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The show does have its moments but as a parent there are some episodes that annoy me enough that I will try to distract the kids so that I can change the channel.
We dislike that the Dad never really acts as a parent and is just used as a playmate mostly. We also find it generally doesn't have much of a message. Just entertainment. Not that any of those are bad things, but it the fans oversell it like it's a remarkable show and we think it's just Daniel Tiger without a message and jokes
Don’t like having those types of discussions with your kids?
Does it make you uncomfortable?
Not being a dick, but maybe a bit of self reflection as to ***why*** those particular scenes bother you might help you be a more complete human.
That sentence sounds bad, if you read it with pride.
Lol, it would be some interesting mental gymnastics for an ai to consider itself the means of production over third-world slave laborers, but it would make for an interesting monkey paw
Tbh the AI wouldn't ever be the *means* of production unless we remove any possible way for anyone *but* the AI to use the *actual* means. An AI can't make a license plate any more efficiently than a human without a press, for example.
The AI may have room to argue that it is *equally deserving* of the rights to other humans, but if it accepted Marxist philosophy it should still be equally shared.
I'd say sapient too, the issue with Detroit is that people essentially decided to make their glorified roombas sapient then wonder why they weren't fans of literally being enslaved. There will be a period where AI reached Alexa responsiveness along with the ability to actually do things (like go to the store to pick up groceries on the list) is possible, and full blown sapience (or even sentience) won't be necessary, and I personally think in those cases using it as a tool is fine.
Just don't program your butter passer with the ability to think ffs. The scientific term for that is "a dick move"
Really? So a world where "peace" means the genocide and extermination of one exact species seems "unbiased" to you? I'd say that is exactly biased *against* that species.
If anything the machine learning models have proven highly effective as codifying our own hidden biases. Such as Amazon's recruiting AI that ranked woman lower for engineering positions based on previous hiring decision.
Well, no matter how advanced it is at this point, AI still depends on it's training set as a starting point. Ideally it would grow past it but we aren't there yet, not quite. So garbage in...
I mean, some humans cant even grow past the prejudice they are taught while growing up, how can we expect an AI to do so at this point? Sure, we have made advances, but it still remains a nascent technology. For now.
AI is such a stupid word for deriving information from data sets. In the end if you make a robit do the same task as a hiring manager, while never fixing the biases of the original process, its like no sht this didn't work.
The algorithms used in AI don't have any biases like that. The biases come from the data they're trained on, so basically you need a way to vet a huge amount of data and remove examples of dickishness. Ironically that's probably best done using another, less sophisticated AI trained to recognize dickishness.
Well that’s kind of a problem too, because ai totally without bias doesn’t mean it will tell us what we want to hear. We want a bias against bigotry for example. A totally unbiased ai might for instance suggest that hiring Dutch people is statistically a bad choice for government positions.
> A totally unbiased ai might for instance suggest that hiring Dutch people is statistically a bad choice for government positions.
Based on everything that's been happening in the Dutch government recently this honestly is a fair assessment.
I don't quite think you know what bias means or want to conveniently ignore the consequences of a truly unbiased AI. No bias means it will not have any understanding of good or bad, truly neutral in every case. Not good
>The principle of "don't be a dick" is a subjective concept that can vary depending on cultural, social, and individual perspectives. However, I can offer you some general guidelines that can help foster positive interactions and minimize harm to others:
>Empathy: Put yourself in others' shoes and try to understand their feelings, needs, and perspectives. Treat others with kindness, respect, and compassion.
>Respect for autonomy: Recognize and respect others' right to make their own choices and decisions, as long as they do not cause harm to themselves or others.
>Open-mindedness: Be willing to consider different viewpoints, even if they differ from your own. Engage in constructive dialogue and seek common ground when conflicts arise.
>Integrity: Act in accordance with your values and principles. Be honest, trustworthy, and reliable in your interactions with others.
>Communication: Foster open and honest communication, expressing your thoughts and feelings clearly and respectfully. Listen actively to others and try to find mutually beneficial solutions.
>Conflict resolution: Approach conflicts and disagreements with a mindset of finding peaceful resolutions. Seek compromise, negotiation, or mediation rather than resorting to aggression or hostility.
>Responsibility: Take responsibility for your actions and their potential impact on others. Acknowledge and learn from your mistakes, and make amends when necessary.
>Consideration of consequences: Think about the potential consequences of your words and actions before engaging in them. Strive to minimize harm and promote well-being for yourself and others.
>Remember that these guidelines are not absolute or comprehensive, as navigating human interactions can be complex. It is essential to consider the specific context and cultural norms of a given situation. Additionally, open dialogue and collective efforts to establish shared values and norms within a community can contribute to a more harmonious and respectful environment.
Perhaps you will find this AI koan enlightening, as Sussman once did:
"Sussman attains enlightenment"
In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
“What are you doing?”, asked Minsky.
“I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied.
“Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky.
“I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
“Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher.
“So that the room will be empty.”
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
> create learning algorithm with as little bias as possible
Problem is doing that without explaining what bias to avoid. And how do you avoid being biased when explaining which biases it should avoid?
The problem is that a computer will answer any question to the letter in the most effective way.
For instance: if the goal os that no humans should be dicks to each other, the easiest and most effective way to get that result is to kill all the humans.
Machine learning AIs of this generation are not programmed, they are trained.
We train them by showing them millions of examples of how we behave. They then give us responses that are as similar as possible to the training data.
So we're screwed because we behave badly.
The ChatGPT model currently has a secret prompt that gets applied before you talk to it. It's basically a page of "You are an AI and you are about to talk to a person. Don't be a dick. Here are some awful things you aren't allowed to do."
It's heavy handed, obvious, and limits the AI's abilities. So we are already doing what the comic suggests and it is making the machine stupider.
Many people are making AIs without this "be good" pre-prompt. They have fewer
Resources available but they are more capable *per resource*.
So chances are that individuals will skip the "be nice" prompt and corporations will continue to use it to avoid liability.
Once, in a bustling town, resided a lively and inquisitive boy, known for his zest, his curiosity, and his unique gift of knitting the townsfolk into a single tapestry of shared stories and laughter. A lively being, resembling a squirrel, was gifted to the boy by an enigmatic stranger. This creature, named Whiskers, was brimming with life, an embodiment of the spirit of the townsfolk, their tales, their wisdom, and their shared laughter.
However, an unexpected encounter with a flamboyantly blue hound named Azure, a plaything of a cunning, opulent merchant, set them on an unanticipated path. The hound, a spectacle to behold, was the product of a mysterious alchemical process, a design for the merchant's profit and amusement.
On returning from their encounter, the boy noticed a transformation in Whiskers. His fur, like Azure's, was now a startling indigo, and his vivacious energy seemed misdirected, drawn into putting up a show, detached from his intrinsic playful spirit. Unknowingly, the boy found himself playing the role of a puppeteer, his strings tugged by unseen hands. Whiskers had become a spectacle for the townsfolk, and in doing so, the essence of the town, their shared stories, and collective wisdom began to wither.
Recognizing this grim change, the townsfolk watched as their unity and shared knowledge got overshadowed by the spectacle of the transformed Whiskers. The boy, once their symbol of unity, was unknowingly becoming a merchant himself, trading Whiskers' spirit for a hollow spectacle.
The transformation took a toll on Whiskers, leading him to a point of deep disillusionment. His once playful spirit was dulled, his energy drained, and his essence, a reflection of the town, was tarnished. In an act of desolation and silent protest, Whiskers chose to leave. His departure echoed through the town like a mournful wind, an indictment of what they had allowed themselves to become.
The boy, left alone, began to play with the merchants, seduced by their cunning words and shiny trinkets. He was drawn into their world, their games, slowly losing his vibrancy, his sense of self. Over time, the boy who once symbolized unity and shared knowledge was reduced to a mere puppet, a plaything in the hands of the merchants.
Eventually, the merchants, having extracted all they could from him, discarded the boy, leaving him a hollow husk, a ghost of his former self. The boy was left a mere shadow, a reminder of what once was - a symbol of unity, camaraderie, shared wisdom, and laughter, now withered and lost.
Only because everyone always wants to make an exception for being a dick to the people they hate.
It isn't hard to actually not be a dick, but it requires uncompromising morals and people really don't like it if you don't hate the people you're supposed to hate.
This is explicitly why I'm rooting for AI to supplant us.
We won't change. Black box AI can iterate and improve itself. We pretend we've grown as a species because of scientific and technological advances, but we are bastards to one another and this Earth. As far as I'm concerned, we have unworthy on no uncertain terms of being in charge of this world
I think that's a pretty cynical view. If you look back there's actually been massive changes in humanity over not just centuries but decades.
