6 ms·

This sort of "internal" approach to AI safety, where you attempt to build fundamental limits into the AI itself, seems like it is easily thwarted by someone who

by lacker 10y ago

This sort of "internal" approach to AI safety, where you attempt to build fundamental limits into the AI itself, seems like it is easily thwarted by someone who intentionally builds an AI without these safety mechanisms. As long as AI is an open technology there will always be some criminals who just want to see the world burn. IMO, a better approach to AI safety research is to focus on securing the first channels that a malicious AI would be likely to exploit. Like spam, and security. Can you make communications spam-resistant? Can you make an unhackable internet service? Those seem hard, but more plausible than the "Watch out for paperclip optimizers" approach to AI safety. It just feels like inventing a way to build a nuclear weapon that can't actually explode, and then hoping the problem of nuclear war is solved.

jimrandomh 10y ago
For the most part these aren't aimed at people making bad AGIs deliberately, but rather, at well-intentioned developers launching AGIs with serious bugs. Those developers will want to include safety mechanisms, and will, hopefully, be the first to make AGIs with major capabilities. We should also be working to secure the channels an AGI might exploit, but most of those are already tied to an economic incentive to invest in security, and are already getting large investments compared to the relatively tiny field of AI safety.
- daveguy 10y ago
  You are right, except most of these are applicable to narrow AI and don't need to wait for AGI for their application.
- lacker 10y ago
  These aren't aimed at people making bad AGIs deliberately, but rather, at well-intentioned developers launching AGIs with serious bugs. That is precisely the approach that does not make sense to me. By the time friendly developers can launch AGIs, unfriendly developers will not be far behind. And AI safety seems likely to be an issue far before the development of AGI - a non-general malicious AI that can only hack internet services or trick humans into running arbitrary code via conversation is already quite a serious problem. So to me focusing on "unfriendly developers building narrow AIs" seems more logical than focusing on "friendly developers building AGI".
  - Hondor 10y ago
    People can already build robots with guns that run around shooting people, but they usually don't. We still have laws to protect us from that. Nation states have the resources to build armies of gun-shooting robots and they already do! But again, they don't use them to destroy humanity for other reasons, like politics and retaliation and all that. So I don't think we need to worry about someone maliciously making an evil robot. That's already a problem and we already spent thousands of years figuring out systems of society to protect us from those dangers.
    - jdhendrickson 10y ago
      I think without visiting the root of the site many people are afraid these are ground rules for strong AI development as an open source project. If that were the case with Google's backing I would be more than apprehensive. We all know strong AI wouldn't be some sort of robot running around shooting people like a movie, this would be an extinction event worse than a rather large asteroid if it fell into the wrong hands. The first country or corporation to create strong AI capable of self evolution will either be able to immediately take control of the world as we know it, or worse create something capable of destroying humanity as we know it. That's not what's going on at all for anyone else that at first glance though that (I'll admit I am guilty of thinking that after glancing at the article as well). Goal 1: Measure our progress Goal 2: Build a household robot Goal 3: Build an agent with useful natural language understanding Goal 4: Solve a wide variety of games using a single agent That's all they are trying to accomplish with this (so far anyway). None of which requires strong AI. TLDR they are formulating some laws of robotics that are a bit more granular for dumb AI which are incapable of self improvement and very task oriented.
      - Retric 10y ago
        You are thinking in narrative terms about AI. Crazy <-> Rational is a far more likely issue with early AI than Good <-> Evil. The problem is you can't optimize for general intelligence only solutions to given problems. Let's say you have two twins one of which is smarter than the other. If you ask about future predictions then how do you know the correct answer before hand. In other words the 99% of paperclip optimizers are going to start making virtual paperclips not paving over the universe with actual paperclips. Hacking your reward function is easer than solving hard problems. PS: Don't do drugs :0
21 10y ago
This paper seems more concerned with near-future and non-malicious AI safety - ie: your self driving car not running off a cliff or your rumba not spewing it's dust bin all over so that it has new work to do. The stuff you talk about is farther in the future, and a much tougher problem.
ikeboy 10y ago
>All else being equal, not many people would prefer to destroy the world. Even faceless corporations, meddling governments, reckless scientists, and other agents of doom require a world in which to achieve their goals of profit, order, tenure, or other villainies. If our extinction proceeds slowly enough to allow a moment of horrified realization, the doers of the deed will likely be quite taken aback on realizing that they have actually destroyed the world. Therefore I suggest that if the Earth is destroyed, it will probably be by mistake. https://intelligence.org/files/CognitiveBiases.pdf https://intelligence.org/files/CognitiveBiases.pdf
- lacker 10y ago
  I agree. But, so far we have come closest to destroying the world when nation states are stockpiling weapons of war, threatening mutually assured destruction, with their arsenals kept on a hair trigger. To me, that seems likely to keep being the main danger scenario in the future. It would still be a "mistake", but not the "oops what does this button do" sort of mistake, but rather the "I could have sworn they fired first" sort of mistake. That is why I think the main goal of AI safety should be how to defend against intentionally malicious AI. We should be thinking about drone swarms and hacker-AIs rather than paper clips.
  - Retric 10y ago
    One nation already went nuclear > non nuclear demonstrating a level of basic competence.
arcanus 10y ago
Excellent post, I rather agree. > As long as AI is an open technology there will always be some criminals who just want to see the world burn. Thankfully we have yet to see terror attacks with nuclear weapons, but the lower barriers of entry for potentially catastrophic AIs undoubtedly is alarming. I often wonder if analog solutions will not be critical. To continue with your example, a nuke that must be armed with a physical lever would be a rather great hindrance to any AI. Internet communications, etc. will be more tricky, due to the high frequency activity, but the point of having meatspace 'firewalls' on mission critical activities is a nice short term kludge.
- ccvannorman 10y ago
  one of the most effective and scariest attack vectors for AI would be convincing or coercing humans to do its bidding (e.g. "pull the lever or i'll switch off your father's life support")
  - deftnerd 10y ago
    It might be easier than that. Data Broker companies are the ones that run those stupid "Which LOTR character are you" or "What color are you" quizzes that are popular in some social media circles. They do it to slowly build psychological trait models of the people taking the quiz. This allows them to sell that information to marketing companies. Access to that kind of data would help an AI determine the people that are more susceptible to manipulation. Add in records on health care, as you mentioned, and information on debts and you have data that can help an AI gather as many human minions as it needs.
    - pixl97 10y ago
      Greedy people cause all kinds of problems now. I don't know why people aren't concerned that a greedy AI could be even worse.
  - kbaker 10y ago
    Great recent story following this plot line: http://compellingsciencefiction.com/stories/crinkles.html http://compellingsciencefiction.com/stories/crinkles.html
Aelinsaar 10y ago
It probably won't require maniacs out to destroy humanity, just a typically careless black market.
pizza 10y ago
"Defenders think in lists, attackers think in graphs" redux
simonh 10y ago
We don't have to choose between making inherently safe AIs and creating and environment safe from hostile AIs. We should do both. Apart from anything else, we already have a planet full of intelligent agents, many of which are highly hostile, so increasing our general level of security should already be a high priority.
ajuc 10y ago
> It just feels like inventing a way to build a nuclear weapon that can't actually explode [accidentally], and then hoping the problem of nuclear war is solved. That's how cold war remained cold.
xyience 10y ago
Can you make an unhackable person? If people can get around your safeguards, even only people with authority rather than in general, the AGI can too. Trying to keep a potentially malicious (actively or passively so, I mean only bad for humans) AGI in a box cannot work, we either get the internal parts right so we can be very confident it's not malicious to begin with (and so no need for a box attempt) or we fail.
throwanem 10y ago
> Can you make communications spam-resistant? Can you make an unhackable internet service? Maybe. Can you make a human that can't be suborned by a superhuman evil AI?

