![]() Ethical SystemsRoss Ashby's grandson, Mick Ashby, spent four years of his spare-time curating meta-data and designing, writing, and refining the XSLT transformations that generate the W. Ross Ashby Digital ArchiveW. Ross Ashby Digital Archive web site. And because he had first-hand experience of how frustratingly cumbersome it was trying to explore the contents of the 25 physical journal volumes and multiple card indexes manually, his primary goal for the digital archive was to make it intuitive, powerful, and enjoyable to explore Ross's 7,189 page journal purposefully. As his refinements to the transformations increasingly amplified the information and usability, Mick read more of his grandfather's journal, and in doing so, became familiar with his work in breadth and depth; not only learning about his ideas and character, but also his rigorous style of thinking. The four years that it took to create the digital archive was time well-spent. In a sense, Mick had created an online version of his grandfather. With a background in computer science and artificial intelligence, extensive familiarity with the contents of Ross's journal, and an interest in systems and cybernetics, Mick started developing his own ideas — in particular, investigating what properties a system must have for it to behave ethically. And by being able to click his way through Ross's journal of over 44 years of theories, ideas, and thoughts that Ross deemed worthy of writing down and indexing, it felt as if clicksploring his grandfather's mindspace was the next best thing to having him as a mentor. As it turned out, Mick's new ideas resonated with and built on some of his grandfather's work, and despite the fact that Ross had passed away 45 years earlier, it felt like a genuine collaboration between a first-generation cybernetician and a third-generation cybernetician. |
![]() The Ethical Regulator TheoremMick Ashby's Ethical Regulator Theorem provides a basis for systematically evaluating and improving the adequacy of existing or proposed designs for systems that make decisions that can have ethical consequences; regardless of whether the regulating agents are humans, artificially intelligent machines, cyberanthropic hybrids, organizations, corporations, or government institutions. The theorem builds upon the Conant-Ashby good regulator theorem and Ross Ashby's law of requisite variety to define nine requisites that are necessary and sufficient for a cybernetic regulator to be both effective and ethical:
Of these nine requisites, only the first six are necessary for a regulator to be effective.
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![]() Ethical Design ProcessAny existing design process can be made ethical by using the Ethical Regulator Theorem (ERT) as a decision function for acceptance testing of the requirements and specifications.
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![]() Super-Ethical SystemsA six-level framework is proposed for classifying cybernetic, ethical, and superintelligent systems, which uses the Ethical Regulator Theorem to distinguish between two important subclasses of superintelligent systems.
Consequently, a bifurcation is identified in our future time-line that results in one of two mutually exclusive outcomes:
By predicting the existence of a race condition, the Ethical Regulator Theorem provides a concrete and viable strategy to avoid the danger that creating superintelligent machines could lead humanity into a cybermisanthropic dystopia:
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![]() The Model-Centric Cybernetics ParadigmThe strength of the model-centric cybernetics paradigm is that it is built from first principles.
This is a complete definition of a first-order regulator, R1(S) that can be designed using first-order cybernetics. |
![]() Orders of RegulationIn the same way that second-order cybernetics is reflexive and is concerned with systems that are themselves reflexive, a second-order regulator, R2, is also reflexive:
This is a complete definition of a second-order regulator, R2(R1(S)) that can be designed using second-order cybernetics. |
![]() Ethical RegulatorsBecause the model-centric cybernetics paradigm is based on rigorously nested regulators, we can add a third regulator, R3, to regulate a second-order regulator, R2:
This is a complete definition of a third-order regulator, R3(R2(R1(S))), which is also known as an Ethical Regulator, which is a new type of regulator that cannot be constructed using second-order cybernetics because being ethical requires more than mere reflexivity, it requires a conscience that is not only aware of what is right and wrong, it must also actively internally constrain the regulator to only act in ways that are acceptable in the society in which the regulator exists.
This R3 regulation mechanism can be added to any ethically agnostic reflexive entity, such as an AI, robot, or corporation to make them incapable of breaking laws without immediate detection. |
![]() Orders of CyberneticsIn 1974, Heinz von Foerster proposed an observer-centric definition of first- and second-order cybernetics, which equated to orders of nested observation. And in 1990, he said that extending it to a third-order "would not create anything new".
These definitions introduce a clear distinction between the science of cybernetics and the philosophy of cybernetics, which is urgently necessary for cybernetics to ever be widely recognized as a science by non-cyberneticians.
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