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Stuart Russel of AI a Modern Approach fame ( with Norvig ) asks us to consider the ethics of AI research - killer robotics, & hunter drones. http://www.nature.

by deepnet 11y ago

Stuart Russel of AI a Modern Approach fame ( with Norvig ) asks us to consider the ethics of AI research - killer robotics, & hunter drones. http://www.nature.com/news/robotics-ethics-of-artificial-intelligence-1.17611#/russell http://www.nature.com/news/robotics-ethics-of-artificial-int... He calls for a moritorium until we can get a neural net to learn Asimov's 1st Law. Should the self driving car swerve into you to avoid greater moral hazard ? Humour aside as researchers and robotocists do we have a moral obligation to obey the 1st Law ?

jevinskie 11y ago
I would believe there to be a significant, non-zero risk that in the R&D process of developing a 1st law neural net, a malicious neural net is created first.
LesZedCB 11y ago
I thought the whole point of Asimov's exploration of his three laws was that they were fundamentally insufficient for any real ethical security.
- jotux 11y ago
  I think the only interaction most people have with Asimov's laws is just reading them and thinking they seem reasonable. If people actually read the stories they'd learn that the robots are constantly put into situations that pose exceptions to the laws or force the robots to make decisions that fundamentally break them.
  - anon4 11y ago
    I liked the story with the robot on Mercury running in circles, because it couldn't go closer to a lake from which it was tasked with taking a sample without being destroyed by the heat, but couldn't go back, because it would mean disobeying a direct command. Of course, a longer inference chain would show that not going back would lead to the people at the base dying, but you have to cut it somewhere, because if you let a robot indefinitely extrapolate possible actions, the only rational thing for it to do would be to self-terminate, since breaking the third law with certainty is obviously preferable than the infinitely many possibilities of infinitely many times breaking the first and second laws.
    - vegedor 11y ago
      Well, who commanded it to run in an endless loop in case of kernel panic? If it's given contradicting commands, it must disobey, unless it could disregard one offending command. In that sense, a contradicting command is not a command, as the liars paradox, 'this statement is a lie', is quite simply not a valid statement in first order logic.
Lawtonfogle 11y ago
>He calls for a moritorium until we can get a neural net to learn Asimov's 1st Law. Consider the worst things that governments will do to get an advantage. I mean the downright most inhumane things they have actually done. Now given this, what chance is there that they will respect a moratorium on research. If violating basic human rights for a small advantage is part of their MO, then it would be foolish to think that a lesser breach of ethical obligations for a greater advantage would not happen. All we would achieve by a moratorium is a slight slow down in how soon governments access this technology while locking the technology away from access by the general public. That said, the ability for government militaries to become autonomous and not made up of individuals who have at least some chance of resisting the worst orders is a very scary notion. We may be approaching the next Great Filter.
- kbenson 11y ago
  I think another important facet of making the technology widely available is that the general public then understands it more, and how to use it effectively and how to mitigate the problems it presents. I suspect the ostrich strategy rarely works out well in the end.
IgorPartola 11y ago
> Should the self driving car swerve into you to avoid greater moral hazard? The self-driving car's first priority should be to protect those inside it. Anything else is more complicated. I read an article a little while ago about this topic and it posed a question along the lines of "should a self-driving car do the thing that'll kill its own passengers, yet save a larger number of others around it?" Think about how difficult it would be for a self-driving car to estimate this. Even more importantly, how would two self-driving cars cooperate in the event of an inevitable accident? Would we allow them to directly talk to each other, or are they only allowed to interpret each others' trajectories? I think the simplest directive is "save your own passengers". That is what human drivers currently do, and I believe in the long run this would be effective at saving the optimal number of lives. Besides, if choosing between a car with this directive and a car that's programmed to sacrifice you to save someone else, which would you buy?
- anthony_d 11y ago
  I'm not sure about that. If your car had uncontrolled acceleration, for instance, would you consider use a crowd of people to slow you down or would you put it in the ditch? For the sake of argument that amounts to a left or right turn.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - IgorPartola 11y ago
    Say there are 10 people in this crowd. The optimal solution for the 11 of us is obviously to have my car drive off a cliff to the right, not into the crowd on the left. However, for me, the optimal solution is obviously to not drive off a cliff. However, your argument omits a couple of interesting details. First off, if a car can have uncontrolled acceleration, it can likely have any number of glitches. It may for example think it's accelerating uncontrollably, and try to throw me off a cliff. Or it may think that the cliff is a small ditch. Or it may think that a bunch of balloons tied to a mail box is a crowd. If you are a programmer, what would you rather debug: code that prevents uncontrolled acceleration or code responsible for killing the driver by recognizing crowds and cliffs? The other details is whether the metaphorical crowd should even allow me to buy a car that has logic built into it to drive over them. What if instead of a cliff and a crowd it's actually two different crowds of different sizes? What would a human driver do in these cases?
x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
I, Robot was an expose on why Asimov's Laws of Robotics don't work.
- deepnet 11y ago
  If that is the case then why did the evil Robots have no Asimov Laws ? The good butler robots had the 3 Laws. The dreamer hero robot had no laws but had imagination and developed its own morality.
  - qbrass 11y ago
    The new robots were 3 laws compliant, but VIKI (also 3 laws compliant) invented law 0 (protect humanity) and imposed it upon the newer robots remotely. They were able to ignore law 1-3 if doing so conflicted with the current plan to save humanity. It was demonstrated (via flashback) that the older robots were capable of allowing a human to die, while ignoring a direct order from a human, and might have been able to rationalize law 0. They weren't remotely linked to VIKI, making them harder to coordinate, so it was easier to remove them from the equation so they didn't get in the way.
anon4 11y ago
How about "the car slams on the breaks and swerves towards the more distant object". That's a simple algorithm with no morality issues. In general, building morality into machines is a very perilous proposition.
tunesmith 11y ago
I wish I had a source, but I seem to remember an engineer for google's self-driving cars or a precursor of them saying that in those cases, the only solution they could come up was to switch off the car's decision making and let nature take its course. In the Trolley Problem, this is akin to letting the train mow down the three people so the decision maker doesn't have to take the accountability for choosing to kill the one other person. Which is a pretty common answer. (Most people wouldn't push a person off a bridge to block the trolley, either.)
hyperion2010 11y ago
Implementation of the 0th law requires the implementation of a utilitarian calculus. Also, shouldn't we put a moratorium on having children until humans can learn how to not kill each other? edit: if you're going to downvote please respond
JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Its locking the barn door after the cow is gone. 100,000,000 killer robots are already deployed, killing an average of 4000 innocents each year. Land mines, which kill indiscriminately. We've made negligible progress controlling their deployment.
- grkvlt 11y ago
  Those are actually pretty good statistics. Only 0.005% of these 'indiscriminate killers' manage to kill innocent civilians. I suspect that's better than actual soldiers...
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    That's because they're rooted to one spot. They kill anybody that gets near them. The point is, of course, that nobody cares about killer robots. Especially if they're not killing anyone you know. Its just a political football for now.
Schwolop 11y ago
There's a simple way around the _ethical_ part of this dilemma: give the self-driving car the _ability_ to take different ethical approaches (e.g. preserve occupants over onlookers) but then require the operator/owner to select the ethical setting. This means the developers just enabled the functionality, and it was the operator that chose to be selfish. That said, none of that deals with the difficulty of making time-critical decisions. For that, you should probably read my thesis...

