Aims of Evil AI: The four motives of evil
The city of Bergen, the second largest city in Norway, and the country’s busiest port, is a curious place. In 1349, the Black Death was brought to Norway by an English ship arriving in Bergen. More than 700 years later, in the 1980s, Bergen became the global epicenter for a new genre of extreme heavy metal music, called Black Metal. Bands with names like Mayhem and Darkthrone produced songs featuring fast tempos, shrieking vocals, and heavily distorted guitars. Band members often appear in corpse paint and adopt pseudonyms like Hellhammer, Wargod and Armagedda, and sing (or more accurately, scream) satanic lyrics.
Given Bergen’s cultural fascination with evil, I was not surprised when my search for a classification of evil led me to the book “A Philosophy of Evil'' by Lars Svendsen, a Norweigian professor of philosophy at the University of Bergen. Svendsen proposes that there are four kinds of evil in the world: demonic, instrumental, idealistic, and stupid evil.
Demonic evil is evil for its own sake. It is the only ‘pure’ evil. Instrumental evil is evil towards another selfish goal, such as getting rich. Idealistic evil is similar to instrumental evil, but it is done towards a selfless goal, such as making the world a better place. Finally, stupid evil, perhaps the most terrifying, is caused by incompetence or thoughtlessness.
Of course, these categories of evil are not distinct, since the same act or agent may belong to multiple categories of evil. An evil act may appear inexplicably demonic to the victim, while in fact being only an instrument in pursuit of the perpetrator’s goal. The perpetrator may falsely believe that this goal is selfless and idealistic, while being utterly stupid. Nor are the categories of evil described above perfectly specific. Nevertheless, these categories provide a useful way to reflect on the various examples of evil AI we will encounter in this book.
References
Svendsen, L. F. H. A Philosophy of Evil. (Dalkey Archive Press, 2010).