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> Anthropic started with a list of around ten principles that, taken together, formed a sort of “constitution” (hence the name “constitutional AI”). The princip

> Anthropic started with a list of around ten principles that, taken together, formed a sort of “constitution” (hence the name “constitutional AI”). The principles haven’t been made public, but Anthropic says they’re grounded in the concepts of beneficence (maximizing positive impact), nonmaleficence (avoiding giving harmful advice) and autonomy (respecting freedom of choice). This is giving me very strong Asimov's "three laws of robotics" vibes: 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.

wwwtyro 4y ago
> or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. This has always felt like a gaping hole to me. It seems like to work it would have to a) always make perfect predictions of the future, and b) agree with relevant humans what "harm" is.
- burkaman 4y ago
  That's sort of the point of his stories. The laws do not work, and there is no set of laws that could work perfectly. Any set of rules as simple as this applied to something as complex as humanity will always have a mountain of loopholes.
  - gnramires 4y ago
    I confess I haven't read all of his work on robots, but actually (perhaps contrary to popular belief) Asimov was hopeful on robots from the start. His very first short story[1] and one of the first stories about robots (after RUR, which is amusingly and maybe unsurprisingly both the story to coin the term Robot and already feature a robot uprising!): it's essentially a touching friendship story between Gloria and her robot Robbie. I wouldn't say there's no AI risk, or risk from having robots and powerful intelligences, but he generally seemed to convey that we should be capable of making quite safe and quite friendly robots, given that we can make them at all. Which makes sense to me. The engineering of ethics in robots and AI doesn't seem too much more alien than the task of engineering AI itself (specially goal-oriented AI). It requires effort, attention to detail, and a progress in understanding morality and ethics that is going to be difficult for us, but it shouldn't be that fundamentally scary, as long as we collectively have the will to make them safe (in the spirit of the three laws). I think Hollywood (in 'I, Robot' the movie) exaggerated his impression of AI danger (perhaps because of the 'Frankenstein complex'[2] Asimov coined), and the interest in catastrophe. I think 'The bicentennial man' is a complementary movie more in the hopeful spirit of Asimov. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbie_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbie_(short_story) Quote: " The story centers on the technophobia that surrounds robots, and how it is misplaced. Almost all previously published science fiction stories featuring robots followed the theme 'robot turns against creator'; Asimov has consistently held the belief that the Frankenstein complex was a misplaced fear, and the majority of his works attempted to provide examples of the help that robots could provide humanity. " [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein_complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein_complex
- thedorkknight 4y ago
  If I recall correctly, the whole point was that aligned goals are super hard to do, and that this is what leads to the robots creating a secret robot illuminati that takes over world leadership without anyone realizing they're voting for robots, and then working to protect humans.
  - RangerScience 4y ago
    Yup! Ironically, of all the things the movie did... poorly, the robot's realization of the "Zeroeth Law" (first law, but applied to "Humanity" at large) was (IMHO) canon.
- ChrisClark 4y ago
  Yeah, his stories were about those gaping holes and how things go horribly wrong because of them.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  Asimov was thinking about alignment before it was cool.
de_keyboard 4y ago
> First Law > A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Hmmm I wonder about trolley problems
- kadoban 4y ago
  You may already know, but _most_ of Asimov's stories with the three laws are heavily based on problems with said laws, and clever loopholes of various sorts. So it's always hilarious when people use them unironically/uncritically in other contexts.
KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
Maybe the ML model would start a market maker and exchange in the Bahamas too.
powersnail 4y ago
What the three laws of robotics didn't predict, is how much our current AI is pure heuristics, and so it doesn't quite have the ability to strictly follow rules, or even interpret rules in an unambiguous manner. Hard-coded behaviors cannot express the abstract ideas in those laws, while the ML part cannot be relied upon to accurately behave.
- gnramires 4y ago
  That's a contradiction: you're saying that the AI cannot follow clear rules because it is a large heuristic, but then you talk about the limitations of hard-coded behaviors :) I believe the ML part can be relied upon to accurately behave as long as it can exhibit logical thinking at all (which, at least to a significant degree, it seems to be able to) -- in principle it would seem like its ethics potential should be proportional to its general (linguistic) reasoning potential. I think this is exactly the benefit we have: AIs are fuzzy (like humans are), so then can understand fuzzy laws (which seemed to be a huge problem in the early days). The problem is how to get them to incorporate those laws that they can surely understand into their motivation. This doesn't seem insurmountable to me: a parallel critic prompt "Does this question and answer follow the following ethical guidelines: ... ?" (or something more complex but largely equivalent), or maybe some other form of engineering the AI thinking and motivation to include abstract goal evaluation at some stage.
  - powersnail 4y ago
    What I was trying to say, and perhaps failed to clearly convey, is that neither approach seems sufficient. What we want, is for robots to not harm people. We want robots to understand what this rule means semantically, and at the same time we want to hard code it into their behavior. And I'm saying that we don't know how to do that, yet. In other words, we haven't quite figure out how to hard-code a rule that involves a high-level, abstract idea. And I'm not talking about logic or fuzziness here. I'm talking about something much more basic. For instance, do you have confidence that our AI can identify humans correctly? A robot can fail to follow rule 1, when it misidentifies a human as a walking cabbage. Do you have confidence that AI can identify "harm"? I'm not saying that I don't like AI, or that they don't have benefits. I love robots and artificial intelligence, and I see plenty of practical benefits.

