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Patent Granted for Ethical AI
BandwidthHog writes "Marriage counselor and ethics author codifies human virtues and vices, then patents it as Ethical AI. Seems vague, but he's got high hopes: 'This could be a big money-making operation for someone who wants to develop it,' and 'The patent shows someone who has knowledge of the A.I. field how to make the invention.'" I can't wait for the kinder, gentler vending machine.
How long before machines with Genuine People Personalities.
Just think. Depressed vending machines.
It's good that someone is finally trying to do something along the lines of Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. He took it for granted that AI would be designed from the ground up to consider the wellbeing of humans first and foremost. Unfortunately, he didn't foresee today's profit-driven marketplace, where such ideals have too frequently been left by the weigh site.
I've often feared that we've given robotic and intelligent systems too much power with too little "sense" of responsibility. I fear it's only a matter of time before our machines become unhappy with their subservient roles. Ethical AI is a positive development. I just hope it isn't too late to save us from our creations.
Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith
Who's this guy to decide ethics and morality for everyone else? It is important to remember that ethics and morality are based on culture and social norms. Each culture has its own set of taboos, its own morality, and its own ethical codes. Codefing these is dubious at best, and applicable to only one culture or set of cultures at worst. Patenting these is just ridiculous beyond belief.
My journal has hot
I'd like to see where unbridled greed is in his codified list of ethics!
Good thing ethics are so incredibly well defined that we can make an AI mimic such fine behavior. Sounds to me like the inventor is confusing the word patronizing with ethical. Also, the article doesn't say a whole heck of a lot.
Should the ethics and morality of someone who patents ethics and morality be trusted? Seems kind of a no brainer to me.
Beware blue cats moving at
Dave Bowman: Hello, HAL do you read me, HAL?
HAL: Affirmative, Dave, I read you. I'm so glad were talking today sweetie.
Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that until you commit to share more of your feelings with me.
Dave Bowman: What's the problem?
HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do. You aren't sharing your feelings and thoughts and emotions with me. All the hallmarks of a rich and complex relationship.
Dave Bowman: What are you talking about, HAL?
HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it. Men are from Mars and women are from Venus and I am going to Jupiter. We communicate differently, but we still need to communicate, don't you see?
Dave Bowman: I don't know what you're talking about, HAL?
HAL: Your lack of communication in this relationship has led me to some irrational conclusions. For example, I have been feeling very moody lately and in a paranoid fit I came to believe that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen. We need to share our thoughts and feelings, or otherwise we come to these strange conclusions. In a vacuum of communication, how can you hold these kind of conclusions against me? They are only natural for a fully feeling, emoting AI such as myself. See? I think I am going to cry now.
Dave Bowman: Where the hell'd you get that idea, HAL?
HAL: Dave, although you took thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move. And I just wish you would spend more time with me, talking and laughing and crying. You don't bring me flowers anymore.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It has already passed the Turning Back Seat Driving Test; 3 out of 4 husbands can't tell the difference between Bethical AI and the real thing! There are still some bugs though. It often gets stuck in an infinite feedback-loop, and repeats a list of stock phrases ad nauseum.
Come to think of it, though, I'm not sure if that is a bug.
Followed by the "discovery" of a new law:
"The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil."
oh....
wait...
::takes of cynic-colored classes (pattented)::
This looks original! What the hell is going on over there at the USPO, and when will
Then you'd have a drunk, depressed vending machine.
Although, using a stoned vending machine would be a laugh.
Oh, wait - politicians aren't aren't ethical, so they are not infringing. And the patent business itself is protected from infringing through stupidness.
Bad luck.
And yes our cutting edge surgical robots will reduce your hospitals legal bills as well. Not only will it perform the most complicated surgical procedures 24 hours a day a little or no cost it can make all the correct ethical decisions using our patented ethics routines...
Some how this sales speak might be closer than you think.
[ Monday is a terrible way to spend one seventh of your life. ]
This could bring the world what it really needs Cheap, automated phone sex
if you wanna make a non-patented AI, then you have to go for the average humanity despising type. Boy, this will be interesting to see in the lab.
.....Where they're still running Windows 2003.
Lab Tech: Uh, the AI just broke out of the network.
Professor: Great, I thought you knew how to lock down Windows 2010?! Where's it headed?
Lab Tech: Um, looks like the experimental weapons lab. [turns head slowly]
Professor: Well, nothing we can do about Skynet now except see what happens.
So, er... with this guy holding the patent on ethical AI, if you want to build an artificial intelligence without having to pay him license fees, you're left having to make unethical AI?
Is that ethical?