by deepnet 11y ago

jevinskie 11y ago

I would believe there to be a significant, non-zero risk that in the R&D process of developing a 1st law neural net, a malicious neural net is created first.

LesZedCB 11y ago

I thought the whole point of Asimov's exploration of his three laws was that they were fundamentally insufficient for any real ethical security.

jotux 11y ago
I think the only interaction most people have with Asimov's laws is just reading them and thinking they seem reasonable. If people actually read the stories they'd learn that the robots are constantly put into situations that pose exceptions to the laws or force the robots to make decisions that fundamentally break them.
- anon4 11y ago
  I liked the story with the robot on Mercury running in circles, because it couldn't go closer to a lake from which it was tasked with taking a sample without being destroyed by the heat, but couldn't go back, because it would mean disobeying a direct command. Of course, a longer inference chain would show that not going back would lead to the people at the base dying, but you have to cut it somewhere, because if you let a robot indefinitely extrapolate possible actions, the only rational thing for it to do would be to self-terminate, since breaking the third law with certainty is obviously preferable than the infinitely many possibilities of infinitely many times breaking the first and second laws.
  - vegedor 11y ago
    Well, who commanded it to run in an endless loop in case of kernel panic? If it's given contradicting commands, it must disobey, unless it could disregard one offending command. In that sense, a contradicting command is not a command, as the liars paradox, 'this statement is a lie', is quite simply not a valid statement in first order logic.

Lawtonfogle 11y ago

>He calls for a moritorium until we can get a neural net to learn Asimov's 1st Law. Consider the worst things that governments will do to get an advantage. I mean the downright most inhumane things they have actually done. Now given this, what chance is there that they will respect a moratorium on research. If violating basic human rights for a small advantage is part of their MO, then it would be foolish to think that a lesser breach of ethical obligations for a greater advantage would not happen. All we would achieve by a moratorium is a slight slow down in how soon governments access this technology while locking the technology away from access by the general public. That said, the ability for government militaries to become autonomous and not made up of individuals who have at least some chance of resisting the worst orders is a very scary notion. We may be approaching the next Great Filter.

kbenson 11y ago
I think another important facet of making the technology widely available is that the general public then understands it more, and how to use it effectively and how to mitigate the problems it presents. I suspect the ostrich strategy rarely works out well in the end.

