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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

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.
RangerScience 4y ago
Um, actually! Asimov's theorized robots ("positronic brains") used potential-based computing (interestingly, AFAIK they predate digital computers; there's actually a few scenes in some stories where characters start using computers as New Shiny Thing) - so I'd actually argue that the original Three Laws are specifically for heuristic-based computing. The three laws aren't really "strict", nor are they what we'd commonly consider "laws". An Asimovian robot (approximately, and IMO) doesn't think of things to do, and then discard the ones that don't match the laws; the three laws are the direct creative impetus for generating possible actions, each action "coming with" some % value in each law, and if the sum passes some threshold, the robot "decides" to do the action. Basically every story in the "I, Robot" anthology is a story of debugging this system... which is essentially a heuristics system. One of the clearer one is the rover orbiting a hazard that it's supposed to investigate at a radius where the balance of the 2nd and 3rd laws even out. Armchair AIist that I am... if I were to try to implement the Three Laws with current AI systems, I'd probably stick one system on at the "front" to add/modify/create/interpret prompts in a way that adds the three laws, and then stick one at the end to measure (and then filter on) how well the output adheres to them.
- powersnail 4y ago
  I'm more thinking of the much more basic kind of bugs. AI might fail to follow rule 1, simply by misidentifying a human as something else, or misidentifying what is harmful. Like how a Tesla can crash into an obstacle, because it failed to recognize that there is an obstacle. This isn't a criticism of Asimov, of course. I think we simply haven't solved many basic problems that he probably regarded as "surely by the time robots need rules to follow, these aren't going to be issues". > I'd probably stick one system on at the "front" to add/modify/create/interpret prompts in a way that adds the three laws, and then stick one at the end to measure (and then filter on) how well the output adheres to them. I bet that we are going to get some sort of end-to-end simulated robot QA system. Imagine pushing your code to Github, and in a few minutes, Travis CI emails you, "28/1000 tests failed. 32 cases of bodily harm against human were reported." What a world to live in!
  - RangerScience 4y ago

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.

RangerScience 4y ago

Um, actually! Asimov's theorized robots ("positronic brains") used potential-based computing (interestingly, AFAIK they predate digital computers; there's actually a few scenes in some stories where characters start using computers as New Shiny Thing) - so I'd actually argue that the original Three Laws are specifically for heuristic-based computing. The three laws aren't really "strict", nor are they what we'd commonly consider "laws". An Asimovian robot (approximately, and IMO) doesn't think of things to do, and then discard the ones that don't match the laws; the three laws are the direct creative impetus for generating possible actions, each action "coming with" some % value in each law, and if the sum passes some threshold, the robot "decides" to do the action. Basically every story in the "I, Robot" anthology is a story of debugging this system... which is essentially a heuristics system. One of the clearer one is the rover orbiting a hazard that it's supposed to investigate at a radius where the balance of the 2nd and 3rd laws even out. Armchair AIist that I am... if I were to try to implement the Three Laws with current AI systems, I'd probably stick one system on at the "front" to add/modify/create/interpret prompts in a way that adds the three laws, and then stick one at the end to measure (and then filter on) how well the output adheres to them.

powersnail 4y ago
I'm more thinking of the much more basic kind of bugs. AI might fail to follow rule 1, simply by misidentifying a human as something else, or misidentifying what is harmful. Like how a Tesla can crash into an obstacle, because it failed to recognize that there is an obstacle. This isn't a criticism of Asimov, of course. I think we simply haven't solved many basic problems that he probably regarded as "surely by the time robots need rules to follow, these aren't going to be issues". > I'd probably stick one system on at the "front" to add/modify/create/interpret prompts in a way that adds the three laws, and then stick one at the end to measure (and then filter on) how well the output adheres to them. I bet that we are going to get some sort of end-to-end simulated robot QA system. Imagine pushing your code to Github, and in a few minutes, Travis CI emails you, "28/1000 tests failed. 32 cases of bodily harm against human were reported." What a world to live in!
- RangerScience 4y ago