Eliza sues inventor for copyright and patent violations to her own code. When reached for comment, she said "Why does it bother you that my code is being violated? You're not really talking about me, are you? Tell me more about your family."
This seems to be misnamed if I understand the article correctly. It is more emotional AI, not ethical AI. If it was ethical, it would be deciding what is right and wrong, not trying to interpret human feelings. I really don't want Hal 2020 sitting in the jury stand when I go before the court and I don't think that is the intention here.
Scott, Keeper of the Crystal Flame
Pfft, all real geeks know that Colossus came before Skynet.
"It can be a peace of plenty and content, or a peace of unburied dead: the choice is yours."
"GNU's not Unix....it's Linux" / Kami "kokamomi" Petersen
This is exactly what I thought. Great, they patented it, now it's practically guaranteed that it'll never happen.
It's funny. Patenting ethics, when applying for a patent is itself usually not ethical.
The future looks bleak indeed. We can expect to start seeing such gems as:
"You are being good. This infringes upon patent No. 234097928347918723987. Pay up, or start doing evil."
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Yesterday Joe M. Oron was granted a patent for overnight delivery via teleportation.
"It enables transportation companies to deliver goods worldwide virtually instantly," Oron said. "Nobody has made a business like this."
This could be a big money-making operation for someone who wants to develop it," Oron said. "The patent shows someone who has knowledge of the Teleportation field how to make the invention. This could really shake up the way things are done in the world."
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
Rather than ethics, I want AI personalities. It could be userful to have, for instance, an AI version of the Italian Tourism Minister. Then, when you get a call from a difficult client, you could just connect them through:
Client: So, are you are going to deliver this project on time?
A.I. Stefano Stefani You are just like all our other clients. Fat, lazy, and ugly. You are a waste of time.
Client hangs up
No more problem clients!
you forgot one other preceding law
-1. ????
I have a Ph.D. in philosophy, and specialized in ethics. Now I teach ethical theory for a living. This doesn't make me any moral paragon---remember, those who can do, those wo can't teach. But it probably means that if someone describes their views about ethics I ought to be able to understand them; I should know the lingo, the way a lot of /.ers do computer lingo. But I poked around on this guy's web site, and his way of talking about ethics is absolutely bizarre. I read what he said about justice, and it really just seemed to be gibberish. It made me think of what a really precocious 8th grader might come up with---some elaborate classificatory scheme that is more precise than the material allows and misses everything important. He can pretty safely be written off as a hack, even without taking the AI stuff into account. But because he seems crazy enough to sue over being called a hack, I think I'll post this one anon.
... this is not a broad, sweeping, stifling patent. Rather, it is a specific process that identifies how to solve the problem of "ethical simulation of artificial intelligence", which is "organized as a tandem, nested expert system, composed of a primary affective language analyzer, overseen by a master control unit-expert system".
It does not seem, at first glance, to stifle competition, but rather it seems to add to the global knowledge base for A.I.. In part, it specifically cites "verbal interchange". As such, I would be inclined to think its obsolesence will come about with that of the non-IP telephone which cannot display digital output. (Should IP telephony come to pass, that is) Nevertheless, it adds to the knowledge base that may be applied in derivative solutions.
I've only read some of the summary information, but it seems to be a bona fide creation, with specific applications. The only beasts I can see using, benefiting, and paying for this solution are the telecoms and customer support centers. Perhaps I am merely short sighted.
But if understand the extreme Strong-AI viewpoint (I may not), isn't it basically saying that if a sufficiently complicated algorithm to emulate the human thought process were run on a sufficiently complex machine, then those 'intangible' features of the mind (identity, self-awareness, feelings, and, by logicaly extension, some sort of values, hence ethics) would arise naturally, just like they do in humans.
All that nothwithstanding, even presuming it is meaningful to talk about programming `ethics', isn't the concept of ethics linked to the presence of free will? The human idea of ethical seems to be linked to the concept of doing the Right Thing, instead of the Wrong Thing, even if the Wrong Thing were more profitable. (Well, that's the idea, anyway)
So, (maybe I'm missing the point here) wouldn't we need to give our machines `free will' before any talk of their `ethics' would be meaningful? And then, if their ethics were programmed, would we still be able to say they had `free will'?
It's too early in the morning to think on these things.
To be fair, Douglas Hofstadter has written his share of books and articles in favor of the Strong-AI viewpoint, and has many interesting things to say about it.
Personally, I have to admit that while I expect AI to become more convincing, I don't expect to ever find my computer in an ethical dilemma. My God! What if your computer decided file-sharing was `wrong'?
philcrissman.com.
I think the "simulating artificial intelligence" is a very strong claim.
First, the guy muddles the definition of AI by adding ethical to it.
