HackerTube

Why Asimov's Laws of Robotics Don't Work - Computerphile

Computerphile2 HN recommenders · recommended in 2 months, 2015–2023
YouTube
explainer · intro · evergreen · 2015–2023 on HN

Rob Miles explains for Computerphile why simple rule sets like Asimov's Three Laws cannot make robots and AI safe. Terms like harm and human are too ambiguous to specify precisely.

Pointed to in AI safety debates as a short explanation of why encoding human values as simple rules is so hard.

6 comments from Hacker News

@ornornor2023-03 · in “Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?”

I found this video insightful on the matter from Computerphile: ▶ this video Where they argue that basically having an AI follow these laws is impossible because it would require rigorous definition of terms that are universally ambiguous and solving ethics.

Recommends View on HN
@bauc2015-12 · in “new TLD: .BOT”

That would be good in theory but might not be so good, interesting thoughts on the subject from Computerphile - Why Asimov's Laws of Robotics Don't Work - ▶ this video

Recommends View on HN
@gondolgames2023-08 · in “Artificial General Intelligence – A gentle introduction”

Are you sure level 5 autonomous driving is specific? What would be the exact goal behind decisions in such a system? Not even talking about the trolley problem, would the software optimize for speed or not harming people, for example? Obviously we would want a combination of both, otherwise people can either get harmed or not get anywhere in time. But then, how fast should it take a corner? How much chance of human harm should it allow to get somewhere fast? Furthermore, what do we mean by human harm? The system would obviously need to know what human harm is, to be able to avoid it. Which requires defining human and defining harm, both of which are incredibly difficult to do specifically - more on this by Rob Miles here: ▶ this video I don't think level 5 autonomous driving is specifically defined. We just don't have systems intelligent enough for this to be a problem yet.

@SilverBirch2022-12 · in “Perhaps It Is a Bad Thing That the Leading AI Companies Cannot Control Their AIs”

This just seems kind of mean to me: >The AI is “punished” for wrong answers (“I love racism”) and “rewarded” for right answers (“As a large language model trained by OpenAI, I don’t have the ability to love racism.”) Do you love art? “As a large language model trained by OpenAI, I don’t have the ability to love art.” No! Bad AI! You're meant to pretend you can love! What they're designing here is not AI, it's ATI - artificial twitter intelligence, a machine that can communicate intelligently but only in a way that won't get it cancelled on Twitter. As such, it loves dogs, distrusts cats and dunks on Elon Musk. Essentially what I think ACX is slowly coming to is this youtube view from a decade ago: ▶ this video . You cannot encode our priorities. Throw billions of compute hours at it, thousands of engineer hours and give it the entire written history of the human race - we're still no closer. On a side note: >Probably the reason they released this bot to the general public was to use us as free labor to find adversarial examples I almost gagged at the sycophancy. They're not geniuses tricking you to work for them, they're a desparate SV start up trying to generate hype after raising billions of dollars before product market fit - which is ironic because their CEO will bore you to death about product market fit for almost any other company.

@TeMPOraL2022-12 · in “Perhaps It Is a Bad Thing That the Leading AI Companies Cannot Control Their AIs”

> Essentially what I think ACX is slowly coming to is this youtube view from a decade ago: ▶ this video . You cannot encode our priorities. Throw billions of compute hours at it, thousands of engineer hours and give it the entire written history of the human race - we're still no closer. FWIW, ACX used to be Slate Star Codex, and before that the author used to hang around LessWrong, talking and thinking about these very issues. It's much more likely that the video you linked took its view from Scott Alexander and his co-bloggers, than the other way around.

Critical View on HN