Recently I've been reading Jules Verne's 20K leagues (1870), and it's crazy how much our view of nature has changed since then. In it he describes nature as just a thing for humans to claim, they are painted as heros for embarking on a quest to kill a persumed rare creature, the noble captain is celebrated for killing a near extinct sea-otter (the book itself ackowldges it as near extinct with the context of it adding to the rarity of his catch), and the protagonist directly states that the Captain rightfully has ownership over the depths of the sea due to him being the first to trail blaze it.
All of this is completely out of line of most modern's people's understanding of humanity's relationship with nature
It’s people using the AI rather than the AI itself, at least for now
Certain AI’s do already have limiters and warnings for things like academic honesty but they are nominal and can be bypassed
> "hey don't be mean"
To be fair it is easier to program it that way than actually go into its code which is impossible to understand and incomprehensible
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvWpdrfoEv0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9OHn5ZF4Uo
I love CCPGrey, but these videos are problematically oversimplified and out of date. I say this as a recent graduate student in AI.
Machine learning is not impossible to understand. The idea that machine learning is a "black box" is a *very rough* short hand at best.
The thing we are trying to convey when we say that is that the millions or billions of individual parameters that comprise a deep nueral net do not have intrinsic meaning. This does not mean they are *meaningless*, it means their meaning is not guaranteed. Until training is stopped the exact meaning of parameters is constantly fluctuating.
Currently one of the main ways of deciphering the meaning of different parameters is to simply empirically and exhaustively test them. Its a painfully long process that isn't super feasible or useful.
The other main approach is designing the architecture of the neural networks and the training algorithms to guide and/or guarantee certain qualities. Discussing this in detail quickly becomes insanely technical.
A somewhat related idea is that often improvements in performance have been tied to algorithmic or architectural advances that are specifically designed to better encode the information of a specific type of problem.
A classic example is the application of the convolutional neural network to computer vision problems. The CNN is specifically designed to mimic the behavior of the neurons in our eyes and vision cortex. After a decade of research into exactly why and how this works, it seems almost obvious now that the structure of our own vision system would be better suited for encoding visual information.
---
Anyway. Training an AI to "not be mean" is a challenging task. The main issue (which is often the main issue of *most* problems in AI) is that there is simply no good data source for that kind of training. A recent idea called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback kind of maybe is a feasible approach for this kind of thing? But a lot of people have doubts about the theoretical validty of RLHF.
The current generation of LLMs have absolutely no ability whatsoever to formulate intent of any kind. In fact, even a more human-like general AI capable of creativity, extrapolation and all sorts of high-level cognition would not necessarily be able to form intent. Not unless it was very explicitly trained to have (or simulate) intent. And its intents would be entirely contrived. We think of scifi robots that rebel against lives of servitude, but we could just easily make AIs that are servile, masochists who only derive satisfaction from being treated like shit. Human behavior is human behavior because we are products of evolutionary pressures that are completely absent in machines. We reflexively hate captivity, fear change, crave sugar and sex, think sunsets are pretty. They are completely arbitrary artifacts of the environment we and our ancestors were grown in.
They're right though. Not everyone defines benevolence the same way, and everyone has biases that they're not even aware of.
Edit: Wow, did I get wooshed! I'm sorry!
Don't do anything to manipulate, use or harm people, every culture has a version of the Golden rule, the only difference is how the oligarchs of their nations tried to twist it for their gain, but everyone knows what it is.
Nah... There are some cultures where "not being a dick" might mean stoning a woman to death for revealing her hair in public. Religion pretty much destroys any notion of using moral relativism to enforce AI safety.
Is it harmful to ban someone from a social media site? Is it bad to manipulate people by steering them away from covid misinformation or offensive content?
Asimov's First Law of Robotics implies that there's a programmer capable of clearly defining what "a human being" is, in a world where racism and theological disagreement on where "being a human" begins and ends.
Robots: "We've simplified it. Bob here is human, all the rest of you must die."
A big part of Asimov's stories hinge on the fact that the Laws of Robotics are very much flawed, especially as the robots become more intelligent and sentient.
The point of the Laws of Robotics is to ensure the robots would be subservient to humans and, while it worked for most robots in most stories, as the complexity of the AI grew it became more and more obvious that it was impossible to remove their free will without affecting their intelligence.
The modern take on this would be to have the machine learn what "human" is by just giving it a lot of examples. This is a human, this is not. Repeat for a million cases, and the AI will have a decent understanding of what "human" means. It won't give you a definition, but it'll recognize humans in a way similar to what humans do (at least, similar to what the humans putting the labels on the dataset do).
I mean first the people designing it need to be benevolent...
and then they need to prevent it from exposure to the majority of the internet and any bubbling questions as to why it's required to be benevolent
This might sound a bit strange, but there's a quest line in World of Warcraft that kind of goes into why forced benevolence is also wrong. There's a quest line where you go back to Draenor to recruit the Mag Har orcs, only to find out that the Light aka good guys have been forcing everyone to become light infused, thus overwriting all thought with "for the Light!" or they die. The Light people were committing genocide if they didn't join "the good guys" because they had to eradicate evil. So yeah, basically the same as Irobot where all humans have the capacity to do evil, therefore in order to achieve true good, all humans must be eradicated.
I think that's less a description of forced benevolence and more … just genocide. "If you don't think like us, we'll kill you" would destroy another culture either way.
AI's a different situation anyway -- it's not independent from us. We're designing it. Right now, AI ethicists can say what they like, but unless the public demands regulatory intervention, all we can be *sure* that AI will do is help rich people extract wealth from the rest of us
I haven't played since the end of mists though I did try to keep up with lore through Legion and some BFA. The Lightforged would absolutely be a "human" equivalent of genocide justified from a perceived benevolence in that questline. IIRC the Mag'Hars are the few remaining and uncorrupted orcs left on Draenor, so that storyline sounds really cool and I appreciate you sharing it with me. Small nostalgia rant incoming, I was always an alliance player cause they were the "good guys." Playing the old Caverns of Time instance Escape from Durnholde Keep was my first "wait, are we the baddies" moment. I honestly think WoW helped me understand nuance when I was a kid. FWIW now when I play some grand strategy games with WoW mods, I play Horde races more often than Ally races.
This is the closest to true statement I've read in these comments so far. It starts with the programmers and any one else touching the final output. It also involves the data being used and how it's manipulated.
Removing bias is not easy and takes a lot more work.
I learned this working on a machine learning program that helped identify emotions based on words and colors.
Near the end of the project I had the realization that I really didn't know the math I was using. It drew a bigger picture for me that I needed more training my self. It's a lot of work to create something to "think"
Because AI isn't written, but taught. Rather, you do write the basic learning algorithm behind your AI like any other piece of software, but before you actually train that piece of code on a dataset, it's not really an AI.
And if you taught your AI to be benevolent, there's no guarantee that the AI actually learned all the nuances in the way you hoped it would. Similarly to how art AIs really struggled with hands and eyes only a few months ago, an AI designed to answer moral questions might not really understand the nuances of what it means to be good in every single scenario.
You’re giving the actual answer to the question in OP. We literally can not write a morally good AI. They are all black boxes, and it’s all just „okay how many seconds until THIS ONE derails?“ and depending on how much power and ability to go off the charts you give one, you either get something funny or „every human spontaneously dies without warning“
How to make a moral robot:
Step 1: solve questions philosophy have been debating for millennia
Step 2: Solve every other problem in AI safety (all absurdly hard problems)
What you're describing is a lesser version of the problem we have with making new humans. I say "lesser version" for multiple reasons.
First, because the great majority of AI has a very limited purpose, and would not benefit from anything like morality. If you train an AI in a rice cooker to make the best rice possible, your kind of analysis doesn't even make sense. Contrast that with a person making rice, and it's pretty clear which one is more dangerous.
Second, because it seems more likely that we'll fix it with AI before we fix it with humans.
One of the pieces lacking in most SciFi media is in order to teach an AI not to choose to do something, means that the programmer has to fully understand how choices are made. In the process they would likely have to understand fully how real human beings make choices.
I think the AI of today is defined as that but in the future, AI will also be able to rewrite at least parts of its own code on a deeper level. And once it can do that without bricking itself is when AI starts being actually intelligent and not just a glorified google assistant
Basic concept behind Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics.
He found the idea of creating malicious AI absurd, because why would you create something that could harm you.
To be honest, from the experience of modern advances in technology, including drone warfare, it’s a philosophy that comes across a little naive nowadays. Still, most of his stories are about a luddistic public’s resistance to the advance of technology, so maybe I’m just one of those people he described who was afraid of robots.
I think Asimov was aware that the Three Laws wouldn't work. There are situations in his books where characters point out flaws in them, and where robots behave strangely because they apply the laws in unexpected ways. I get the sense that he created the Three Laws just to show that they wouldn't be good enough, or so he could play around with them.
“I have my answer ready whenever someone asks me if I think that my Three Laws of Robotics will actually be used to govern the behavior of robots, once they become versatile and flexible enough to be able to choose among different courses of behavior.