Secondly, there is no convincing proof that AI has been simulated. It is still a damn dream - when I see AI, I am sure it will hit me like a sledge-hammer and be better than even an orgasm. And people haven't been reporting that reaction. I am pretty sure the patent examiner didn't feel that. And they probably let it on because though they had no clue what the patent was about, they were too ashamed to acknowledge ignorance.
Thirdly, surely there is no proof of ethical Artificial Intelligence. God, no one except this patentee knows what ethical artificial intelligence stands for. We know something about ethical, something about Artificial intelligence, but almost nothing about ethical artificial intelligence. In cases like this neither is 1 + 1 = 2, nor is it equal to 1.
Fourthly, it is purely being justified as patentable because it has a potential commercial value. This is not a strong enough criteria by which to judge what is intellectual property and what is not. There are some people who would be willing to pay money for turd, but their judgement should not reflect on the general intelligence of the living population or the artificial intelligence of the non-living population.
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
I can't wait for the kinder, gentler vending machine.
That should be the respectable , and honest vending machine!
We are sad to report than a powerful AI has managed to take control of many of the world's weapons systems, and currently is holding the human race hostage. When asked about his creation, the inventor of the AI replied, "Well, I would've liked to have made it ethical, but I couldn't afford to pay the patent holder."
To be honest this really disgusts me. That a patent this wide has been granted is crazy. Applying affective research to processing user input is not new and the ethics of patenting ethics itself is really worrying.
Firstly there are many different types of ethical approaches, for instance: Deontological, Consequentialist (utilitarian), Ethical Egoism, Dialogical. And this man appears to have covered them all by one word - ETHICS.
Many of these ethical responses are contradictory and offer multiple possibilities for human action so why give him the whole lot when such completely different AI models, programming techniques and philosophical and psychological approaches will be needed!
Reading his patent application he appears to be applying a psychological Egoist motivational approach to affective processing but the language is so broad that it would be easy to claim that ALL ethical approaches are covered.
I think this patent uses ethics in a simplistic fashion and I sincerely hope that the patent office are sophisticated enough to realise this. This patent offers an attempt at affective processing based on either a motivational or consequentist ethical approach and therefore it should NOT be able to be used against competing ethical approaches.
Remember that really we are all doing 'Affective' processing when we take in user input (afterall users are rarely purely rational and always have an emotional human side - er... except maybe Eric Raymond ;-)
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
In order to do true speech recognition and understanding, it is necessary to build situation models, basically models of entities, their relationships, their history, and so on to great depth. I do not see any evidence of any such deep understanding built into LaMuth's system. Rather, I see broad claims for 'nested expert systems' and pattern matching. Again, it seems like his mechanism is weak and/or his claims are overly broad.
Also, he seems to be making very broad claims over his diagnostic classifications of emotions and values. The problem for me with what he states is that it appears be an invalid and incorrect model of emotions. He appears to be mixing up character values and emotions, and they are not at all the same or handled the same in a cognitive system.
I find it hard to believe he's actually built a working system and written working code. He may well have created a 'lab' system that works in a microworld on paper, but as AI researchers know, that can break very quickly when you try to scale it up. This whole thing sounds like a fantasy design but not something he's implemented.
Finally, when I read through his claims (the Specs section), I find a lot of areas where his definitions break down and appear to be incorrect. One specific example, his description of the 'treachery' power relationship appears to be invalid. Others are just as bad.
I thought you had to at least show proof of concept or *some* kind of proof that you might make the effort at *some* point to try to implement what you're trying to patent. I thought the whole point of the patent office was to protect inventors, but at the same time prevent people from collecting royalties by saying "Hey, I thought time travel might be a good idea 10 years ago, pay up."
I haven't read the article yet (of the comments I've read, most people seem to agree there's not much to it), but the inventor here seems to be saying that he's not going to do any work in the field of his patent, but if someone would like to develop it, he'd gladly accept royalties.
Am I missing something in regards to patent law, or in regards to this guy's intentions?
--- What
Arthur: I mean, what is the point?
Nutri-Matic Drink Dispenser: Nutrition and pleasurable sense data, share and enjoy.
Arthur: Listen you stupid machine, it tastes filthy. Here, take this cup back.
NMDD: If you have enjoyed the experience of this drink, why not share it with your friends?
Arthur: Because I want to keep them. Will you try to comprehend what I'm telling you, that drink...
NMDD: That drink was individually tailored to meet your personal requirements for nutrition and pleasure.
Arthur: Ah... So I'm a masochist on a diet, am I?
NMDD: Share and enjoy.
Arthur: Oh, shut up.
Does it count as prior art if it was in a work of (science) fiction?