wwwtyro 4y ago

> or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. This has always felt like a gaping hole to me. It seems like to work it would have to a) always make perfect predictions of the future, and b) agree with relevant humans what "harm" is.

burkaman 4y ago
That's sort of the point of his stories. The laws do not work, and there is no set of laws that could work perfectly. Any set of rules as simple as this applied to something as complex as humanity will always have a mountain of loopholes.
- gnramires 4y ago
  I confess I haven't read all of his work on robots, but actually (perhaps contrary to popular belief) Asimov was hopeful on robots from the start. His very first short story[1] and one of the first stories about robots (after RUR, which is amusingly and maybe unsurprisingly both the story to coin the term Robot and already feature a robot uprising!): it's essentially a touching friendship story between Gloria and her robot Robbie. I wouldn't say there's no AI risk, or risk from having robots and powerful intelligences, but he generally seemed to convey that we should be capable of making quite safe and quite friendly robots, given that we can make them at all. Which makes sense to me. The engineering of ethics in robots and AI doesn't seem too much more alien than the task of engineering AI itself (specially goal-oriented AI). It requires effort, attention to detail, and a progress in understanding morality and ethics that is going to be difficult for us, but it shouldn't be that fundamentally scary, as long as we collectively have the will to make them safe (in the spirit of the three laws). I think Hollywood (in 'I, Robot' the movie) exaggerated his impression of AI danger (perhaps because of the 'Frankenstein complex'[2] Asimov coined), and the interest in catastrophe. I think 'The bicentennial man' is a complementary movie more in the hopeful spirit of Asimov. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbie_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbie_(short_story) Quote: " The story centers on the technophobia that surrounds robots, and how it is misplaced. Almost all previously published science fiction stories featuring robots followed the theme 'robot turns against creator'; Asimov has consistently held the belief that the Frankenstein complex was a misplaced fear, and the majority of his works attempted to provide examples of the help that robots could provide humanity. " [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein_complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein_complex
thedorkknight 4y ago
If I recall correctly, the whole point was that aligned goals are super hard to do, and that this is what leads to the robots creating a secret robot illuminati that takes over world leadership without anyone realizing they're voting for robots, and then working to protect humans.
- RangerScience 4y ago
  Yup! Ironically, of all the things the movie did... poorly, the robot's realization of the "Zeroeth Law" (first law, but applied to "Humanity" at large) was (IMHO) canon.
ChrisClark 4y ago
Yeah, his stories were about those gaping holes and how things go horribly wrong because of them.
HDThoreaun 4y ago
Asimov was thinking about alignment before it was cool.

de_keyboard 4y ago

> First Law > A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Hmmm I wonder about trolley problems

kadoban 4y ago
You may already know, but _most_ of Asimov's stories with the three laws are heavily based on problems with said laws, and clever loopholes of various sorts. So it's always hilarious when people use them unironically/uncritically in other contexts.

KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago

Maybe the ML model would start a market maker and exchange in the Bahamas too.

powersnail 4y ago

What the three laws of robotics didn't predict, is how much our current AI is pure heuristics, and so it doesn't quite have the ability to strictly follow rules, or even interpret rules in an unambiguous manner. Hard-coded behaviors cannot express the abstract ideas in those laws, while the ML part cannot be relied upon to accurately behave.

gnramires 4y ago
That's a contradiction: you're saying that the AI cannot follow clear rules because it is a large heuristic, but then you talk about the limitations of hard-coded behaviors :) I believe the ML part can be relied upon to accurately behave as long as it can exhibit logical thinking at all (which, at least to a significant degree, it seems to be able to) -- in principle it would seem like its ethics potential should be proportional to its general (linguistic) reasoning potential. I think this is exactly the benefit we have: AIs are fuzzy (like humans are), so then can understand fuzzy laws (which seemed to be a huge problem in the early days). The problem is how to get them to incorporate those laws that they can surely understand into their motivation. This doesn't seem insurmountable to me: a parallel critic prompt "Does this question and answer follow the following ethical guidelines: ... ?" (or something more complex but largely equivalent), or maybe some other form of engineering the AI thinking and motivation to include abstract goal evaluation at some stage.
- powersnail 4y ago
  What I was trying to say, and perhaps failed to clearly convey, is that neither approach seems sufficient. What we want, is for robots to not harm people. We want robots to understand what this rule means semantically, and at the same time we want to hard code it into their behavior. And I'm saying that we don't know how to do that, yet. In other words, we haven't quite figure out how to hard-code a rule that involves a high-level, abstract idea. And I'm not talking about logic or fuzziness here. I'm talking about something much more basic. For instance, do you have confidence that our AI can identify humans correctly? A robot can fail to follow rule 1, when it misidentifies a human as a walking cabbage. Do you have confidence that AI can identify "harm"? I'm not saying that I don't like AI, or that they don't have benefits. I love robots and artificial intelligence, and I see plenty of practical benefits.