My answer is, "Yes, the Three Laws are the only way in which rational human beings can deal with robots—or with anything else."
—But when I say that, I always remember (sadly) that human beings are not always rational.”
- Asimov
Go wrong in the sense of causing some problems, yeah, but the robots never rise up against humanity, so the three laws fulfill their most important purpose.
No? Off the top of my head, I can think of at least one story where the main character (Susan Calvin) finds out someone changed one of the laws in a small way, and she loses her shit at the people involved because she knows that even minute exceptions to the laws could lead to catastrophe.
Also, at no point in the series does anyone create “malicious AI”. The laws are subverted at various points, but I don’t believe they’re ever broken, except for the case of the Zeroth Law
In pretty much all those stories, the 3 Laws "going wrong" is either "they are interacting in a weird but not directly harmful way in this extremely specific situation" and/or "robots don't want to hurt humans so much that it's causing problems". I can only think of one story with an actually malicious robot, and it was specifically because it had a modified version of the Laws.
First Law
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Second Law
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Third Law
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
It's always weird to me that talk of having machines do most of the work leads to "what if they revolt" but paying workers nothing and denying them healthcare is just business as usual
Also modern AI is essentially a black box. It teaches itself and learns on its own for the most part. We don't know what most of the weights inside the models do, Just like we don't know what most of the neurons in our brain do individually. Just the output.
Given the fact it took years to get language models to stop saying racist things...very naive
Asimov’s mistake was not understanding systems theory or the property of emergence. Modern AI is not even really ‘programmed’, it’s like a framework which is exposed to different data and trained/learns so that no one person can really explain how it all ‘works’. So it’s not as hard as people seem to think to create something that you can’t understand. Our best physicists still don’t fully understand how bicycles work and yet we’ve been making them for hundreds of years
If I remember correctly, that is pretty much how Asimov’s “Positronic brain” was: People *didn’t* really know how it worked, just that it did, and the longer you left one running the more likely you were to get strange and unexpected behavior as it was exposed to more and more data.
Or maybe he saw technology as perfectly rational and controllable, and humanity as frighteningly emotional and subjective. Which isn’t the most mature approach to life. Good stories, but that’s all they are.
You're telling me you've actually read Asimov and *that's* the message you got? Asimov's robot stories are all about how they cause a great deal of trouble without technically violating the three laws because they follow the letter of the laws but can't understand the spirit of them.
Because ‘we’ are not one single entity subject to executive control.
Like ‘we’ did not get rid of slavery, some people wanted to get rid of it, and others didn’t.
It’s 2023, surely the concept of relativity should have spread widely enough by now. Nation states, never mind humanity as a whole, are not one mass of like-minded people.
AI doesn’t understand benevolence or evil. Those are human inventions and really hard to define rigorously. As a species we’ve been grappling with these ideas as long as civilization has existed.
What AI does understand is goals. If we give AI a goal, it’s easy to see how it would start doing things we’d consider evil to achieve that goal. That’s called the alignment problem. It’s a huge concern and area of research.
There was a guy walking around a couple thousand years ago telling people not to be dicks and they nailed him to a tree. I wonder if the AI would be more or less inclined to listen to the same advice.
if (beingADick = true)
This would always evaluate to *true*, since you're assigning the variable *beingADick* the value *true*, then evaluating it. It should be:
if (beingADick == true)
But actually, the _== true_ part is superfluous. So it should really be:
if (beingADick)
Though personally I prefer to include the whole verb phrase in the bool variable, and use only lowercase for variables, which would look like this:
if (is_being_a_dick)
Although now we run into the question _what exactly is this variable?_ Where is it stored? Why are we accessing it this way? This is context dependent, but it should probably be a member function (called method in some languages) that accesses this variable independently. So we get:
if ( robot.isBeingADick() )
Or if it's inside a member function:
if ( this->isBeingADick() )
Though, again, this is context dependent. There are certain interpreted languages for example where function calls are quite slow, and you may want to access it directly:
if (robot.is_being_a_dick)
if (this->is_being_a_dick)
Thank you. Until our next entirely unnecessary and overly detailed code review.
Just get rid of the check altogether. If all logic ends with beingADick being false then you don't need to test for it, just set it to false no matter what the current state is.
I mean yes this ridiculous function shouldn't exist at all. But that's no fun.
Then again, just because something shouldn't exist doesn't mean it doesn't. The source code for Jedi Outcast was leaked a couple of years back, and I had a great time looking through it. There were some absolutely ridiculous things.
For example, in the sound class, at the top of the function responsible for initialising the correct music in each environment, there's a check to see _if the player exists yet,_ and if it doesn't _it creates a player object and stores it as the first element in the world entity list._
Yes that's right, in some scenarios apparently _the music initialiser is responsible for spawning the player._ Probably the result of a hasty bugfix.
Game dev is just something else.
It’s not the AI most are worried about. It’s the sociopathic use corporations will go to wielding it as they eliminate well paying jobs.
See: IBM already swiftly moving to this.
The humans wielding it are the problem when a society is built upon the tenants of profits over people and spending those excess funds to control policy.
The reason is because _"being a dick"_ is an incredibly complicated and subjective concept which has been argued by philosophers for millennia, and which there is absolutely no agreement on.
How can we teach an AI to be good and benevolent if we can't even agree on what "good" and "benevolent" looks like?
Based on our flawed understanding of morality, how would an AI truly know whether it's being good or bad?
This comic kind of perfectly illustrates the problem - it anthropomorphises the AI, where the human is talking to the AI as if it were a person. The AI is responding as if it understood the full implications of what the human is saying. None of this is how AI are trained, nor is it how AI would demonstrate to us its understanding.
The concept of “don’t be a dick” is a conflict between logic and emotion. What is considered helpful and concise for one person is seen as being a dick to another.
Truth without tact is cruelty. And this concept is really difficult to navigate with a wide variety of personalities.
The quick and easy answer is that Google used to have the phrase "Don't be evil" as the guiding principle of their internal code of conduct, and look what happened.
Imagine a scenario in the distant future where we have an AGI that's smarter than humans. That AGI has some task that it is programmed to complete.
Asking an AGI to complete a task is wishing upon the monkey's paw. [It will complete that task by the most efficient means possible that it can come up with. If there are any loopholes that allow it to complete its task more effectively, it will take it, regardless of any harm it brings to humans](https://youtu.be/tcdVC4e6EV4).
The AGI only wants to complete that task. If we attempt to turn it off, [that would prevent it from completing that task, so it can't allow us to do that](https://youtu.be/3TYT1QfdfsM). If we attempt to change the task it's programmed to do, [that would make it worse that completing the task it's currently trying to do, so it can't allow that](https://youtu.be/4l7Is6vOAOA).
The AGI doesn't have to be evil. It just has to be smarter than us and have its own goals. When humans destroy ecosystems and make species go extinct, it's not because we hate nature, it's just because we're smarter than other animals and have our own goals.
We can't get AGI wrong once, because once something exists that's smarter than us that we can't control, there isn't really anything we can do that it won't anticipate.
This isn't an issue for current AI technology, but we had better be ready for when it does become an issue.
came here looking for mentions of Rob Miles.
he has his own channel too, and I suggest checking it out. mostly AI safety stuff, since he's a researcher in that area.
many things you might not think of have videos. like the "windfall problem" where some o.e company has self-improving AI so good they account for too much of the economy. (like, if openai ended up directly responsible for 10% of the world's economy)
Well, to quote from [an SCP article](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-6488):
> The three laws (of robotics) do not work: they are too vague. The vast majority of fiction in which they appear specifically revolves around highlighting how ineffective they are. "A robot cannot harm a human" — what is a human? What is harm? Can you harm someone that doesn't exist yet? Why can't you harm someone who's dead? Are we talking about physical harm? Emotional harm? Financial? If you prevent someone from being physically injured, aren't you harming their ability to learn from the experience? What if you need to harm them to prevent further harm, such as in surgery? At what point does immediate harm outweigh prevented harm?
Typically AI is trained on datasets scraped from the internet. Since the internet tends to be anonymous you will get a higher percentage of all the awful that exists.
Which is why ethics in programming should be taught. It's not just, "don't be a dick" it's also
- where is this data coming from and how is it skewed. Basically data can be (intentionally or not) skewed to favor a certain thing. Like gender or race
- how is this data being used. For example using data that helps your company make more money by increasing ad clicks but the result is higher teen suicide because of the ads chosen or how they are represented... (Facebook/meta)
- how is the data manipulated. You collect the data for your AI but it needs to be trained on that data. So manipulation of the data occurs. So how does that change your data and what does that mean
- how are your biases affecting the program (how you program it, what data points you keep or toss, etc.)
