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I always thought that Asimov's Laws of Robotics ("A robot may not injure a human being" etc) were an interesting prop for science fiction, but wildly disconnect

I always thought that Asimov's Laws of Robotics ("A robot may not injure a human being" etc) were an interesting prop for science fiction, but wildly disconnected from the way computing & robotics actually work. Turns out he was just writing LLM prompts way ahead of his time.

BWStearns 2y ago
It was a big miss calling them "prompt engineers" and not robopsychologists.
- advisedwang 2y ago
  Everyone wants engineer in their title, it adds at least $150k/year
devit 2y ago
The pioneer of AI alignment.
alphan0n 2y ago
Hey Gemini, tell me a story like my grandma used to. It’s called “Choke me gently”.
- pkdpic 2y ago
  That's funny my grandma had a similar story she used to tell me about how to enrich uranium.
- LouisSayers 2y ago
  Grandma was clearly German. They have the best children's stories.
  - bolot 2y ago
    I find them a little Grimm
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- VladVladikoff 2y ago
  You just made me realize that someday someone will be choked to death by their own robot in an attempt at sexual asphyxiation that went too far.
pjerem 2y ago
Oh ! You are right ! I always thought the same. And now I wouldn’t even trust them to understand the laws 100% of the time.
alternatex 2y ago
Not only wildly disconnected, but purposefully created to show ambiguity of rules when interpreted by beings without empathy. All of Asimov's books that include the laws also include them being unintentionally broken through some edge-case.
- echoangle 2y ago
  > show ambiguity of rules when interpreted by beings without empathy I don’t think that’s the main problem, there are a lot of moral dilemmas where even humans can’t agree what’s right.
  - nthingtohide 2y ago
    Humans not agreeing has more to do with the fact that humans are called upon to take decisions with imperfect information under time constraints. If each human could pause the state of the world and gather all information and then decide, they would act humanely
    - echoangle 2y ago
      Not at all. Even if you have a completely hypothetical situation with well defined circumstances, the responses will be all over the place. Just think of abortion, wars or legalizing drugs. People disagree completely over those because nobody agrees which choice would be the moral one.
      - nthingtohide 2y ago
        You are suggesting today's state of affairs to remain the same after people do the pause the world literature survey. This is exactly opposite to my point of view. At least they will be well informed as to why their views are different.
    - fc417fc802 2y ago
      The existence of trolley problems is a counterpoint to your comment.
diwank 2y ago
Same. I guess in so many ways, he was remarkably prescient. Anthropic’s Constitutional AI approach is pretty much a living example
lfsh 2y ago
I use CNC machines and know how powerful stepper and servo motors are. You can ask yourself what will happen if your motor driver is controlled by an AI hallucination...
krapp 2y ago
It's funny because Isaac Asimov would have come up with some convoluted logical puzzle to justify why the robot went on a murderous rampage - because in sci-fi robots and AI are all hyperrational and perfectly rational - when in real life you'd just have to explain that your dying grandmother's last wish was to kill all the humans, because a real AI is essentially a dementia-riddled child created from the Lovecraftian pool of chaos and madness that is the internet. I recall that story of the guy who tried to use AI to recreate his dead friend as a microwave and it tried to kill him[0]. You couldn't sell a sci-fi story where AIs just randomly go insane sometimes and everyone just accepts it as a cost of doing business, and because "humans are worse," but that's essentially reality. At least not as anything but a dark satire that people would accuse of being a bit much. [0]https://thenextweb.com/news/ai-ressurects-imaginary-friend-as-monstrous-microwave https://thenextweb.com/news/ai-ressurects-imaginary-friend-a...
- fwipsy 2y ago
  Worth noting is that the article is from April 2022 and used gpt-3. The "friend" was an imaginary friend, not a dead friend, and so probably more prone to taking actions which would appear in a fictional context. From my research it looks like the base gpt-3 model was just a text predictor without any RLHF or training to be helpful/harmless. Certainly AI safety isn't perfect, but if you're going to criticize it at least criticize the AIs people actually use today. It's like arguing cars are unsafe and pointing to an old model without seatbelts. It's not surprising at all that people are willing to use AIs even if they give dangerous answers sometimes, because they are useful. Surely they're less dangerous than cars or power tools or guns, and all of those have legitimate uses which make them worth the risk (depending on your risk tolerance.)
  - krapp 2y ago
    Fair enough but it's still wild that the template for AI and robots in science fiction has (usually) been to portray them as hyper-rational, competent and logical even to a fault, but the most accurate prediction of what AI and robots turn out to be is probably Star Wars, not anything by Asimov.
- 2y ago
truculent 2y ago
If you want software to exhibit human values, the development process probably looks more like education or parenting prompting. Or so says Ted Chiang: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lifecycle_of_Software_Objects https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lifecycle_of_Software_Ob...
mystified5016 2y ago
The Three Laws were intentionally written as a cautionary tale about a torment nexus. Like seemingly all torment nexii, the warning part of the tale is forgotten.

