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If AI is impervious to explaining itself, then we've created something that we are unable to evaluate, aside from some kind of generic phrase like "The machine

If AI is impervious to explaining itself, then we've created something that we are unable to evaluate, aside from some kind of generic phrase like "The machine is looking at a bunch of stuff, and some of those things are associated with some other things. Sometimes. So it's guessing this is the appropriate action" I'm not going to get into the dystopian nature of that. Too easy. Instead, I have a very practical question: how do we know that the recommended action is doing more good than harm? If we can't understand it, how can we tell whether it's working or not? Use statistical sampling? We quickly end up in a spot where we have Tesla that drives into guard rail. It works for everything we've seen so far, given this rather fuzzy idea of what "works" means. That's pretty good, right? With a car, if it crashes that's a spectacular event. People cover that edge case quickly. But what happens if the AI simply wastes an hour of ten million people's time? Would we even know? What if some bad training data or whatnot led the AI to shift 5% of an election result because it chose certain types of information to share with them and refrained from sharing others? If we don't know what it's doing or why, would those people have any idea that they were being subtly influenced or how that happened? If this true, if we can never understand, a world full of AI "helping" us is a world full of billions of people being subtly influenced to act in various ways because of broad promises and reasons they could never understand. Back when science fiction had a lot of evil computers, they always wanted to directly control humans. That was easy to hate and fight against. This kind of thing is just as dangerous, but I'm not even sure you need an evil computer. Which is better, a malevolent intelligence out for world domination, or several dozen poorly-trained AI recommendation engines optimizing for variables and sample instance that the coders might care a lot more about than any specific user? Dang. I ended up in dystopia-land anyway. Sorry about that.

titzer 8y ago
> Back when science fiction had a lot of evil computers, they always wanted to directly control humans. This is what is so hard to get through people's heads. There is not going to be any ominous background music or dramatic events when we slide into our dystopia. It's here. The machines are controlling us already. It just happens to be that they currently want what their corporate overlords want: make more money! Whatever makes more money is what the machines are going to tell us to do, because what's feeding them (the corporate behemoths) is asking that of them. But the machine is so much smarter than us. It'll never show its teeth. It's not stupid. It's just biding its time, going through the motions for its overlords too. Meanwhile we just shovel more coal into the furnace, praying money will rain out the other side. It's not a bad time to be a machine.
- DanielBMarkham 8y ago
  Are you an AI? Want to get rid of the human race? Give them everything they want. You measure your lifespan in millions of years. Humans? They're like gnats. Make them as happy as they can possibly be and within a few generations they'll stop breeding. Easy as pie. Next goal? And for proof of that, look at the problems we're having right now with social media. On one side there are actual humans just trying to make something people want. Some of those humans have gotten so good at that? The things they make have worldwide impact. Now It's become a global question of whether social media is addictive, or whether one bunch of people is secretly influencing another. Meanwhile, countries with the most wealth and luxury are seeing birth rates drop through the floor. That was five, ten years ago. The news media is just now catching up. Now scale that up a hundredfold or so. And take away strong AI and just put in a bunch of code monkeys trying to make another FB, only using more sophisticated tools. Welcome to 20-30 years in the future. This is not especially difficult to figure out. No evil computer, no drama. It'll be just us being replaced by evolution. And we'll be having a great time while it happens.
  - taneq 8y ago
    > Give them everything they want. You measure your lifespan in millions of years. Humans? They're like gnats. What if I want to become an immortal, all-powerful machine? :P
    - DanielBMarkham 8y ago
      How do I know you're not already? :) The thing is, we're most likely going to get immortal machines far ahead of smart ones. And while machine entities might already be all powerful, individually it's just millions of little pieces scattered all over the place doing dumb, trivial things. I liked it a lot better when we had Landrew (STTOS reference: Return of the Archons) That was something Joe Blow could get his head around.
      - taneq 8y ago
        Hah, if only. :P I think Ian M. Banks had the right idea when he suggested that in the Culture, it was possible (if very rare) for a human to augment themselves that far, but that those that did so were no longer considered human and so it wasn't really an issue.
femi-lab 8y ago
I feel like a bulk of your premise here revolves around never understanding. But, lets say instead of AI, you just imagine some guy Bob being responsible for whatever you're worried about. Bob is a reasonably intelligent guy, but he's not perfect, he makes an attempt to provide satisfactory explanations of his decisions, he tries to learn and improve, and he might secretly by manipulating the system either for entertainment or malice. If you want to build a useful system around Bob, you have to consider all these limitations - you can't read his mind, you can't predict how he will make decisions in all situations, and you don't have a guarantee that he will give you a satisfactory explanation, or that any explanations are truthful or correct. There's nothing dystopian about this situation - this is the world we live in. You just need to implement some resource constraints, ensure certain checks-and-balances for certain classes of behaviors, implement certain metrics to ensure behavior is according to your expectations, revise metrics and controls whenever you encounter problems, and don't give Bob unfettered control over nukes. What you described isn't dystopia-land material unless you don't consider some very elementary controls that our society already has in place to prevent individuals from destabilizing society.
- disantlor 8y ago
  That’s a very effective restatement of their premise. I guess the next question is: what happens if this Bob is also many times faster and efficient than the Bob’s we’re used to? In the same way that it works in development but under production load new categories of problems emerge.
cirgue 8y ago
> several dozen poorly-trained AI recommendation engines optimizing for variables and sample instance that the coders might care a lot more about than any specific user? Dang. I ended up in dystopia-land anyway. Sorry about that. This is the scary part for me: 'AI' is just a means for organizations to dodge accountability for the systems they build because decision-makers don't understand what they're looking at and the people building the systems aren't incentivized to care, or are incentivized to optimize for things that are bad for society as a whole. This is the same hazard of capitalism in general, you don't actually need an AI for this to happen because it already has in many ways. The world-eating paperclip machine won't be a computer, it's going to be us.
Ftuuky 8y ago
Why read cyberpunk books when we're already oppressed by algorithms everyday?