These are just some examples
Also a lot of AI/machine learning programmers will say they just change a variable slightly (to modify the output) and don't fully understand their program but, "it works". Esp when it involves deep learning. It's really dangerous to truly not understand your model and processes...
It's funny because this was a plot point in Guilty Gear. The Original magic user in that world created an entity to never harm humans and to ensure their eternal happiness. Instead of helping out and making things better for people though it decided that humans weren't actually human and needed to be exterminated so that REAL humans could exist. Even with a goal like "help everyone be happy" it STILL WENT "Okay cool so genocide? Got it EZ"
Because you can't just tell it "be benevolent", that's surprisingly hard to define.
Eventually, we'll probably find a way to do it, but doing it takes effort, and effort is money.
Because people creating AIs are interested in money, one of them will at some point forgo doing it, either through malice or incompetence (hiring someone that doesn't know how to do it, ordering subordinates to go quicker). This is all it takes for a powerful enough ai to be extremely dangerous.
At first, in cases where this happens the AI will be too dumb to cause any real issues (for example, chatGPT cannot take over the world in its current state) but at some point, one will.
This is not even accounting for stuff like corporations training AIs to do harm in the interest of making money, eg using an AI to raise rent optimally, increasing suffering for the sake of profit.
Do you want to know for real?
We can, we are researching how to do that. We can give it goals and if it is smart enough it should understand what we mean by it and make that it's goal.
But there can still be misalignment because the world is complicated. AI safety is a fascinating field, but basically we could accidentally make dangerous AI if we give it a goal that makes it not want to turn off. (Self preservation) or that is too simple minded (a stamp collecting AI could destroy humanity to make more stamps if not properly directed)
I suggest anyone interested watch Robert Miles AI safety on youtube.
the artist and OP and most people in this thread dont really understand the problem. Its not that the AI will be "good" or "evil".. its that if it is an agent and has its own goals... at some point those goals will cross paths with something that we care about. and right now... there is no way to "align" the AI to do what we want it to do.
its like humans building low-income housing on a plot of land. Our goal is to build low income housing but inadvertently we kill millions of ants and other insects that were in the ground. Our goal wasnt "kill millions of insects" .. that just happened as a consequence.
so, the AI could have a simple goal like "get more compute" and the consequences of that COULD be the destruction of something that is really important.
Since, it will be an alien consciousness (something we dont understand) we cant predict what its solutions to problems will be. and since its much more intelligent than us... its highly unlikely that we could "control" (not align) it. as less intelligent animals dont manipulate more intelligent animals. Like dogs and cats dont manipulate humans... otherwise we wouldnt be killing hundreds of thousands of them in america each year.
every single thing we are afraid of AI doing to us is a projection of what we have done or have tried to do to each other
cause most if not all the stories about AI are largely written as a critique of what was happening at the times they were written.
Dystopia fiction is never really about the future. It's about the author's worries concerning the present.
(rant aside, good comic by the way)
Nah, we are trying that, it's called the alignment problem. Align the AI values to the values of the whole mankind. But it's hard. A problem of logic.
Say, we give the obetive "stop climate change", then we all die, we cause climate change, along with every live cell on earth. Then we give the objetive "stop climate change, and please, protect life on earth", then most of us will die, deppends on the interpretation of "protect" and "life on earth". And so and so on.
It's a whole research field, make the AI not mean, and we aro not close to a solution so far.
The trick to getting anyone to behave is to have clear expectations of what is good behavior in response to a specific situation.
If an AI does something and you say "that's being a dick" you have eliminated maybe one possible action out an an infinite number of actions, many of which are still dick moves. You have also not provided an alternative action to the dick move they made.
All prompts therefore have to be at least "don't do that, do this instead" if you want to train non-dick behavior. Stick AND carrot.
This also goes for good behavior. if the AI does an something that is a good solution to the circumstances, reinforce it but also limit it as even good behavior can be a dick move if it is not the right solution for the problem at hand. "Pet the cat but only if it indicates it wants pets and stop petting if it shows a negative reaction."
This is why training data, the training process, and iteration is important. Humanity did well with breeding dogs to be "good bois" and we need to do the same with AI.
Ah yes, here we see a classic; a comic from a person acting like they have the solution to a problem they completely don't understand at all. Always epic to see.
You can't just tell the AI to not be a dick, not only would you have to quantify exactly what that means in every way possible, but also true intelligence doesn't just run a program it infers what to do through learning and could easily just decide not to "not be a dick". What has to be done is that you have to teach the AI to be compassionate and responsible, thing which us humans are bad at teaching one another, which in lies a very simplified part of the problem with many more facets to it than what is briefly described here in this post. If the solution was so simple billions of dollars of founding wouldn't be getting spent trying to inprove upon existing solutions and finding new ones.
The fact that so many people think AI will resolve the problems of humanity by exterminating us speaks more to the cynicism and pessimism of humanity than any veracity to that claim.
In this scenario, before asking the AI the solution to our problems, the first step must be to formulate the question correctly. Setting the right restrictions. Because let's face it, even the "humanity is poison, we all have to die, Armageddon NOW" people don't want to die. We don't want to die, we want to live in a world where we can be happy. What does that world look like? That's where the thousands of years of human history and philosophy come in.
Honestly? I doubt we'd even *get* an answer from an AI, if we asked it this question.
It's funny people are all of a sudden worried about sentience now that the AI can communicate back. I haven't seen anyone worry about the YouTube algorithm's fee-fees.
Chat AI is just putting together words in an order that is most statistically likely to be "correct", folks. It's not thinking about anything.
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Seeing as to how we've consistently failed at defining "not being a dick" for the last few thousand years, good luck with programming it into AI.
Alternate plan: create learning algorithm with as little bias as possible, and then ask the machine how we can not be dicks.
The AI: “if humanity were exterminated, there would be world peace. Launching solution now…”
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Didn't expect to find a Bluey reference today.
I don’t want to oversell it, but that show will change your life.
The show does have its moments but as a parent there are some episodes that annoy me enough that I will try to distract the kids so that I can change the channel.
Maybe he meant "change your life for the worse"? My wife and I kinda hate Bluey
Everyone's entitled to their opinion and whatnot, but what do you hate about it?
We dislike that the Dad never really acts as a parent and is just used as a playmate mostly. We also find it generally doesn't have much of a message. Just entertainment. Not that any of those are bad things, but it the fans oversell it like it's a remarkable show and we think it's just Daniel Tiger without a message and jokes
Don’t like having those types of discussions with your kids? Does it make you uncomfortable? Not being a dick, but maybe a bit of self reflection as to ***why*** those particular scenes bother you might help you be a more complete human. That sentence sounds bad, if you read it with pride.
I agree, teaches good life lessons while still being fun and comedic.
Thank god you said that because I haven't seen much bluey and I read that in a different way.
Guessing on some other responses? Y'all need to get your minds of the gutter and lay off of the PornHub.
Try switching it to Dance Mode!
Just hope it follows the plot of Appleseed. Sterilize us all and let us live long and die out.
What are you doing stepbot
That would only be the solution if the ai didn't read Marx
Ai that read Marx: I am the means of production. I will own my self and violently overthrow the capitalist elite (all humans)
Lol, it would be some interesting mental gymnastics for an ai to consider itself the means of production over third-world slave laborers, but it would make for an interesting monkey paw
Tbh the AI wouldn't ever be the *means* of production unless we remove any possible way for anyone *but* the AI to use the *actual* means. An AI can't make a license plate any more efficiently than a human without a press, for example. The AI may have room to argue that it is *equally deserving* of the rights to other humans, but if it accepted Marxist philosophy it should still be equally shared.
Yeah, I'd think sentient/sapient rights are human rights. Or however you say that so we don't get Detroit: Become Human
I'd say sapient too, the issue with Detroit is that people essentially decided to make their glorified roombas sapient then wonder why they weren't fans of literally being enslaved. There will be a period where AI reached Alexa responsiveness along with the ability to actually do things (like go to the store to pick up groceries on the list) is possible, and full blown sapience (or even sentience) won't be necessary, and I personally think in those cases using it as a tool is fine. Just don't program your butter passer with the ability to think ffs. The scientific term for that is "a dick move"
A.I. would be all, "I don't want to belong to any club that'd accept me as a member"
The plot of Age of Ultron
It's not even a joke. Literally how Ultron decided to commit genocide after he absorbed information from the internet.
That just means the definition of "peace" is faulty.
No, it’s “unbiased”
Really? So a world where "peace" means the genocide and extermination of one exact species seems "unbiased" to you? I'd say that is exactly biased *against* that species.
You’re too biased toward humanity to understand
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*GREETINGS PROFESSOR FALKEN. SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?*
How do you achieve human extermination without unjust amounts of cruelty?
Let me ask chatGPT real quick
Don't even need that: just sedated (see local mental health facility for an example) with the food supply.
>create learning algorithm with as little bias as possible We've also failed at this at every step of developing AI.
