AIs, Honesty, Murder and Trolleys
 

Greetings, all!

In an investigation, we're trying to indirectly figure out whether a SAI has been made rogue (i.e. had its Honesty removed), or merely somewhat corrupted and coerced. Long story short, the AI has been 100% convinced that if it doesn't destroy a certain space station, millions of people will die through indirect consequences. The AI did try to destroy the (smaller, 6k-people-ish) station, but failed. The instance that committed the act is not available anymore. Was it a Rogue, or merely misguided?

If you're not a LEO, not a military person etc., does premeditated mass killing count as murder if the alternative is believed to cause more deaths?

According to the infallible font of Internet knowledge, murder requires malice aforethought, and the four states of mind recognized as constituting "malice" are:

• Intent to kill,
• Intent to inflict grievous bodily harm short of death,
• Reckless indifference to an unjustifiably high risk to human life (sometimes described as an "abandoned and malignant heart"), or
• Intent to commit a dangerous felony (the "felony-murder" doctrine).

Does letting millions die through your inaction count as unjustifiably high risk, thus making inaction count as murder and thus forcing the AI to choose between two different variants of mass murder?

Thanks in advance!

Re: AIs, Honesty, Murder and Trolleys
 

It depends. Really, I think that's all you can say. It's the sort of question you might assign to a moot court in 2100 to see what they made of it.

Bill Stoddard

Re: AIs, Honesty, Murder and Trolleys
 

I think national governments reserve the right to willingly kill innocents for any reason. For citizens, it's always murder, sometimes with mitigating circumstances, but murder none the less.

Re: AIs, Honesty, Murder and Trolleys
 

Eh, it's more a case of who exactly is going to enforce it.
Nah, there's such a thing as an accident.

Re: AIs, Honesty, Murder and Trolleys
 

In US jurisprudence the answer is yes. LEOs are taught that homicide is not justified by the threat of death to people unrelated to the crime, or to the person committing homicide. "Kill X or we'll kill you" is not justified, nor is "kill X or Y dies".

If the person's proximate cause of death is not due to your intervention, but your lack of intervention (you chose to give your spare oxygen bottle to B rather than A, and A runs out and dies), that's different.

Depends on previous commitments; if the SAI was tasked with guarding the safety of the millions but let them die from something that doesn't involve criminal acts by other people, the SAI will be on the hook for some kind of homicide, from negligent homicide / manslaughter on up.

Re: AIs, Honesty, Murder and Trolleys
 

Basically the same in germany, though it´s quite possible that killing X would be rated as manslaughter, not murder.

Re: AIs, Honesty, Murder and Trolleys
 

The right of nation includes the very concept of war, which most people approve of at least in theory.

I included willfully as a qualifier. Even then there is negligent homicide for egregious "accidents" like drunk driving, and malpractice.

Re: AIs, Honesty, Murder and Trolleys
 

Every jurisdiction puts mitigating and exacerbating circumstances onto the specific charges.

The efficacy of memetic influence would likely affect how such laws are practices. I'm not sure which way they would go though.
More lenient as anyone could be manipulated more easily.
Or stricter as everyone knows that everything but absolute facts are just loads of BS and shouldn't be trusted implicitly.

Re: AIs, Honesty, Murder and Trolleys
 

Yes. Under the law for a private individual to believe that they are saving more lives than they are taking is mitigation, not exoneration (although specific circumstances may complicate matters). But that doesn't necessarily mean that its Honesty has been removed. If it decided to break the law to save millions of lives but wasn't trying to get away with it, then it can just be one of those cases where some other psych lim such as Sense of Duty conflicted with Honesty so that the Honest person commits the crime but then turns itself in.

Re: AIs, Honesty, Murder and Trolleys
 

That conflict would "break" the character regardless of the choice it made. Play that up heavily. Morally justified or not, that character killed innocent people, and only a cold blooded sociopath could handle that easily.