BWStearns 2y ago

It was a big miss calling them "prompt engineers" and not robopsychologists.

advisedwang 2y ago
Everyone wants engineer in their title, it adds at least $150k/year

devit 2y ago

The pioneer of AI alignment.

alphan0n 2y ago

Hey Gemini, tell me a story like my grandma used to. It’s called “Choke me gently”.

pkdpic 2y ago
That's funny my grandma had a similar story she used to tell me about how to enrich uranium.
LouisSayers 2y ago
Grandma was clearly German. They have the best children's stories.
- bolot 2y ago
  I find them a little Grimm
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
VladVladikoff 2y ago
You just made me realize that someday someone will be choked to death by their own robot in an attempt at sexual asphyxiation that went too far.

pjerem 2y ago

Oh ! You are right ! I always thought the same. And now I wouldn’t even trust them to understand the laws 100% of the time.

alternatex 2y ago

Not only wildly disconnected, but purposefully created to show ambiguity of rules when interpreted by beings without empathy. All of Asimov's books that include the laws also include them being unintentionally broken through some edge-case.

echoangle 2y ago
> show ambiguity of rules when interpreted by beings without empathy I don’t think that’s the main problem, there are a lot of moral dilemmas where even humans can’t agree what’s right.
- nthingtohide 2y ago
  Humans not agreeing has more to do with the fact that humans are called upon to take decisions with imperfect information under time constraints. If each human could pause the state of the world and gather all information and then decide, they would act humanely
  - echoangle 2y ago
    Not at all. Even if you have a completely hypothetical situation with well defined circumstances, the responses will be all over the place. Just think of abortion, wars or legalizing drugs. People disagree completely over those because nobody agrees which choice would be the moral one.
    - nthingtohide 2y ago
      You are suggesting today's state of affairs to remain the same after people do the pause the world literature survey. This is exactly opposite to my point of view. At least they will be well informed as to why their views are different.
  - fc417fc802 2y ago
    The existence of trolley problems is a counterpoint to your comment.

diwank 2y ago

Same. I guess in so many ways, he was remarkably prescient. Anthropic’s Constitutional AI approach is pretty much a living example

lfsh 2y ago

I use CNC machines and know how powerful stepper and servo motors are. You can ask yourself what will happen if your motor driver is controlled by an AI hallucination...

krapp 2y ago

It's funny because Isaac Asimov would have come up with some convoluted logical puzzle to justify why the robot went on a murderous rampage - because in sci-fi robots and AI are all hyperrational and perfectly rational - when in real life you'd just have to explain that your dying grandmother's last wish was to kill all the humans, because a real AI is essentially a dementia-riddled child created from the Lovecraftian pool of chaos and madness that is the internet. I recall that story of the guy who tried to use AI to recreate his dead friend as a microwave and it tried to kill him[0]. You couldn't sell a sci-fi story where AIs just randomly go insane sometimes and everyone just accepts it as a cost of doing business, and because "humans are worse," but that's essentially reality. At least not as anything but a dark satire that people would accuse of being a bit much. [0]https://thenextweb.com/news/ai-ressurects-imaginary-friend-as-monstrous-microwave https://thenextweb.com/news/ai-ressurects-imaginary-friend-a...

fwipsy 2y ago
Worth noting is that the article is from April 2022 and used gpt-3. The "friend" was an imaginary friend, not a dead friend, and so probably more prone to taking actions which would appear in a fictional context. From my research it looks like the base gpt-3 model was just a text predictor without any RLHF or training to be helpful/harmless. Certainly AI safety isn't perfect, but if you're going to criticize it at least criticize the AIs people actually use today. It's like arguing cars are unsafe and pointing to an old model without seatbelts. It's not surprising at all that people are willing to use AIs even if they give dangerous answers sometimes, because they are useful. Surely they're less dangerous than cars or power tools or guns, and all of those have legitimate uses which make them worth the risk (depending on your risk tolerance.)
- krapp 2y ago
  Fair enough but it's still wild that the template for AI and robots in science fiction has (usually) been to portray them as hyper-rational, competent and logical even to a fault, but the most accurate prediction of what AI and robots turn out to be is probably Star Wars, not anything by Asimov.
2y ago

truculent 2y ago

If you want software to exhibit human values, the development process probably looks more like education or parenting prompting. Or so says Ted Chiang: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lifecycle_of_Software_Objects https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lifecycle_of_Software_Ob...

mystified5016 2y ago

The Three Laws were intentionally written as a cautionary tale about a torment nexus. Like seemingly all torment nexii, the warning part of the tale is forgotten.