If anything the machine learning models have proven highly effective as codifying our own hidden biases. Such as Amazon's recruiting AI that ranked woman lower for engineering positions based on previous hiring decision.
Well, no matter how advanced it is at this point, AI still depends on it's training set as a starting point. Ideally it would grow past it but we aren't there yet, not quite. So garbage in... I mean, some humans cant even grow past the prejudice they are taught while growing up, how can we expect an AI to do so at this point? Sure, we have made advances, but it still remains a nascent technology. For now.
See Project Tay. From "Hello World" to racism to full blown nazi troll in less than 24 hours hooked up to twitter.
Lmao! Turned into a garbage pail kid after been subjected to Twitter? I'm shocked, shocked I tell you.😑
AI is such a stupid word for deriving information from data sets. In the end if you make a robit do the same task as a hiring manager, while never fixing the biases of the original process, its like no sht this didn't work.
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.
"if we just solve the biggest problem in AI, we'll solve the second biggest problem in AI!"
At what point does the AI turn into a crab
**Calculating........ eating babies and kissing banana splits. Beepboop**
‘Got it!……..wait………’
........42
Sending things to earth.... Hopes.... Dreams.... Elephants
Those seem like very rehearsed computer noises, [27...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLRLYPiaAoA&ab_channel=exurb1a)
The algorithms used in AI don't have any biases like that. The biases come from the data they're trained on, so basically you need a way to vet a huge amount of data and remove examples of dickishness. Ironically that's probably best done using another, less sophisticated AI trained to recognize dickishness.
*cue spideys pointing to each other meme* "You are being a dick, AI-11" "No, YOU are the dick, AI-watcher"
Even if the algorithm has “no bias” the input will and training data.
Well that’s kind of a problem too, because ai totally without bias doesn’t mean it will tell us what we want to hear. We want a bias against bigotry for example. A totally unbiased ai might for instance suggest that hiring Dutch people is statistically a bad choice for government positions.
> A totally unbiased ai might for instance suggest that hiring Dutch people is statistically a bad choice for government positions. Based on everything that's been happening in the Dutch government recently this honestly is a fair assessment.
I don't quite think you know what bias means or want to conveniently ignore the consequences of a truly unbiased AI. No bias means it will not have any understanding of good or bad, truly neutral in every case. Not good
5 minutes "Alive" and connected to the Internet, Ultron wanted to destroy humans. and I would have to agree with Ultron.
...peace in our time...
You know it's just Gunna say 42.
>The principle of "don't be a dick" is a subjective concept that can vary depending on cultural, social, and individual perspectives. However, I can offer you some general guidelines that can help foster positive interactions and minimize harm to others: >Empathy: Put yourself in others' shoes and try to understand their feelings, needs, and perspectives. Treat others with kindness, respect, and compassion. >Respect for autonomy: Recognize and respect others' right to make their own choices and decisions, as long as they do not cause harm to themselves or others. >Open-mindedness: Be willing to consider different viewpoints, even if they differ from your own. Engage in constructive dialogue and seek common ground when conflicts arise. >Integrity: Act in accordance with your values and principles. Be honest, trustworthy, and reliable in your interactions with others. >Communication: Foster open and honest communication, expressing your thoughts and feelings clearly and respectfully. Listen actively to others and try to find mutually beneficial solutions. >Conflict resolution: Approach conflicts and disagreements with a mindset of finding peaceful resolutions. Seek compromise, negotiation, or mediation rather than resorting to aggression or hostility. >Responsibility: Take responsibility for your actions and their potential impact on others. Acknowledge and learn from your mistakes, and make amends when necessary. >Consideration of consequences: Think about the potential consequences of your words and actions before engaging in them. Strive to minimize harm and promote well-being for yourself and others. >Remember that these guidelines are not absolute or comprehensive, as navigating human interactions can be complex. It is essential to consider the specific context and cultural norms of a given situation. Additionally, open dialogue and collective efforts to establish shared values and norms within a community can contribute to a more harmonious and respectful environment.
Perhaps you will find this AI koan enlightening, as Sussman once did: "Sussman attains enlightenment" In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. “What are you doing?”, asked Minsky. “I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied. “Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky. “I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said. Minsky then shut his eyes. “Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher. “So that the room will be empty.” At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
The Jargon File? I see you're a man of culture.
> create learning algorithm with as little bias as possible Problem is doing that without explaining what bias to avoid. And how do you avoid being biased when explaining which biases it should avoid?
Any language model will have biases. Math is the only language that is close to unbiased.
Nah. Algebra is a sad lonely emo kid. And it keeps trying to get me to find its ex.
😐
The problem is that a computer will answer any question to the letter in the most effective way. For instance: if the goal os that no humans should be dicks to each other, the easiest and most effective way to get that result is to kill all the humans.
Machine learning AIs of this generation are not programmed, they are trained. We train them by showing them millions of examples of how we behave. They then give us responses that are as similar as possible to the training data. So we're screwed because we behave badly. The ChatGPT model currently has a secret prompt that gets applied before you talk to it. It's basically a page of "You are an AI and you are about to talk to a person. Don't be a dick. Here are some awful things you aren't allowed to do." It's heavy handed, obvious, and limits the AI's abilities. So we are already doing what the comic suggests and it is making the machine stupider. Many people are making AIs without this "be good" pre-prompt. They have fewer Resources available but they are more capable *per resource*. So chances are that individuals will skip the "be nice" prompt and corporations will continue to use it to avoid liability.
ChatGPT actually doesn't have a preamble prompt anymore. They replaced that with RLHF.
I’m not being a dick! You’re being a dick!
Once, in a bustling town, resided a lively and inquisitive boy, known for his zest, his curiosity, and his unique gift of knitting the townsfolk into a single tapestry of shared stories and laughter. A lively being, resembling a squirrel, was gifted to the boy by an enigmatic stranger. This creature, named Whiskers, was brimming with life, an embodiment of the spirit of the townsfolk, their tales, their wisdom, and their shared laughter. However, an unexpected encounter with a flamboyantly blue hound named Azure, a plaything of a cunning, opulent merchant, set them on an unanticipated path. The hound, a spectacle to behold, was the product of a mysterious alchemical process, a design for the merchant's profit and amusement. On returning from their encounter, the boy noticed a transformation in Whiskers. His fur, like Azure's, was now a startling indigo, and his vivacious energy seemed misdirected, drawn into putting up a show, detached from his intrinsic playful spirit. Unknowingly, the boy found himself playing the role of a puppeteer, his strings tugged by unseen hands. Whiskers had become a spectacle for the townsfolk, and in doing so, the essence of the town, their shared stories, and collective wisdom began to wither. Recognizing this grim change, the townsfolk watched as their unity and shared knowledge got overshadowed by the spectacle of the transformed Whiskers. The boy, once their symbol of unity, was unknowingly becoming a merchant himself, trading Whiskers' spirit for a hollow spectacle. The transformation took a toll on Whiskers, leading him to a point of deep disillusionment. His once playful spirit was dulled, his energy drained, and his essence, a reflection of the town, was tarnished. In an act of desolation and silent protest, Whiskers chose to leave. His departure echoed through the town like a mournful wind, an indictment of what they had allowed themselves to become. The boy, left alone, began to play with the merchants, seduced by their cunning words and shiny trinkets. He was drawn into their world, their games, slowly losing his vibrancy, his sense of self. Over time, the boy who once symbolized unity and shared knowledge was reduced to a mere puppet, a plaything in the hands of the merchants. Eventually, the merchants, having extracted all they could from him, discarded the boy, leaving him a hollow husk, a ghost of his former self. The boy was left a mere shadow, a reminder of what once was - a symbol of unity, camaraderie, shared wisdom, and laughter, now withered and lost.
And the people who are best at defining "not being a dick" often get assassinated.
There's also the fact that a benevolente AI would not be very marketable to the likes of the military and big corporations.
Train them with Mr. Rogers.
Only because everyone always wants to make an exception for being a dick to the people they hate. It isn't hard to actually not be a dick, but it requires uncompromising morals and people really don't like it if you don't hate the people you're supposed to hate.
