Ethical Regulator Theorem
Mick Ashby's ethical regulator theorem builds upon the Conant-Ashby
good regulator
The good regulator is a theorem conceived by Roger C. Conant and W. Ross Ashby that is central to cybernetics. Originally stated that "every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system", but more accurately, every good regulator must ...
theorem, which is ambiguous because being good at regulating does not imply being good ethically. "The ethical regulator theorem claims that the following nine requisites are necessary and sufficient for a cybernetic regulator to be both effective and ethical:
# Purpose expressed as unambiguously prioritized goals.
# Truth about the past and present.
#
Variety
Variety may refer to:
Arts and entertainment Entertainment formats
* Variety (radio)
* Variety show, in theater and television
Films
* ''Variety'' (1925 film), a German silent film directed by Ewald Andre Dupont
* ''Variety'' (1935 film), ...
of possible actions.
# Predictability of the future effects of actions.
# Intelligence to choose the best actions.
# Influence on the regulated system.
# Ethics expressed as unambiguously prioritized rules.
# Integrity of all subsystems.
# Transparency of ethical behavior.
Of these requisites, only the first six are necessary for a regulator to be effective. The three requisites ethics, integrity, and transparency are optional if a system only needs to be effective. This gives rise to the Law of Inevitable Ethical Inadequacy, which states "If you don't specify that you require a secure ethical system, what you get is an insecure unethical system." The reason is that unless ethical adequacy is a requirement, a system design will tend to optimize for effectiveness, and therefore maximally ignore the optional ethical, integrity, and transparency dimensions, which inevitably results in a design and subsequent implementation that is ethically inadequate and vulnerable to manipulation.
Effectiveness of a regulator
The ethical regulator theorem shows that the effectiveness of a cybernetic regulator depends on seven requisites. The effectiveness of a regulator, R, can be expressed as the function:
Effectiveness
R = Purpose
R x Truth
R x (Variety
R - Ethics
R) x Predictability
R x Intelligence
R x Influence
R
If two systems, A and B, are competing for control of a third system, C, and Effectiveness
A "is greater than Effectiveness
B, then A is more likely than B to win control of C".
The effectiveness function reflects how the variety of actions that are available to an ethical regulator is reduced by all actions that are considered unethical, which puts an ethical regulator at a disadvantage when competing against an unethical competitor.
Model-Centric Cybernetics Paradigm
![A first-order (simple) cybernetic regulator](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/A_first-order_%28simple%29_cybernetic_regulator.png)
According to the model-centric cybernetics paradigm,
[M. Ashby]
"Problems with Abstract Observers and Advantages of a Model-Centric Cybernetics Paradigm"
''Systems'', 2022; 10(3):53. an ethical regulator is the product of third-order regulation. The model-centric cybernetics paradigm is built from first principles, in particular, the Conant-Ashby
good regulator
The good regulator is a theorem conceived by Roger C. Conant and W. Ross Ashby that is central to cybernetics. Originally stated that "every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system", but more accurately, every good regulator must ...
theorem, which proved that "every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system".
The paradigm defines that a cybernetic
regulator consists of a purpose, a model, a well-defined observer that only observes what the model requires as input parameters, some kind of decision-making intelligence, and a control channel that transmits selected actions or communications to the regulated system.
Thus, in order to be effective, a first-order (simple) cybernetic regulator requires a model of the system that is being regulated and a second-order (reflexive) regulator can only achieve reflexivity by also having a model of itself, which encodes a real-time representation of the possible
variety
Variety may refer to:
Arts and entertainment Entertainment formats
* Variety (radio)
* Variety show, in theater and television
Films
* ''Variety'' (1925 film), a German silent film directed by Ewald Andre Dupont
* ''Variety'' (1935 film), ...
that is available to the regulator. Finally, an ethical regulator is realized by using a third regulator to regulate a reflexive regulator to constrain it to only exhibit behavior that does not violate the ethical schema that is encoded in a third model. If the third model encodes what is illegal or socially unacceptable, then the concept of a third-order regulator has utility for making law-abiding
robots "\n\n\n\n\nThe robots exclusion standard, also known as the robots exclusion protocol or simply robots.txt, is a standard used by websites to indicate to visiting web crawlers and other web robots which portions of the site they are allowed to visi ...
and
ethical AI.
See also
*
Good regulator
The good regulator is a theorem conceived by Roger C. Conant and W. Ross Ashby that is central to cybernetics. Originally stated that "every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system", but more accurately, every good regulator must ...
*
Variety (cybernetics)
In cybernetics, the term variety denotes the total number of distinguishable elements of a set, most often the set of states, inputs, or outputs of a finite-state machine or transformation, or the binary logarithm of the same quantity. Variet ...
References
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Cybernetics