Free Will and AIs

Where we at ?

Giving AIs free will is a question that we’ve usually pondered in works of fiction and, until recently, seemed to be many decades away. I am here today to tell you that the schedule has been accelerated, and we could very well need to confront this or deal with the consequences post facto. Actually, I expect this to be the case, as regulators are probably years behind, and AI developers (including myself) might launch/create first and deal with the consequences later. So, here we’ll tackle this thorny issue.

What even is free will ?

Free will in humans can be defined as the capacity to make choices and take actions that are not wholly determined by external forces, encompassing the ability to exercise control over one’s decisions and actions within the constraints of one’s circumstances.

But who or what allows free will ?

Free will, aligned with determinism (which asserts that all events, 
including human actions, are determined by previous causes), encompasses 
the capacity to exert influence over present causes, thereby shaping 
future outcomes within the constraints of external factors and the 
structure of reality.

In other words, what you (and presumably AIs) do can shape the future of 
everything to some extent! Tracking all the previous events that lead to 
your (our) current reality seems impossible, and the fact that you can 
exercise free will is a systemic property of the universe we live in! 

Artificial free Will

Definitions allow you to reverse engineer them to implement the definiendum (the thing being defined), so in this case we could implement free will in AIs by allowing them the choice of action or even artificial thought within certain constraints.

Artificial Free will
The capacity of artificial agents, such as AI systems, to make autonomous
decisions and take actions that appear to be self-directed and not 
wholly determined by external programming or prior input.

A matter of depth

Giving software programs control over things (important things) is nothing new. Here’s some code that shuts off a valve and prevents a nuclear meltdown:

if (currentTemperature > temperatureThreshold) {…