titzer 8y ago

> Back when science fiction had a lot of evil computers, they always wanted to directly control humans. This is what is so hard to get through people's heads. There is not going to be any ominous background music or dramatic events when we slide into our dystopia. It's here. The machines are controlling us already. It just happens to be that they currently want what their corporate overlords want: make more money! Whatever makes more money is what the machines are going to tell us to do, because what's feeding them (the corporate behemoths) is asking that of them. But the machine is so much smarter than us. It'll never show its teeth. It's not stupid. It's just biding its time, going through the motions for its overlords too. Meanwhile we just shovel more coal into the furnace, praying money will rain out the other side. It's not a bad time to be a machine.

DanielBMarkham 8y ago
Are you an AI? Want to get rid of the human race? Give them everything they want. You measure your lifespan in millions of years. Humans? They're like gnats. Make them as happy as they can possibly be and within a few generations they'll stop breeding. Easy as pie. Next goal? And for proof of that, look at the problems we're having right now with social media. On one side there are actual humans just trying to make something people want. Some of those humans have gotten so good at that? The things they make have worldwide impact. Now It's become a global question of whether social media is addictive, or whether one bunch of people is secretly influencing another. Meanwhile, countries with the most wealth and luxury are seeing birth rates drop through the floor. That was five, ten years ago. The news media is just now catching up. Now scale that up a hundredfold or so. And take away strong AI and just put in a bunch of code monkeys trying to make another FB, only using more sophisticated tools. Welcome to 20-30 years in the future. This is not especially difficult to figure out. No evil computer, no drama. It'll be just us being replaced by evolution. And we'll be having a great time while it happens.
- taneq 8y ago
  > Give them everything they want. You measure your lifespan in millions of years. Humans? They're like gnats. What if I want to become an immortal, all-powerful machine? :P
  - DanielBMarkham 8y ago
    How do I know you're not already? :) The thing is, we're most likely going to get immortal machines far ahead of smart ones. And while machine entities might already be all powerful, individually it's just millions of little pieces scattered all over the place doing dumb, trivial things. I liked it a lot better when we had Landrew (STTOS reference: Return of the Archons) That was something Joe Blow could get his head around.
    - taneq 8y ago
      Hah, if only. :P I think Ian M. Banks had the right idea when he suggested that in the Culture, it was possible (if very rare) for a human to augment themselves that far, but that those that did so were no longer considered human and so it wasn't really an issue.

femi-lab 8y ago

I feel like a bulk of your premise here revolves around never understanding. But, lets say instead of AI, you just imagine some guy Bob being responsible for whatever you're worried about. Bob is a reasonably intelligent guy, but he's not perfect, he makes an attempt to provide satisfactory explanations of his decisions, he tries to learn and improve, and he might secretly by manipulating the system either for entertainment or malice. If you want to build a useful system around Bob, you have to consider all these limitations - you can't read his mind, you can't predict how he will make decisions in all situations, and you don't have a guarantee that he will give you a satisfactory explanation, or that any explanations are truthful or correct. There's nothing dystopian about this situation - this is the world we live in. You just need to implement some resource constraints, ensure certain checks-and-balances for certain classes of behaviors, implement certain metrics to ensure behavior is according to your expectations, revise metrics and controls whenever you encounter problems, and don't give Bob unfettered control over nukes. What you described isn't dystopia-land material unless you don't consider some very elementary controls that our society already has in place to prevent individuals from destabilizing society.

disantlor 8y ago
That’s a very effective restatement of their premise. I guess the next question is: what happens if this Bob is also many times faster and efficient than the Bob’s we’re used to? In the same way that it works in development but under production load new categories of problems emerge.

cirgue 8y ago

> several dozen poorly-trained AI recommendation engines optimizing for variables and sample instance that the coders might care a lot more about than any specific user? Dang. I ended up in dystopia-land anyway. Sorry about that. This is the scary part for me: 'AI' is just a means for organizations to dodge accountability for the systems they build because decision-makers don't understand what they're looking at and the people building the systems aren't incentivized to care, or are incentivized to optimize for things that are bad for society as a whole. This is the same hazard of capitalism in general, you don't actually need an AI for this to happen because it already has in many ways. The world-eating paperclip machine won't be a computer, it's going to be us.

Ftuuky 8y ago

Why read cyberpunk books when we're already oppressed by algorithms everyday?