Machine intelligence is necessary to scale morality
By Myworkforwiki (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
When we discuss the concept of morality it is often from the perspective of intuitive morality. This is not going to be about any intuition, or emotions, as in my opinion these can actually create bias, and tilt morality in favor of personal interests. So for this discussion we will not place much emphasis on this even though I expect any reader to have their moral intuitions.
Consequentialism is a consequence based method of determining the correct or incorrect actions. So if you are trying to learn from consequences it is often a trial and error approach. This kind of learning of right from wrong is often the only viable approach because there is not always a mentor, a teacher, a religious guide, or script on what to do in a particular situation. Entities learn what to do and what not to do, by looking at what happened to the people who did or didn't do a particular action.
Consequentialism requires a lot of analysis of data. Big data analysis is a method of scaling consequentialism up and data analytics companies are known to assist in this process. The problem is the common Joe Sixpack has no method of even attempting to improve their decision making along these lines due to barriers to entry (cost of hiring a data analytics company) or due to inability to process the data if they managed to collect it themselves. The smart types (I will include myself) do constantly analyze the data we come across to try to continuously improve our decision making capability (morality) but we find ourselves limited to what data we can process using very limited tools such as our brains, calculators, etc.
The day trading example
A good example for understanding how consequentialism works is to take a look at the typical day trader in crypto. If we think of investment decisions as we think of moral decisions, and we label a bad investment decision as immoral in practice and a good investment decision as moral in practice, then we can know based on return on our investment whether or not any particular decision was moral. Most day traders lose money because they invest with their brains while the quantitative traders know that the manipulation of psychology and of these individual brains allows them to utilize bots to take advantage of certain emotions such as fear, mania, etc. As a result, quantitative traders simply turn investment decisions into algorithms and remove their intuition entirely from the decision making process.
Quantitative trading requires lots of data, lots of computation resources to analyze the data, and high quality sources of data. A source of data includes public sentiment about a particular stock. If we were to put this in a moral context this would be public sentiment about a particular topic or choice (this is moral sentiment of the crowd). The sentiment often is right, but not always, as the crowd is influenced by emotions. Algorithms merely take the current sentiment of the crowd as just another input into a calculation.
The only way to scale up decision making in investing is to use artificial intelligence. We know this because in practice the entities which have the highest quality information and the best AI are winning the ROI competition. Why is it when the topic is morality that so many cannot see also that the same processes are at work? In consequentialist morality it is obvious that the same computers which can be used to help make an investment decision can help make a moral decision, merely by tweaking the algorithms. Big data represents the mass of data too big and too much for human brains to process, but this is the data necessary to be processed to determine the most moral course of action or the highest quality decision.
A consequentialist can view morality as a risk management strategy. Better morality in the world and in decision making means lower risks.
References
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_analyst
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data
- https://steemit.com/ethics/@dana-edwards/is-the-moral-high-ground-merely-a-synonym-for-moral-pyramid
- https://steemit.com/politics/@dana-edwards/total-transparancy-benefits-the-top-of-the-pyramid-and-may-not-actually-work-as-intended-there-are-costs