribal bias is a natural and nearly ineradicable feature of human cognition, and that no group—not even one’s own—is immune.

Here is part of the Conclusion:

Humans are tribal creatures. They were not designed to reason dispassionately about the world; rather, they were designed to reason in ways that promote the interests of their coalition (and hence, themselves). It would therefore be surprising if a particular group of individuals did not display such tendencies, and recent work suggests, at least in the U.S. political sphere, that both liberals and conservatives are substantially biased—and to similar degrees. Historically, and perhaps even in modern society, these tribal biases are quite useful for group cohesion but perhaps also for other moral purposes (e.g., liberal bias in favor of disadvantaged groups might help increase equality). Also, it is worth noting that a bias toward viewing one’s own tribe in a favorable light is not necessarily irrational. If one’s goal is to be admired among one’s own tribe, fervidly supporting their agenda and promoting their goals, even if that means having or promoting erroneous beliefs, is often a reasonable strategy (Kahan et al., 2017). The incentives for holding an accurate opinion about global climate change, for example, may not be worth the social rejection and loss of status that could accompany challenging the views of one’s political ingroup. However, these biases decrease the likelihood of consensus across political divides. Thus, developing effective strategies for disincentivizing political tribalism and promoting the much less natural but more salutary tendencies toward civil political discourse and reasonable compromise are crucial priorities for future research. A useful theoretical starting point is that tribalism and concomitant biases are part of human nature, and that no group, not even one’s own, is immune.

A pre-print is here.