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Is anyone working on implementing the three laws of robotics? (Or have we come up with a better model?) Edit: Being completely serious here. My reasoning was t

by andai 2y ago

Is anyone working on implementing the three laws of robotics? (Or have we come up with a better model?) Edit: Being completely serious here. My reasoning was that if the robot had a comprehensive model of the world and of how harm can come to humans, and was designed to avoid that, then jailbreaks that cause dangerous behavior could be rejected at that level. (i.e. human safety would take priority over obeying instructions... which is literally the Three Laws.)

ilaksh 2y ago
It's not really as simple as you think. There is a massive amount of research out there along those lines. Search for "Bostrom Superintelligence" "AGI Control Problem", "MIRI AGI Safety", "David Shapiro Three Laws of Robotis" are a few things that come to mind that will give you a start.
- freeone3000 2y ago
  Those assume robots that are smarter than us. What if we assume, as we likely have now, robots that are dumber? Address the actual current issues with code-as-law, expectations-versus-rules, and dealing with conflict of laws in an actual structured fashion without relying on vibes (like people) or a bunch of rng (like an llm)?
  - ilaksh 2y ago
    What system do you propose that implements the code-as-law? What type of architecture does it have?
    - freeone3000 2y ago
      I don’t know! I’m currently trying a strong bayesian prior for the RL action planner, which has good tradeoffs with enforcement but poor tradeoffs with legibility and ingestion. Aside from Spain, there’s not a lot of computer-legible law to transpile; llm support always needs to be checked and some of the larger submodels reach the limits of the explainability framework I’m using. There’s also still the HF step that needs to be incorporated, which is expensive! But the alternative is Waymo, which keeps the law perfectly even when “everybody knows” it needs to be broken sometimes for traffic(society) to function acceptably. So the above strong prior needs to be coordinated with HF and the appropriate penalties assigned… In other words. It’s a mess! But assumptions of “AGI” don’t really help anyone.
- andai 2y ago
  Sounds like it would take animal intelligence (current AIs may be superhuman in many respects, but they are sub-animal in most!), coupled with mirror neurons. i.e. understand what hurts me, then extend that to others (presumably with a value multiplier for humans).
currymj 2y ago
your sentence is correct but we have no idea what a comprehensive model of the world looks like, whether or not these systems have one or not, what harm even means, and even if we resolved these theoretical issues, it’s not clear how to reliably train away harmful behavior. all of this is a subject of active research though.
- andai 2y ago
  By "comprehensive model of the world" I don't mean Common Crawl, but an understanding of how physical reality works, for example "if you push a long thin object into a human, the human is perforated", and by "harm" I mean "when humans are perforated, the important stuff comes out." (And I mean this knowledge as "physics", not language, though presumably the two integrate somehow.) I don't know how close we are to that, but it seems like a good start!
devjab 2y ago
I’m curious as to how you would implement anything like Asimovs laws. This is because the laws would require AI to have some form of understanding. Every current AI model we have is a probability machine, bluntly put, so they never “know” anything. Yes, yes, it’s a little more complicated than that but you get the point. I think the various safeguards companies put on their models, are, their attempt at the three laws. The concept is sort of silly though. You have a lot of western LLMs and AIs which have safeguards build on western culture. I know some people could argue about censorship and so on all day, but if you’re not too invested in red vs blue, I think you’ll agree that current LLMs are mostly “safe” for us. Nobody forces you to put safeguards on your AI though and once models become less energy consuming (if they do), then you’re going to see an jihadGPT, because why wouldn’t you? I don’t mean to single out Islam, insure we’re going to see all sorts of horrible models in the next decade. Models which will be all to happy helping you build bombs, 3D print weapons and so on. So even if we had thinking AI, and we were capable of building in actual safeguards, how would you enforce it on a global scale? The only thing preventing these things is the computation required to run the larger models.
- LeonardoTolstoy 2y ago
  To actually implement it we would have to completely understand how the underlying model works and how to manually manipulate the structure. It might be impossible with LLMs. Not to take Asimov as gospel truth, he was just writing stories afterall not writing a treatise about how robots have to work, but in his stories at least the three laws were encoding explicitly in the structure of the robot's brain. They couldn't be circumvented (in most stories). And in those stories it was enforced in the following way: the earth banned robots. In response the three laws were created and it was proved that robots couldn't disobey them. So I guess the first step is to ban LLMs until they can prove they are safe ... Something tells be that ain't happening.
- soco 2y ago
  Or you have an agent system - maker-checker - where the second agent only does check first's output against the three laws. Perfect? No, but as of today much more realistic than building somehow the laws into the LLM.
david-gpu 2y ago
Asimov himself wrote a short story proving how even in the scenario where the three laws are followed, harm to humans can still easily be achieved. I vaguely recall it involved two or three robots who were unaware of what the previous robots had done. First, a person asks one robot to purchase a poison, then asks another to dissolve this powder into a drink, then another serves that drink to the victim. I read the story decades ago, but the very rough idea stands.
- LeonardoTolstoy 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complete_Robot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complete_Robot You might be thinking of Let's Get Together? There is a list there of the few short stories in which the robots act against the three laws. That being said the Robot stories are meant to be a counter to the Robot As Frankenstein's Monster stories that were prolific at the time. In most of the stories robots literally cannot harm humans. It is built into the structure of their positronic brain.
  - crooked-v 2y ago
    I would argue that the overall theme of the stories is that having a "simple" and "common sense" set of rules for behavior doesn't actually work, and that the 'robot' part is ultimately pretty incidental.
hlfshell 2y ago
I've seen this being researched under the term Constitutional AI, including some robotics papers (either SayCan or RT 2? Maybe Code as Policies?) that had such rules (never pick up a knife as it could harm people, for instance) in their prompting.

