This is a thought experiment following a weekend read of CS Lewis ‘The Abolition of Man’. To frame the context here Lewis book written in 1945, is a philosophical work that discusses the concept of truth and the distinction between reality and opinion, objective and subjective morality. I make no pretense as a philosopher but I do understanding this framework will have influence on AGI and how decisions are made by AGI.
While this sounds esoteric, consider 1. Donald Trump and Peter Hegseth as compared to 2. Ursula von Leyen, and Ulf Kristersson.
Group 1. have strong hard core beliefs in family and religion that transcend subjectivism, and border on extremeism. Lewis goes on to rationalise how he shifted from aethist to belief in God, but I will stick here to objective, subjective morality.
Lewis’s primary concern with Gaius and Titius was their rejection of
objective values and their assertion that statements of value are merely
expressions of the speaker’s feelings, not judgments about reality. Lewis
believed this perspective undermined the formation of proper sentiments in
students and posed a significant threat to moral education and broader
culture[1][3][2].
On the basis of the revolutionary shifts we are seeing today, Palestinian Genocide, European purchase of Oil and Gas from perpretators of war and land grab there is no doubt humans will never lose the ability, need, desire to act based on personal values will become part of recorded history and AGI will learn and act within its coded parameters.
So given a set of cirumstances presented to AGI what are the unchangeable values and how will AGI conclude on a decision. These are fundamental considerations which even Lewis found as a conumdrum, but he had ideas on that.
The first lecture in ‘The Abolition of Man’ has three sections:on discussion, as shown in the following quote book review extracts. And ending in Lewis conclusion on The Conditiners (remember this was written in 1945) as an arbriteron human values.
Source: https://evolutionnews.org/2020/08/the-main-argument-of-the-abolition-of-man/
The Green Book
Lewis zeroes in on the response by Gaius and Titius to a famous story about Coleridge at a waterfall, in which Coleridge endorses the judgment that the waterfall is “sublime”:
> Gaius and Titius comment as follows: ‘When the man said _This is sublime_, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall … Actually … he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really _I have feelings associated in my mind with the word “Sublime_,” or shortly, _I have sublime feelings_…. This confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.’4
The Tao
There is thus a conflict between the _Tao_ and the view advocated by _The Green Book_. This conflict necessarily produces two different views of education:
> Hence the educational problem is wholly different according as you stand within or without the _Tao_. For those within, the task is to train in the pupil those responses which are in themselves appropriate, whether anyone is making them or not, and in making which the very nature of man consists. Those without, if they are logical, must regard all sentiments as equally non-rational, as mere mists between us and the real objects. As a result, they must either decide to remove all sentiments, as far as possible, from the pupil’s mind; or else encourage some sentiments for reasons that have nothing to do with their intrinsic ‘justness’ or ‘ordinacy’.11
This insight brings Lewis to the argumentative climax of the chapter:
We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element’. The head rules the belly through the chest — the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment — these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man; for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.15
In the light of his Platonic understanding, Lewis summarizes his criticism of Gaius and Titius thus:
“The operation of The Green Book and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests.”16 But without “chests,” i.e., without the middle part of the soul that Plato called thumos, neither creative energy nor self-sacrifice, neither enterprise nor virtue, is possible.17 Thus, in seeking to abolish thumos, the authors of The Green Book unwittingly seek to abolish man.
The Basis of Value Judgments
In the second chapter of The Abolition of Man, Lewis notes that, despite the ferocity with which the authors of The Greek Book debunk the basis of all judgments of value, they in fact are driven by such judgments themselves: “Gaius and Titius will be found to hold, with complete uncritical dogmatism, the whole system of values which happened to be in vogue among moderately educated young men of the professional classes during the period between the two wars.”18
Lewis envisions a future society in which “man’s conquest of nature” is complete. Human beings have mastered external nature and can use it to produce food, shelter, medicine, and infinite creature comforts and entertainments at will. The survival and physical contentment of the race is thus guaranteed. But mastery over external nature will eventually involve mastery over biological and psychological nature, as the tools of science become more probing and powerful; thus, mankind will be able to remake, not only the external environment, but even itself. The human race will be able, for the first time, to define itself, to create its own future reality. This creates the paradoxical situation in which man is at once master and slave: master over the externalities of nature — heat, cold, hunger, sickness, etc. — but enslaved by the science which will control his own genetic constitution and his own emotional makeup through high-tech biological and psychological manipulation. And who will be in charge of that scientific manipulation?
The Conditioners
Lewis foresees a class of men called “the Conditioners.” The Conditioners, more consistent than Gaius and Titius, have “seen through” all attempts to ground behaviour in any ultimate truth about the way things are, and consequently have rejected the authority of the Tao or any fragments of it (such as the liberal, humanist fragments which still guide Gaius and Titius). The Tao-less Conditioners are charged with deciding what man is to be. They will choose the physical talents of future generations of human beings, and they will choose the set of emotions and valuations to implant in those future generations, in order to get them to behave in a desired way.
But Lewis asks the question: What will guide the Conditioners in their choice of the “values” which future men will have?
Source quote completed
Conclusion
This is a fascinating thought experiment. The likely outcome for AGI is that authoritarians will gravitate to train AGI to reflect what they personally want and believe. In fact we see that in Grok which seems to have no difficulties with statements reflecting views that others believe is racial or pick your view.
Recall that Lewis lecture began with a waterfall. Is it sublime, or noisy waterfalling.
All this to say I continue to clude that AGI will be capable of statements and decisions that are at minimum controversial, and at worst …
Bankwatch 