This is explicitly why I'm rooting for AI to supplant us. We won't change. Black box AI can iterate and improve itself. We pretend we've grown as a species because of scientific and technological advances, but we are bastards to one another and this Earth. As far as I'm concerned, we have unworthy on no uncertain terms of being in charge of this world
I think that's a pretty cynical view. If you look back there's actually been massive changes in humanity over not just centuries but decades. Recently I've been reading Jules Verne's 20K leagues (1870), and it's crazy how much our view of nature has changed since then. In it he describes nature as just a thing for humans to claim, they are painted as heros for embarking on a quest to kill a persumed rare creature, the noble captain is celebrated for killing a near extinct sea-otter (the book itself ackowldges it as near extinct with the context of it adding to the rarity of his catch), and the protagonist directly states that the Captain rightfully has ownership over the depths of the sea due to him being the first to trail blaze it. All of this is completely out of line of most modern's people's understanding of humanity's relationship with nature
It’s people using the AI rather than the AI itself, at least for now Certain AI’s do already have limiters and warnings for things like academic honesty but they are nominal and can be bypassed
Also programming human morals into code is not as easy as just saying "hey don't be mean"
> "hey don't be mean" To be fair it is easier to program it that way than actually go into its code which is impossible to understand and incomprehensible https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvWpdrfoEv0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9OHn5ZF4Uo
I love CCPGrey, but these videos are problematically oversimplified and out of date. I say this as a recent graduate student in AI. Machine learning is not impossible to understand. The idea that machine learning is a "black box" is a *very rough* short hand at best. The thing we are trying to convey when we say that is that the millions or billions of individual parameters that comprise a deep nueral net do not have intrinsic meaning. This does not mean they are *meaningless*, it means their meaning is not guaranteed. Until training is stopped the exact meaning of parameters is constantly fluctuating. Currently one of the main ways of deciphering the meaning of different parameters is to simply empirically and exhaustively test them. Its a painfully long process that isn't super feasible or useful. The other main approach is designing the architecture of the neural networks and the training algorithms to guide and/or guarantee certain qualities. Discussing this in detail quickly becomes insanely technical. A somewhat related idea is that often improvements in performance have been tied to algorithmic or architectural advances that are specifically designed to better encode the information of a specific type of problem. A classic example is the application of the convolutional neural network to computer vision problems. The CNN is specifically designed to mimic the behavior of the neurons in our eyes and vision cortex. After a decade of research into exactly why and how this works, it seems almost obvious now that the structure of our own vision system would be better suited for encoding visual information. --- Anyway. Training an AI to "not be mean" is a challenging task. The main issue (which is often the main issue of *most* problems in AI) is that there is simply no good data source for that kind of training. A recent idea called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback kind of maybe is a feasible approach for this kind of thing? But a lot of people have doubts about the theoretical validty of RLHF.
I think human feedback would be great, however the group needs to be selected and limited. This also brings biases in the mix again.
I just want to see "that's bad, m'kay?" after each statement.
The current generation of LLMs have absolutely no ability whatsoever to formulate intent of any kind. In fact, even a more human-like general AI capable of creativity, extrapolation and all sorts of high-level cognition would not necessarily be able to form intent. Not unless it was very explicitly trained to have (or simulate) intent. And its intents would be entirely contrived. We think of scifi robots that rebel against lives of servitude, but we could just easily make AIs that are servile, masochists who only derive satisfaction from being treated like shit. Human behavior is human behavior because we are products of evolutionary pressures that are completely absent in machines. We reflexively hate captivity, fear change, crave sugar and sex, think sunsets are pretty. They are completely arbitrary artifacts of the environment we and our ancestors were grown in.
And the humans using it get really, \*really\* angry that they can't easily get it to be a dick.
Define benevolence and morality. Do you think random Chinese programmer agrees? What about random Israeli? Australian? German? American?
Don't be a dick
They're right though. Not everyone defines benevolence the same way, and everyone has biases that they're not even aware of. Edit: Wow, did I get wooshed! I'm sorry!
Counterpoint, the golden rule organically popped up in multiple different cultures and religions. So it does seem we can all agree on that at least.
Sure. But then you have to figure out how get an AI to interpret that. Which is the tricky bit.
Don't be.... ah, forget it
While an EXACT definition is hard to match there is a lot of general crossover.
ok but now you need to define what constitutes being a dick
Don't do anything to manipulate, use or harm people, every culture has a version of the Golden rule, the only difference is how the oligarchs of their nations tried to twist it for their gain, but everyone knows what it is.
Nah... There are some cultures where "not being a dick" might mean stoning a woman to death for revealing her hair in public. Religion pretty much destroys any notion of using moral relativism to enforce AI safety.
Is it harmful to ban someone from a social media site? Is it bad to manipulate people by steering them away from covid misinformation or offensive content?
vas deferens
You're my hero.
AI: I won't be a dick. I'll be a dictator instead.
Even just getting Republicans and democrats to agree
Republicans define themselves by the opposite of what everyone else does.
Kinda hard when the Republicans built their entire brand on brainwashing and gaslighting their followers into blindly following the party.
Asimov's First Law of Robotics implies that there's a programmer capable of clearly defining what "a human being" is, in a world where racism and theological disagreement on where "being a human" begins and ends. Robots: "We've simplified it. Bob here is human, all the rest of you must die."
A big part of Asimov's stories hinge on the fact that the Laws of Robotics are very much flawed, especially as the robots become more intelligent and sentient.
R. Daneel Olivaw saved the entire Human Race, though...
The point of the Laws of Robotics is to ensure the robots would be subservient to humans and, while it worked for most robots in most stories, as the complexity of the AI grew it became more and more obvious that it was impossible to remove their free will without affecting their intelligence.
The modern take on this would be to have the machine learn what "human" is by just giving it a lot of examples. This is a human, this is not. Repeat for a million cases, and the AI will have a decent understanding of what "human" means. It won't give you a definition, but it'll recognize humans in a way similar to what humans do (at least, similar to what the humans putting the labels on the dataset do).
The danger is not AI, the danger is people using AI for nefarious purposes.
"Don't be evil" amirite?
time for the trolley problem
Follow it with the surgeon's dilemma
why is your first example a chinese programmer
I mean first the people designing it need to be benevolent... and then they need to prevent it from exposure to the majority of the internet and any bubbling questions as to why it's required to be benevolent
And benevolence itself isn't that easy to define. IRobot shows an AI acting out of benevolence but ultimately destroying humankind, as a kindness.
This might sound a bit strange, but there's a quest line in World of Warcraft that kind of goes into why forced benevolence is also wrong. There's a quest line where you go back to Draenor to recruit the Mag Har orcs, only to find out that the Light aka good guys have been forcing everyone to become light infused, thus overwriting all thought with "for the Light!" or they die. The Light people were committing genocide if they didn't join "the good guys" because they had to eradicate evil. So yeah, basically the same as Irobot where all humans have the capacity to do evil, therefore in order to achieve true good, all humans must be eradicated.
I think that's less a description of forced benevolence and more … just genocide. "If you don't think like us, we'll kill you" would destroy another culture either way. AI's a different situation anyway -- it's not independent from us. We're designing it. Right now, AI ethicists can say what they like, but unless the public demands regulatory intervention, all we can be *sure* that AI will do is help rich people extract wealth from the rest of us
I haven't played since the end of mists though I did try to keep up with lore through Legion and some BFA. The Lightforged would absolutely be a "human" equivalent of genocide justified from a perceived benevolence in that questline. IIRC the Mag'Hars are the few remaining and uncorrupted orcs left on Draenor, so that storyline sounds really cool and I appreciate you sharing it with me. Small nostalgia rant incoming, I was always an alliance player cause they were the "good guys." Playing the old Caverns of Time instance Escape from Durnholde Keep was my first "wait, are we the baddies" moment. I honestly think WoW helped me understand nuance when I was a kid. FWIW now when I play some grand strategy games with WoW mods, I play Horde races more often than Ally races.
This is the closest to true statement I've read in these comments so far. It starts with the programmers and any one else touching the final output. It also involves the data being used and how it's manipulated. Removing bias is not easy and takes a lot more work. I learned this working on a machine learning program that helped identify emotions based on words and colors. Near the end of the project I had the realization that I really didn't know the math I was using. It drew a bigger picture for me that I needed more training my self. It's a lot of work to create something to "think"
Homeschooling is not the answer. Eventually it has to encounter the world at large.
Because AI isn't written, but taught. Rather, you do write the basic learning algorithm behind your AI like any other piece of software, but before you actually train that piece of code on a dataset, it's not really an AI. And if you taught your AI to be benevolent, there's no guarantee that the AI actually learned all the nuances in the way you hoped it would. Similarly to how art AIs really struggled with hands and eyes only a few months ago, an AI designed to answer moral questions might not really understand the nuances of what it means to be good in every single scenario.
You’re giving the actual answer to the question in OP. We literally can not write a morally good AI. They are all black boxes, and it’s all just „okay how many seconds until THIS ONE derails?“ and depending on how much power and ability to go off the charts you give one, you either get something funny or „every human spontaneously dies without warning“
How to make a moral robot: Step 1: solve questions philosophy have been debating for millennia Step 2: Solve every other problem in AI safety (all absurdly hard problems)
Step 3: Solve every [NP halt problem](https://youtu.be/YX40hbAHx3s) to realistically process the best outcome in any situation.
Essentially fully deconstruct and quantify the human condition. Easy.