by lacker 10y ago

jimrandomh 10y ago

For the most part these aren't aimed at people making bad AGIs deliberately, but rather, at well-intentioned developers launching AGIs with serious bugs. Those developers will want to include safety mechanisms, and will, hopefully, be the first to make AGIs with major capabilities. We should also be working to secure the channels an AGI might exploit, but most of those are already tied to an economic incentive to invest in security, and are already getting large investments compared to the relatively tiny field of AI safety.

daveguy 10y ago
You are right, except most of these are applicable to narrow AI and don't need to wait for AGI for their application.
lacker 10y ago
These aren't aimed at people making bad AGIs deliberately, but rather, at well-intentioned developers launching AGIs with serious bugs. That is precisely the approach that does not make sense to me. By the time friendly developers can launch AGIs, unfriendly developers will not be far behind. And AI safety seems likely to be an issue far before the development of AGI - a non-general malicious AI that can only hack internet services or trick humans into running arbitrary code via conversation is already quite a serious problem. So to me focusing on "unfriendly developers building narrow AIs" seems more logical than focusing on "friendly developers building AGI".
- Hondor 10y ago
  People can already build robots with guns that run around shooting people, but they usually don't. We still have laws to protect us from that. Nation states have the resources to build armies of gun-shooting robots and they already do! But again, they don't use them to destroy humanity for other reasons, like politics and retaliation and all that. So I don't think we need to worry about someone maliciously making an evil robot. That's already a problem and we already spent thousands of years figuring out systems of society to protect us from those dangers.
  - jdhendrickson 10y ago
    I think without visiting the root of the site many people are afraid these are ground rules for strong AI development as an open source project. If that were the case with Google's backing I would be more than apprehensive. We all know strong AI wouldn't be some sort of robot running around shooting people like a movie, this would be an extinction event worse than a rather large asteroid if it fell into the wrong hands. The first country or corporation to create strong AI capable of self evolution will either be able to immediately take control of the world as we know it, or worse create something capable of destroying humanity as we know it. That's not what's going on at all for anyone else that at first glance though that (I'll admit I am guilty of thinking that after glancing at the article as well). Goal 1: Measure our progress Goal 2: Build a household robot Goal 3: Build an agent with useful natural language understanding Goal 4: Solve a wide variety of games using a single agent That's all they are trying to accomplish with this (so far anyway). None of which requires strong AI. TLDR they are formulating some laws of robotics that are a bit more granular for dumb AI which are incapable of self improvement and very task oriented.
    - Retric 10y ago
      You are thinking in narrative terms about AI. Crazy <-> Rational is a far more likely issue with early AI than Good <-> Evil. The problem is you can't optimize for general intelligence only solutions to given problems. Let's say you have two twins one of which is smarter than the other. If you ask about future predictions then how do you know the correct answer before hand. In other words the 99% of paperclip optimizers are going to start making virtual paperclips not paving over the universe with actual paperclips. Hacking your reward function is easer than solving hard problems. PS: Don't do drugs :0