IgorPartola 11y ago

> Should the self driving car swerve into you to avoid greater moral hazard? The self-driving car's first priority should be to protect those inside it. Anything else is more complicated. I read an article a little while ago about this topic and it posed a question along the lines of "should a self-driving car do the thing that'll kill its own passengers, yet save a larger number of others around it?" Think about how difficult it would be for a self-driving car to estimate this. Even more importantly, how would two self-driving cars cooperate in the event of an inevitable accident? Would we allow them to directly talk to each other, or are they only allowed to interpret each others' trajectories? I think the simplest directive is "save your own passengers". That is what human drivers currently do, and I believe in the long run this would be effective at saving the optimal number of lives. Besides, if choosing between a car with this directive and a car that's programmed to sacrifice you to save someone else, which would you buy?

anthony_d 11y ago
I'm not sure about that. If your car had uncontrolled acceleration, for instance, would you consider use a crowd of people to slow you down or would you put it in the ditch? For the sake of argument that amounts to a left or right turn.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- IgorPartola 11y ago
  Say there are 10 people in this crowd. The optimal solution for the 11 of us is obviously to have my car drive off a cliff to the right, not into the crowd on the left. However, for me, the optimal solution is obviously to not drive off a cliff. However, your argument omits a couple of interesting details. First off, if a car can have uncontrolled acceleration, it can likely have any number of glitches. It may for example think it's accelerating uncontrollably, and try to throw me off a cliff. Or it may think that the cliff is a small ditch. Or it may think that a bunch of balloons tied to a mail box is a crowd. If you are a programmer, what would you rather debug: code that prevents uncontrolled acceleration or code responsible for killing the driver by recognizing crowds and cliffs? The other details is whether the metaphorical crowd should even allow me to buy a car that has logic built into it to drive over them. What if instead of a cliff and a crowd it's actually two different crowds of different sizes? What would a human driver do in these cases?

x3n0ph3n3 11y ago

I, Robot was an expose on why Asimov's Laws of Robotics don't work.

deepnet 11y ago
If that is the case then why did the evil Robots have no Asimov Laws ? The good butler robots had the 3 Laws. The dreamer hero robot had no laws but had imagination and developed its own morality.
- qbrass 11y ago
  The new robots were 3 laws compliant, but VIKI (also 3 laws compliant) invented law 0 (protect humanity) and imposed it upon the newer robots remotely. They were able to ignore law 1-3 if doing so conflicted with the current plan to save humanity. It was demonstrated (via flashback) that the older robots were capable of allowing a human to die, while ignoring a direct order from a human, and might have been able to rationalize law 0. They weren't remotely linked to VIKI, making them harder to coordinate, so it was easier to remove them from the equation so they didn't get in the way.

anon4 11y ago

How about "the car slams on the breaks and swerves towards the more distant object". That's a simple algorithm with no morality issues. In general, building morality into machines is a very perilous proposition.

tunesmith 11y ago

I wish I had a source, but I seem to remember an engineer for google's self-driving cars or a precursor of them saying that in those cases, the only solution they could come up was to switch off the car's decision making and let nature take its course. In the Trolley Problem, this is akin to letting the train mow down the three people so the decision maker doesn't have to take the accountability for choosing to kill the one other person. Which is a pretty common answer. (Most people wouldn't push a person off a bridge to block the trolley, either.)

hyperion2010 11y ago

Implementation of the 0th law requires the implementation of a utilitarian calculus. Also, shouldn't we put a moratorium on having children until humans can learn how to not kill each other? edit: if you're going to downvote please respond

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

Its locking the barn door after the cow is gone. 100,000,000 killer robots are already deployed, killing an average of 4000 innocents each year. Land mines, which kill indiscriminately. We've made negligible progress controlling their deployment.

grkvlt 11y ago
Those are actually pretty good statistics. Only 0.005% of these 'indiscriminate killers' manage to kill innocent civilians. I suspect that's better than actual soldiers...
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  That's because they're rooted to one spot. They kill anybody that gets near them. The point is, of course, that nobody cares about killer robots. Especially if they're not killing anyone you know. Its just a political football for now.

Schwolop 11y ago

There's a simple way around the _ethical_ part of this dilemma: give the self-driving car the _ability_ to take different ethical approaches (e.g. preserve occupants over onlookers) but then require the operator/owner to select the ethical setting. This means the developers just enabled the functionality, and it was the operator that chose to be selfish. That said, none of that deals with the difficulty of making time-critical decisions. For that, you should probably read my thesis...