Teach good. To do good.

Training AI to “Do Good Things” for Humanity and Nature----EnviroAI

… teaching AI to “do good things” for humanity and nature …

---“We can train AI to be good or bad. I think good is better.”

• Jed Anderson, EnviroAI

Nick Bostrom’s book “Superintelligence” is a must-read in my opinion. It’s stuck with me since I first read it. Bill Gates and Elon Musk think so too[It’s on Elon Musk’s Top-Ten Booklist and Gates said its one of two books to read if you want to understand the implications of AI]. In the book, Bostrom (an Oxford Professor) exhaustively describes safeguards to AI that include domesticity, indirect normativity, trip-wiring, boxing, incentives, direct specification (Asimov’s laws), and stunting. Another safe-guard, that we can already begin to implement, is called “positivity”.

Positivity

AI can be taught to do bad things or good things. The more people we have in society training AI in its early stages to do good things, the more AI will value good things as it evolves and moves more toward general AI.

Think of AI almost as a 3 year-old. If you train a 3-year how to be an adult with a bunch of bad things, odds are that when the child gets older they will do more bad things. If you show a 3-year old how to be an adult by doing good things, odds are that when the child gets older they will do more good things.

---“AI will learn. It’s what we teach it that’s important.”

• Jed Anderson, EnviroA

“Thoughts largely determine future reality …

… ‘we are what we think’----and AI will be what it thinks.”

• Jed Anderson, EnviroA

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TEACH

GOOD!

Training Artificial Intelligence to Value and Protect Nature & Humanity

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@misc{anderson_2021_teach_good_to_do_good,
  author = {Jed Anderson},
  title  = {Teach good. To do good.},
  year   = {2021},
  url    = {https://jedanderson.org/posts/teach-good-to-do-good},
  note   = {Accessed: 2026-05-13}
}

Anderson, J. (2021). Teach good. To do good.. Retrieved from https://jedanderson.org/posts/teach-good-to-do-good

Anderson, Jed. "Teach good. To do good.." Jed Anderson, August 23, 2021, https://jedanderson.org/posts/teach-good-to-do-good.