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Might Asimov’s laws of robotics suddenly become relevant? It’s surprising to me how AI seen in sci-fi that looked completely out of touch with how computers wo

Might Asimov’s laws of robotics suddenly become relevant? It’s surprising to me how AI seen in sci-fi that looked completely out of touch with how computers work has started to seep into our reality.

ElevenLathe 3y ago
I had the same thought reading this. If that's the case we have to be super careful to remember to include the Zeroth Law!
NumberWangMan 3y ago
Still potentially way easier said than done. Robert Miles has a good video on this. One issue is that to define something like "harm", you need to solve a whole bunch of philosophy problems. And people disagree -- does corporal punishment harm children? People used to think that failing to hit your kids was harmful, because they'd grow up and be lazy and end up wasting their lives! Another issue is that a lot of stuff breaks down as the robots get more intelligent, and start coming up with solutions humans aren't smart enough to consider. Is scanning human brains and digitizing all of us and getting rid of our human bodies harmful? What if it means we get to live forever and are protected by the AI, who is more competent than us? What if we don't want to -- is it good to "protect" us against our will? If not, what about saving someone who is suicidal? (back to the philosophy problem!) Also, note that the three laws aren't really meaningful -- if lower laws always must be prioritized, you can't ever really do anything, because your action might lead to a human coming to harm. So they have to be interpreted with some tradeoff. But that opens the possibility for a robot to take actions to protect its own existence at the cost of human lives. If the tradeoff is 1000 AI lives to 1 human life, what happens when there are 1000 times as many AIs as humans, and they're worried that we'll do something that ends up killing them all? So yeah, implementing anything like the 3 laws still requires completely solving alignment, basically.
rahidz 3y ago
Semi off-topic, I just asked ChatGPT "What are Asimov's three laws of robotics?" and it just...froze after the first few words. And refused to continue. Never seen that kind of behavior from it before.

ElevenLathe 3y ago

I had the same thought reading this. If that's the case we have to be super careful to remember to include the Zeroth Law!

NumberWangMan 3y ago

Still potentially way easier said than done. Robert Miles has a good video on this. One issue is that to define something like "harm", you need to solve a whole bunch of philosophy problems. And people disagree -- does corporal punishment harm children? People used to think that failing to hit your kids was harmful, because they'd grow up and be lazy and end up wasting their lives! Another issue is that a lot of stuff breaks down as the robots get more intelligent, and start coming up with solutions humans aren't smart enough to consider. Is scanning human brains and digitizing all of us and getting rid of our human bodies harmful? What if it means we get to live forever and are protected by the AI, who is more competent than us? What if we don't want to -- is it good to "protect" us against our will? If not, what about saving someone who is suicidal? (back to the philosophy problem!) Also, note that the three laws aren't really meaningful -- if lower laws always must be prioritized, you can't ever really do anything, because your action might lead to a human coming to harm. So they have to be interpreted with some tradeoff. But that opens the possibility for a robot to take actions to protect its own existence at the cost of human lives. If the tradeoff is 1000 AI lives to 1 human life, what happens when there are 1000 times as many AIs as humans, and they're worried that we'll do something that ends up killing them all? So yeah, implementing anything like the 3 laws still requires completely solving alignment, basically.

rahidz 3y ago

Semi off-topic, I just asked ChatGPT "What are Asimov's three laws of robotics?" and it just...froze after the first few words. And refused to continue. Never seen that kind of behavior from it before.