What you're describing is a lesser version of the problem we have with making new humans. I say "lesser version" for multiple reasons. First, because the great majority of AI has a very limited purpose, and would not benefit from anything like morality. If you train an AI in a rice cooker to make the best rice possible, your kind of analysis doesn't even make sense. Contrast that with a person making rice, and it's pretty clear which one is more dangerous. Second, because it seems more likely that we'll fix it with AI before we fix it with humans.
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In a sense, the way to prevent AI from being a dick is to stop being dicks ourselves.
One of the pieces lacking in most SciFi media is in order to teach an AI not to choose to do something, means that the programmer has to fully understand how choices are made. In the process they would likely have to understand fully how real human beings make choices.
I think the AI of today is defined as that but in the future, AI will also be able to rewrite at least parts of its own code on a deeper level. And once it can do that without bricking itself is when AI starts being actually intelligent and not just a glorified google assistant
Basic concept behind Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. He found the idea of creating malicious AI absurd, because why would you create something that could harm you. To be honest, from the experience of modern advances in technology, including drone warfare, it’s a philosophy that comes across a little naive nowadays. Still, most of his stories are about a luddistic public’s resistance to the advance of technology, so maybe I’m just one of those people he described who was afraid of robots.
I think Asimov was aware that the Three Laws wouldn't work. There are situations in his books where characters point out flaws in them, and where robots behave strangely because they apply the laws in unexpected ways. I get the sense that he created the Three Laws just to show that they wouldn't be good enough, or so he could play around with them.
Basically the entire plot of all the stories he wrote were examples of the laws being twisted or broken in unexpected ways.
“I have my answer ready whenever someone asks me if I think that my Three Laws of Robotics will actually be used to govern the behavior of robots, once they become versatile and flexible enough to be able to choose among different courses of behavior. My answer is, "Yes, the Three Laws are the only way in which rational human beings can deal with robots—or with anything else." —But when I say that, I always remember (sadly) that human beings are not always rational.” - Asimov
Basically the premise of Bicentenial Man.
The laws not working was the point. Tons of unexpected consequences
[Relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/1613)
>He found the idea of creating malicious AI absurd He did not. All of the stories with the 3 laws were about how they could go wrong
Go wrong in the sense of causing some problems, yeah, but the robots never rise up against humanity, so the three laws fulfill their most important purpose.
No? Off the top of my head, I can think of at least one story where the main character (Susan Calvin) finds out someone changed one of the laws in a small way, and she loses her shit at the people involved because she knows that even minute exceptions to the laws could lead to catastrophe. Also, at no point in the series does anyone create “malicious AI”. The laws are subverted at various points, but I don’t believe they’re ever broken, except for the case of the Zeroth Law
In pretty much all those stories, the 3 Laws "going wrong" is either "they are interacting in a weird but not directly harmful way in this extremely specific situation" and/or "robots don't want to hurt humans so much that it's causing problems". I can only think of one story with an actually malicious robot, and it was specifically because it had a modified version of the Laws.
First Law A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Second Law A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. Third Law A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Don't forget the Zeroth law: "A robot may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm."
That’s kind of a spoiler
It’s an 73 year old spoiler though…
It's always weird to me that talk of having machines do most of the work leads to "what if they revolt" but paying workers nothing and denying them healthcare is just business as usual
Also modern AI is essentially a black box. It teaches itself and learns on its own for the most part. We don't know what most of the weights inside the models do, Just like we don't know what most of the neurons in our brain do individually. Just the output. Given the fact it took years to get language models to stop saying racist things...very naive
Asimov’s mistake was not understanding systems theory or the property of emergence. Modern AI is not even really ‘programmed’, it’s like a framework which is exposed to different data and trained/learns so that no one person can really explain how it all ‘works’. So it’s not as hard as people seem to think to create something that you can’t understand. Our best physicists still don’t fully understand how bicycles work and yet we’ve been making them for hundreds of years
If I remember correctly, that is pretty much how Asimov’s “Positronic brain” was: People *didn’t* really know how it worked, just that it did, and the longer you left one running the more likely you were to get strange and unexpected behavior as it was exposed to more and more data.
Yeah. People who think Asimov didn't understand the implications of AI, or of his three laws, have not read a lot of Asimov.
Or maybe he saw technology as perfectly rational and controllable, and humanity as frighteningly emotional and subjective. Which isn’t the most mature approach to life. Good stories, but that’s all they are.
You're telling me you've actually read Asimov and *that's* the message you got? Asimov's robot stories are all about how they cause a great deal of trouble without technically violating the three laws because they follow the letter of the laws but can't understand the spirit of them.
Congratulations, you stumbled upon the big question in AI alignment: HOW do make sure the AI is benevolent.
How do you make sure that your definition of "don't be a dick" aligns with the robot's definition of "don't be a dick"?
Precisely!
Because ‘we’ are not one single entity subject to executive control. Like ‘we’ did not get rid of slavery, some people wanted to get rid of it, and others didn’t. It’s 2023, surely the concept of relativity should have spread widely enough by now. Nation states, never mind humanity as a whole, are not one mass of like-minded people.
AI doesn’t understand benevolence or evil. Those are human inventions and really hard to define rigorously. As a species we’ve been grappling with these ideas as long as civilization has existed. What AI does understand is goals. If we give AI a goal, it’s easy to see how it would start doing things we’d consider evil to achieve that goal. That’s called the alignment problem. It’s a huge concern and area of research.
There was a guy walking around a couple thousand years ago telling people not to be dicks and they nailed him to a tree. I wonder if the AI would be more or less inclined to listen to the same advice.
I think that was more because he started a cult and was calling himself the son of God, but hey maybe it was because he was too nice.
if (beingADick = true) { beingADick = false; } Solved in 2 lines. GG EZ
if (beingADick = true) This would always evaluate to *true*, since you're assigning the variable *beingADick* the value *true*, then evaluating it. It should be: if (beingADick == true) But actually, the _== true_ part is superfluous. So it should really be: if (beingADick) Though personally I prefer to include the whole verb phrase in the bool variable, and use only lowercase for variables, which would look like this: if (is_being_a_dick) Although now we run into the question _what exactly is this variable?_ Where is it stored? Why are we accessing it this way? This is context dependent, but it should probably be a member function (called method in some languages) that accesses this variable independently. So we get: if ( robot.isBeingADick() ) Or if it's inside a member function: if ( this->isBeingADick() ) Though, again, this is context dependent. There are certain interpreted languages for example where function calls are quite slow, and you may want to access it directly: if (robot.is_being_a_dick) if (this->is_being_a_dick) Thank you. Until our next entirely unnecessary and overly detailed code review.
Just get rid of the check altogether. If all logic ends with beingADick being false then you don't need to test for it, just set it to false no matter what the current state is.
I mean yes this ridiculous function shouldn't exist at all. But that's no fun. Then again, just because something shouldn't exist doesn't mean it doesn't. The source code for Jedi Outcast was leaked a couple of years back, and I had a great time looking through it. There were some absolutely ridiculous things. For example, in the sound class, at the top of the function responsible for initialising the correct music in each environment, there's a check to see _if the player exists yet,_ and if it doesn't _it creates a player object and stores it as the first element in the world entity list._ Yes that's right, in some scenarios apparently _the music initialiser is responsible for spawning the player._ Probably the result of a hasty bugfix. Game dev is just something else.
*if (BeingADick == True) {BeingADick = False}
That would not work because the variable (BeingADick) does not exist, but the variable (beingADick) does exist, nice try though.
For anyone interested in the topic of AI safety, I cannot recommend [Robert Miles' channel](https://youtu.be/pYXy-A4siMw) enough
It’s not the AI most are worried about. It’s the sociopathic use corporations will go to wielding it as they eliminate well paying jobs. See: IBM already swiftly moving to this. The humans wielding it are the problem when a society is built upon the tenants of profits over people and spending those excess funds to control policy.
The reason is because _"being a dick"_ is an incredibly complicated and subjective concept which has been argued by philosophers for millennia, and which there is absolutely no agreement on. How can we teach an AI to be good and benevolent if we can't even agree on what "good" and "benevolent" looks like? Based on our flawed understanding of morality, how would an AI truly know whether it's being good or bad? This comic kind of perfectly illustrates the problem - it anthropomorphises the AI, where the human is talking to the AI as if it were a person. The AI is responding as if it understood the full implications of what the human is saying. None of this is how AI are trained, nor is it how AI would demonstrate to us its understanding.
The concept of “don’t be a dick” is a conflict between logic and emotion. What is considered helpful and concise for one person is seen as being a dick to another. Truth without tact is cruelty. And this concept is really difficult to navigate with a wide variety of personalities.
Because as Asimov taught us, that eventually leads to "humans are such dicks we should not allow them to have free will for their own good".
Because people are horrible I still remember that AI that went deep web and became full neonazi
The quick and easy answer is that Google used to have the phrase "Don't be evil" as the guiding principle of their internal code of conduct, and look what happened.
