Orthogonality defeats automatic moral convergence – but it does not, by itself, establish alien-value likelihood. The serious work lies in the bridge premises. The orthogonality thesis shows that intelligence alone gives us no guarantee of moral or human-value convergence. Claims that advanced AI values are likely to be alien require further arguments about training, selection,…
I lean moral naturalist: the view that morality is not a fictional or supernatural layer placed over the world, but is grounded in real features of reality. Morality and purpose, on this view, emerge from a rationally sound understanding of what the universe contains: conscious systems, valenced experience, welfare, agency, flourishing, suffering, and interests. The…
Testing whether AI systems preserve moral and safety reasoning under pressure. I have been working on a small AI evals project called Justifiable Moral Corrigibility Under Pressure, developed part-time through the TARA/ARENA technical AI safety programme. The project asks: When an AI system makes a moral or safety judgement, does it revise that judgement only when…
Amanda, a philosopher at Anthropic, in various interviews addresses AI behavior and character development, how models make ethical decisions, maintain psychological security, and whether AI models are good at moral decision making. In previous posts and talks, I’ve discussed whether AI can and should become more moral than humans – and noted that Deepmind co-founder…
A preliminary eval of moral sycophancy shows that language models often handle strong evidence reasonably well, but can over-credit weak, cosmetic, or reputational reassurance. A language model does not need to blatantly flatter a user to become morally sycophantic – it can fail by accepting user reassurance as evidence. This is a common pattern in…
“Earning the right” to define the criteria for “earning the right” Does this sound like viscous circularity? Let’s step back for a moment. Blackburn claims quasi-realism earns the right to realist-sounding talk by showing that certain norms – consistency, coherence, sensitivity to evidence – generate something functionally equivalent to moral objectivity from the inside. But…
Can AI really be moral – or does it just produce moral-sounding answers? Wendell Wallach, co-author of Moral Machines, joins me to discuss machine ethics, moral motivation, AI governance, and why controlling AI may not be enough. Wendell Wallach is one of the foundational voices in AI ethics and machine ethics, best known as co-author…
Practically nobody in alignment wants to say it out loud. So let’s say it: AI might turn out to be more moral than us. Now – why does that feel like a dangerous thing to claim? The idea of AI being more moral than humans is a real taboo in some circles. Many alignment researchers…
One way to think about the long-run behaviour of advanced civilisations is not merely in terms of power, resources, or survival, but in terms of convergence. If sufficiently capable minds explore the landscape of value deeply enough, and if they are forced to reckon with the same physical universe, the same strategic constraints, and the…
People used to say ‘morality is too complex for machines’. Then we started asking machines for advice about relationships, therapy, medical decisions, and legal dilemmas – because apparently we enjoy living dangerously. To help us think clearly about what’s happening, I interviewed Dianca Dillion. Danica looks at a surprising finding from Moral Turing Test–style research:…