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Um, actually! Asimov's theorized robots ("positronic brains") used potential-based computing (interestingly, AFAIK they predate digital computers; there's actu

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
  > CI That'd be pretty cool, actually! A little... maybe ironic? How many stories are there about "they didn't stop to ask if they should, only if they could", and then... outsourcing that check to an AI system. Like I love it, but also, sus. > bugs Yep! I think positronic brains would notionally use a heuristics system ("human detector says 89%"), and AFAIK so do our AI systems. That said, your larger point still stands: what happens when such a system either fails, or is mis-calibrated, or is calibrated in a sus way? (such as facial recognition, at first, not working on BIPOC faces... because the devs used themselves as the test subjects and weren't BIPOC) I'm almost certain there's at least one story by Asimov on this issue; I know I've read other SciFi on this issue, although I think it's much more common to have the AIs act "better than the humans" rather than vice versa. Something like: "The rules you programmed in say Group X are humans even tho you don't treat them that way". Usually (I think?) when it's "Group X aren't humans by the programmed rules" it's apocalyptical because no-one / almost no-one fits. I think you could probably write a cute short story about robots anthropomorphizing a lot of things in order to catch all the odd human edge-cases ("not all humans have a face").

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
> CI That'd be pretty cool, actually! A little... maybe ironic? How many stories are there about "they didn't stop to ask if they should, only if they could", and then... outsourcing that check to an AI system. Like I love it, but also, sus. > bugs Yep! I think positronic brains would notionally use a heuristics system ("human detector says 89%"), and AFAIK so do our AI systems. That said, your larger point still stands: what happens when such a system either fails, or is mis-calibrated, or is calibrated in a sus way? (such as facial recognition, at first, not working on BIPOC faces... because the devs used themselves as the test subjects and weren't BIPOC) I'm almost certain there's at least one story by Asimov on this issue; I know I've read other SciFi on this issue, although I think it's much more common to have the AIs act "better than the humans" rather than vice versa. Something like: "The rules you programmed in say Group X are humans even tho you don't treat them that way". Usually (I think?) when it's "Group X aren't humans by the programmed rules" it's apocalyptical because no-one / almost no-one fits. I think you could probably write a cute short story about robots anthropomorphizing a lot of things in order to catch all the odd human edge-cases ("not all humans have a face").