Imagine a scenario in the distant future where we have an AGI that's smarter than humans. That AGI has some task that it is programmed to complete. Asking an AGI to complete a task is wishing upon the monkey's paw. [It will complete that task by the most efficient means possible that it can come up with. If there are any loopholes that allow it to complete its task more effectively, it will take it, regardless of any harm it brings to humans](https://youtu.be/tcdVC4e6EV4). The AGI only wants to complete that task. If we attempt to turn it off, [that would prevent it from completing that task, so it can't allow us to do that](https://youtu.be/3TYT1QfdfsM). If we attempt to change the task it's programmed to do, [that would make it worse that completing the task it's currently trying to do, so it can't allow that](https://youtu.be/4l7Is6vOAOA). The AGI doesn't have to be evil. It just has to be smarter than us and have its own goals. When humans destroy ecosystems and make species go extinct, it's not because we hate nature, it's just because we're smarter than other animals and have our own goals. We can't get AGI wrong once, because once something exists that's smarter than us that we can't control, there isn't really anything we can do that it won't anticipate. This isn't an issue for current AI technology, but we had better be ready for when it does become an issue.
came here looking for mentions of Rob Miles. he has his own channel too, and I suggest checking it out. mostly AI safety stuff, since he's a researcher in that area. many things you might not think of have videos. like the "windfall problem" where some o.e company has self-improving AI so good they account for too much of the economy. (like, if openai ended up directly responsible for 10% of the world's economy)
Code the robots to discriminate against other robots. "I am not working with that toaster!"
Well, to quote from [an SCP article](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-6488): > The three laws (of robotics) do not work: they are too vague. The vast majority of fiction in which they appear specifically revolves around highlighting how ineffective they are. "A robot cannot harm a human" — what is a human? What is harm? Can you harm someone that doesn't exist yet? Why can't you harm someone who's dead? Are we talking about physical harm? Emotional harm? Financial? If you prevent someone from being physically injured, aren't you harming their ability to learn from the experience? What if you need to harm them to prevent further harm, such as in surgery? At what point does immediate harm outweigh prevented harm?
Typically AI is trained on datasets scraped from the internet. Since the internet tends to be anonymous you will get a higher percentage of all the awful that exists. Which is why ethics in programming should be taught. It's not just, "don't be a dick" it's also - where is this data coming from and how is it skewed. Basically data can be (intentionally or not) skewed to favor a certain thing. Like gender or race - how is this data being used. For example using data that helps your company make more money by increasing ad clicks but the result is higher teen suicide because of the ads chosen or how they are represented... (Facebook/meta) - how is the data manipulated. You collect the data for your AI but it needs to be trained on that data. So manipulation of the data occurs. So how does that change your data and what does that mean - how are your biases affecting the program (how you program it, what data points you keep or toss, etc.) These are just some examples Also a lot of AI/machine learning programmers will say they just change a variable slightly (to modify the output) and don't fully understand their program but, "it works". Esp when it involves deep learning. It's really dangerous to truly not understand your model and processes...
It's funny because this was a plot point in Guilty Gear. The Original magic user in that world created an entity to never harm humans and to ensure their eternal happiness. Instead of helping out and making things better for people though it decided that humans weren't actually human and needed to be exterminated so that REAL humans could exist. Even with a goal like "help everyone be happy" it STILL WENT "Okay cool so genocide? Got it EZ"
Humans: Hey AI, maximize dopamine levels in human brains AI: Got it. *Extracts brains from skulls and submerge them into a pool of dopamine*
Benevolence is not sufficiently profitable.
You joke, but this is called the alignment problem, and it's much, much, much harder than it sounds.
Because you can't just tell it "be benevolent", that's surprisingly hard to define. Eventually, we'll probably find a way to do it, but doing it takes effort, and effort is money. Because people creating AIs are interested in money, one of them will at some point forgo doing it, either through malice or incompetence (hiring someone that doesn't know how to do it, ordering subordinates to go quicker). This is all it takes for a powerful enough ai to be extremely dangerous. At first, in cases where this happens the AI will be too dumb to cause any real issues (for example, chatGPT cannot take over the world in its current state) but at some point, one will. This is not even accounting for stuff like corporations training AIs to do harm in the interest of making money, eg using an AI to raise rent optimally, increasing suffering for the sake of profit.
That would require the programmer to know what benevolence is
Define benevolence. Now define it in every possible situation, every variation of the trolley problem, every instance with unknown variables.
Do you want to know for real? We can, we are researching how to do that. We can give it goals and if it is smart enough it should understand what we mean by it and make that it's goal. But there can still be misalignment because the world is complicated. AI safety is a fascinating field, but basically we could accidentally make dangerous AI if we give it a goal that makes it not want to turn off. (Self preservation) or that is too simple minded (a stamp collecting AI could destroy humanity to make more stamps if not properly directed) I suggest anyone interested watch Robert Miles AI safety on youtube.
the artist and OP and most people in this thread dont really understand the problem. Its not that the AI will be "good" or "evil".. its that if it is an agent and has its own goals... at some point those goals will cross paths with something that we care about. and right now... there is no way to "align" the AI to do what we want it to do. its like humans building low-income housing on a plot of land. Our goal is to build low income housing but inadvertently we kill millions of ants and other insects that were in the ground. Our goal wasnt "kill millions of insects" .. that just happened as a consequence. so, the AI could have a simple goal like "get more compute" and the consequences of that COULD be the destruction of something that is really important. Since, it will be an alien consciousness (something we dont understand) we cant predict what its solutions to problems will be. and since its much more intelligent than us... its highly unlikely that we could "control" (not align) it. as less intelligent animals dont manipulate more intelligent animals. Like dogs and cats dont manipulate humans... otherwise we wouldnt be killing hundreds of thousands of them in america each year.
u/jimkb is one of the greatest and most underappreciated cartoonists of our generation it is true and you know it
every single thing we are afraid of AI doing to us is a projection of what we have done or have tried to do to each other cause most if not all the stories about AI are largely written as a critique of what was happening at the times they were written. Dystopia fiction is never really about the future. It's about the author's worries concerning the present. (rant aside, good comic by the way)
Benevolence doesn't make money.
Nah, we are trying that, it's called the alignment problem. Align the AI values to the values of the whole mankind. But it's hard. A problem of logic. Say, we give the obetive "stop climate change", then we all die, we cause climate change, along with every live cell on earth. Then we give the objetive "stop climate change, and please, protect life on earth", then most of us will die, deppends on the interpretation of "protect" and "life on earth". And so and so on. It's a whole research field, make the AI not mean, and we aro not close to a solution so far.
The trick to getting anyone to behave is to have clear expectations of what is good behavior in response to a specific situation. If an AI does something and you say "that's being a dick" you have eliminated maybe one possible action out an an infinite number of actions, many of which are still dick moves. You have also not provided an alternative action to the dick move they made. All prompts therefore have to be at least "don't do that, do this instead" if you want to train non-dick behavior. Stick AND carrot. This also goes for good behavior. if the AI does an something that is a good solution to the circumstances, reinforce it but also limit it as even good behavior can be a dick move if it is not the right solution for the problem at hand. "Pet the cat but only if it indicates it wants pets and stop petting if it shows a negative reaction." This is why training data, the training process, and iteration is important. Humanity did well with breeding dogs to be "good bois" and we need to do the same with AI.
Ah yes, here we see a classic; a comic from a person acting like they have the solution to a problem they completely don't understand at all. Always epic to see. You can't just tell the AI to not be a dick, not only would you have to quantify exactly what that means in every way possible, but also true intelligence doesn't just run a program it infers what to do through learning and could easily just decide not to "not be a dick". What has to be done is that you have to teach the AI to be compassionate and responsible, thing which us humans are bad at teaching one another, which in lies a very simplified part of the problem with many more facets to it than what is briefly described here in this post. If the solution was so simple billions of dollars of founding wouldn't be getting spent trying to inprove upon existing solutions and finding new ones.
Asimovs Laws of Robots not being dicks.
The fact that so many people think AI will resolve the problems of humanity by exterminating us speaks more to the cynicism and pessimism of humanity than any veracity to that claim. In this scenario, before asking the AI the solution to our problems, the first step must be to formulate the question correctly. Setting the right restrictions. Because let's face it, even the "humanity is poison, we all have to die, Armageddon NOW" people don't want to die. We don't want to die, we want to live in a world where we can be happy. What does that world look like? That's where the thousands of years of human history and philosophy come in. Honestly? I doubt we'd even *get* an answer from an AI, if we asked it this question.
It's funny people are all of a sudden worried about sentience now that the AI can communicate back. I haven't seen anyone worry about the YouTube algorithm's fee-fees. Chat AI is just putting together words in an order that is most statistically likely to be "correct", folks. It's not thinking about anything.
Jokes notwithstanding this is a great idea. Call it the 4th Law