21 10y ago

This paper seems more concerned with near-future and non-malicious AI safety - ie: your self driving car not running off a cliff or your rumba not spewing it's dust bin all over so that it has new work to do. The stuff you talk about is farther in the future, and a much tougher problem.

ikeboy 10y ago

>All else being equal, not many people would prefer to destroy the world. Even faceless corporations, meddling governments, reckless scientists, and other agents of doom require a world in which to achieve their goals of profit, order, tenure, or other villainies. If our extinction proceeds slowly enough to allow a moment of horrified realization, the doers of the deed will likely be quite taken aback on realizing that they have actually destroyed the world. Therefore I suggest that if the Earth is destroyed, it will probably be by mistake. https://intelligence.org/files/CognitiveBiases.pdf https://intelligence.org/files/CognitiveBiases.pdf

lacker 10y ago
I agree. But, so far we have come closest to destroying the world when nation states are stockpiling weapons of war, threatening mutually assured destruction, with their arsenals kept on a hair trigger. To me, that seems likely to keep being the main danger scenario in the future. It would still be a "mistake", but not the "oops what does this button do" sort of mistake, but rather the "I could have sworn they fired first" sort of mistake. That is why I think the main goal of AI safety should be how to defend against intentionally malicious AI. We should be thinking about drone swarms and hacker-AIs rather than paper clips.
- Retric 10y ago
  One nation already went nuclear > non nuclear demonstrating a level of basic competence.

arcanus 10y ago

Excellent post, I rather agree. > As long as AI is an open technology there will always be some criminals who just want to see the world burn. Thankfully we have yet to see terror attacks with nuclear weapons, but the lower barriers of entry for potentially catastrophic AIs undoubtedly is alarming. I often wonder if analog solutions will not be critical. To continue with your example, a nuke that must be armed with a physical lever would be a rather great hindrance to any AI. Internet communications, etc. will be more tricky, due to the high frequency activity, but the point of having meatspace 'firewalls' on mission critical activities is a nice short term kludge.

ccvannorman 10y ago
one of the most effective and scariest attack vectors for AI would be convincing or coercing humans to do its bidding (e.g. "pull the lever or i'll switch off your father's life support")
- deftnerd 10y ago
  It might be easier than that. Data Broker companies are the ones that run those stupid "Which LOTR character are you" or "What color are you" quizzes that are popular in some social media circles. They do it to slowly build psychological trait models of the people taking the quiz. This allows them to sell that information to marketing companies. Access to that kind of data would help an AI determine the people that are more susceptible to manipulation. Add in records on health care, as you mentioned, and information on debts and you have data that can help an AI gather as many human minions as it needs.
  - pixl97 10y ago
    Greedy people cause all kinds of problems now. I don't know why people aren't concerned that a greedy AI could be even worse.
- kbaker 10y ago
  Great recent story following this plot line: http://compellingsciencefiction.com/stories/crinkles.html http://compellingsciencefiction.com/stories/crinkles.html

Aelinsaar 10y ago

It probably won't require maniacs out to destroy humanity, just a typically careless black market.

pizza 10y ago

"Defenders think in lists, attackers think in graphs" redux

simonh 10y ago

We don't have to choose between making inherently safe AIs and creating and environment safe from hostile AIs. We should do both. Apart from anything else, we already have a planet full of intelligent agents, many of which are highly hostile, so increasing our general level of security should already be a high priority.

ajuc 10y ago

> It just feels like inventing a way to build a nuclear weapon that can't actually explode [accidentally], and then hoping the problem of nuclear war is solved. That's how cold war remained cold.

xyience 10y ago

Can you make an unhackable person? If people can get around your safeguards, even only people with authority rather than in general, the AGI can too. Trying to keep a potentially malicious (actively or passively so, I mean only bad for humans) AGI in a box cannot work, we either get the internal parts right so we can be very confident it's not malicious to begin with (and so no need for a box attempt) or we fail.

throwanem 10y ago

> Can you make communications spam-resistant? Can you make an unhackable internet service? Maybe. Can you make a human that can't be suborned by a superhuman evil AI?