A three-state Ternary Moral Logic (TML) replaces binary safety outcomes with PROCEED, SACRED_PAUSE, and REFUSE to handle ethically complex AI decisions. The SACRED_PAUSE state triggers deliberate moral reflection rather than instantaneous yes/no outputs. TML evaluates scenarios across multiple ethical dimensions such as stakeholder count, reversibility, harm potential, and benefit distribution to calculate a moral complexity score. Use cases include medical treatment choices, autonomous vehicle dilemmas, nuanced content moderation, and consequential financial lending. The approach integrates a complexity threshold to determine when to pause, enabling deliberative processes, human-in-the-loop review, or additional computational reasoning before producing final actions.
I'm writing this with stage 4 cancer, knowing my time is limited. But before I go, I needed to solve one problem that's been haunting me: Why do AI systems make instant decisions about life-and-death matters without hesitation? Humans pause. We deliberate. We agonize over difficult choices. Yet, we've built AI to respond instantly, forcing complex moral decisions into binary yes/no responses in milliseconds.
Current AI safety operates like a light switch - on or off, safe or unsafe, allowed or denied. But real ethical decisions aren't binary. Consider these scenarios: A medical AI deciding treatment for a terminal patient An autonomous vehicle choosing between two harmful outcomes A content moderation system evaluating nuanced political speech A financial AI denying a loan that could save or destroy a family
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