by andai 2y ago

ilaksh 2y ago

It's not really as simple as you think. There is a massive amount of research out there along those lines. Search for "Bostrom Superintelligence" "AGI Control Problem", "MIRI AGI Safety", "David Shapiro Three Laws of Robotis" are a few things that come to mind that will give you a start.

freeone3000 2y ago
Those assume robots that are smarter than us. What if we assume, as we likely have now, robots that are dumber? Address the actual current issues with code-as-law, expectations-versus-rules, and dealing with conflict of laws in an actual structured fashion without relying on vibes (like people) or a bunch of rng (like an llm)?
- ilaksh 2y ago
  What system do you propose that implements the code-as-law? What type of architecture does it have?
  - freeone3000 2y ago
    I don’t know! I’m currently trying a strong bayesian prior for the RL action planner, which has good tradeoffs with enforcement but poor tradeoffs with legibility and ingestion. Aside from Spain, there’s not a lot of computer-legible law to transpile; llm support always needs to be checked and some of the larger submodels reach the limits of the explainability framework I’m using. There’s also still the HF step that needs to be incorporated, which is expensive! But the alternative is Waymo, which keeps the law perfectly even when “everybody knows” it needs to be broken sometimes for traffic(society) to function acceptably. So the above strong prior needs to be coordinated with HF and the appropriate penalties assigned… In other words. It’s a mess! But assumptions of “AGI” don’t really help anyone.
andai 2y ago
Sounds like it would take animal intelligence (current AIs may be superhuman in many respects, but they are sub-animal in most!), coupled with mirror neurons. i.e. understand what hurts me, then extend that to others (presumably with a value multiplier for humans).

currymj 2y ago

your sentence is correct but we have no idea what a comprehensive model of the world looks like, whether or not these systems have one or not, what harm even means, and even if we resolved these theoretical issues, it’s not clear how to reliably train away harmful behavior. all of this is a subject of active research though.

andai 2y ago
By "comprehensive model of the world" I don't mean Common Crawl, but an understanding of how physical reality works, for example "if you push a long thin object into a human, the human is perforated", and by "harm" I mean "when humans are perforated, the important stuff comes out." (And I mean this knowledge as "physics", not language, though presumably the two integrate somehow.) I don't know how close we are to that, but it seems like a good start!

devjab 2y ago

I’m curious as to how you would implement anything like Asimovs laws. This is because the laws would require AI to have some form of understanding. Every current AI model we have is a probability machine, bluntly put, so they never “know” anything. Yes, yes, it’s a little more complicated than that but you get the point. I think the various safeguards companies put on their models, are, their attempt at the three laws. The concept is sort of silly though. You have a lot of western LLMs and AIs which have safeguards build on western culture. I know some people could argue about censorship and so on all day, but if you’re not too invested in red vs blue, I think you’ll agree that current LLMs are mostly “safe” for us. Nobody forces you to put safeguards on your AI though and once models become less energy consuming (if they do), then you’re going to see an jihadGPT, because why wouldn’t you? I don’t mean to single out Islam, insure we’re going to see all sorts of horrible models in the next decade. Models which will be all to happy helping you build bombs, 3D print weapons and so on. So even if we had thinking AI, and we were capable of building in actual safeguards, how would you enforce it on a global scale? The only thing preventing these things is the computation required to run the larger models.

LeonardoTolstoy 2y ago
To actually implement it we would have to completely understand how the underlying model works and how to manually manipulate the structure. It might be impossible with LLMs. Not to take Asimov as gospel truth, he was just writing stories afterall not writing a treatise about how robots have to work, but in his stories at least the three laws were encoding explicitly in the structure of the robot's brain. They couldn't be circumvented (in most stories). And in those stories it was enforced in the following way: the earth banned robots. In response the three laws were created and it was proved that robots couldn't disobey them. So I guess the first step is to ban LLMs until they can prove they are safe ... Something tells be that ain't happening.
soco 2y ago
Or you have an agent system - maker-checker - where the second agent only does check first's output against the three laws. Perfect? No, but as of today much more realistic than building somehow the laws into the LLM.

david-gpu 2y ago

Asimov himself wrote a short story proving how even in the scenario where the three laws are followed, harm to humans can still easily be achieved. I vaguely recall it involved two or three robots who were unaware of what the previous robots had done. First, a person asks one robot to purchase a poison, then asks another to dissolve this powder into a drink, then another serves that drink to the victim. I read the story decades ago, but the very rough idea stands.

LeonardoTolstoy 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complete_Robot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complete_Robot You might be thinking of Let's Get Together? There is a list there of the few short stories in which the robots act against the three laws. That being said the Robot stories are meant to be a counter to the Robot As Frankenstein's Monster stories that were prolific at the time. In most of the stories robots literally cannot harm humans. It is built into the structure of their positronic brain.
- crooked-v 2y ago
  I would argue that the overall theme of the stories is that having a "simple" and "common sense" set of rules for behavior doesn't actually work, and that the 'robot' part is ultimately pretty incidental.

hlfshell 2y ago

I've seen this being researched under the term Constitutional AI, including some robotics papers (either SayCan or RT 2? Maybe Code as Policies?) that had such rules (never pick up a knife as it could harm people, for instance) in their prompting.