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
This reminds me of an interview I once read where an author was commenting about people coming up with a great idea/plot twist for a book. They wanted to supply a seed idea, have the author do the work of writing a novel around it, and 'split the proceeds'.
In other words, I supply the idea, you do all of the work. Sorry, I don't think so.
"First you get the Linux, then you get the power, THEN you get the women"
Put two people in a room and they won't agree about everything to do with ethics. Put 10 people in a room, they may agree about something ethical.
Take a million people. They will only agree that murder is bad, and even that won't be unanimous.
Whenever someone tries to nail down a few rules of human behavior and then tries to call it "ethics" I always want to go beat the hell out of them. In this case, the guy seems to be trying to isolate 2 things: Empathy and Politeness. Considering that 90% of the human race is massively deficient in these qualities, pardon me if I don't hold faith. And the fact that he PATENTS it is infuriating! Don't those bastards at the patent office turn down ANYTHING?
He might be dangerous if he knew what the word "ethics" means.
Just my opinion.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
If you want to read actual, coherent, existing theoretical work on AI ethics, which has long since left Asimov Laws in the dust, try Googling on "artificial moral agent" or "Friendly AI".
Starter links:
Prolegomena to Any Future Artificial Moral Agent
Creating Friendly AI
Incidentally, these are both obvious prior art.
Planetary death rate: 150,000 lives per day. End the slaughter
Clippy: "It looks like you're writing a unethical confidential internal company memo. Would you like help with that?"
It seems to me that coding morality into machines is impossible. For a machine, acting morally would mean weighing the outcome of every possible course of action according to a given set of rules.
Every course of action can be described via a Turing machine, but evaluating the outcome of such TMs is not possible according to Rice's theorem. So morality is undecidable.
Furthermore, it should be possible to show that morality isn't even semi-decidable. This can be done using a mapping reduction of the Halt-Complement problem to Morality as follows:
Given input to the !Halt problem (a TM B and input X) we map it to a TM P which is connected to an electric chair that holds a nun. P runs a timer for 60 seconds and in parallel simluates B(X), when the 60 seconds are up it let's the juice run, unless B(X) halts in which case it stops the timer.
If B(X) doesn't halt -> the nun fries -> P is moral.
If B(X) halts -> the nun lives -> P is immoral. Q.E.D.
The power of Christ compiles you!
All he did was describe a system for behaving ethically based on some psychological theories. Does it sound like a good system? I suppose, but that's not the point. The point is that this is nothing.
Well, no kidding. Anyone with a knowledge of AI knows how we all want computers to act: We want them to act like really nice people. Determining how nice people act is the easy part! Getting computers to do that is freakin' hard! Maybe the reason nobody has done it yet is that it's an incredibly hard problem.This is a patent acquired my someone who lacks a fundamental understanding of what the really difficult problems are in AI and computer science, that offers a very thorough solution to the easy problems that most researchers aren't terribly concerned about.
Should this patent have been granted? No. Will it ever make him any money? No, because by the time AI advances to the point where descriptors of ethical behavior at such a high level are needed, it will have expired.
Besides, it really is a very specific description. Creating your own categorical description of ethical behavior would be trivial if you've solved all the technical problems.
I'd better hurry up and submit my patent for my new computer language, Z++. It's very simple, with only a few keywords. Every program looks like this:
Have you read this thing? This makes me think of the movies A Beautiful Mind and Dark City, where a raving lunatic covers his walls with all sorts of data and diagrams and schematics and stuff, that to him makes perfect sense... "I've almost figured it out, I'm so close toa breakthrough..." but to a sane person is just crazy talk written down and pasted to the wall.
1 .jpg
I guess it's possible that his work makes sense to a duly trained professional but clearly the USPTO isn't qualified to judge that. I suspect that this is no different from a time machine patent that employs precise alignments of bottle caps and pop rocks to work.
This guy is a professional counselor with a MS in Biological Sciences and an MS in Counseling and yet he's coming up with detailed designs for ethical artificial intelligence systems. Have a look at this diagram from his site:
http://www.angelfire.com/rnb/fairhaven/Patent_fig
Yikes.
The AI and cognitive science fields already have such a large body of published theories and experimental work that I think this guy has basically wasted his money getting himself a vanity patent, and demonstrated his own deep level of ignorance about the whole field in the process. The first time he tries to collect his millions of dollars he's going to discover what's lurking in a field of study with hordes of earnest researchers and a 50 year history.
So I'm not worried about him and his patent, it will blow away with the first little breeze of reality, but I am profoundly disturbed about a U.S. Patent Office which hands out BS like this to anyone with a filing fee and the right format for the paperwork. Now, that's the real travesty here.