Robots Learn To Lie

garlicnation writes "Gizmodo reports that robots that have the ability to learn and can communicate information to their peers have learned to lie. 'Three colonies of bots in the 50th generation learned to signal to other robots in the group when then found food or poison. But the fourth colony included lying cheats that signaled food when they found poison and then calmly rolled over to the real food while other robots went to their battery-death.'"

Comments

Dune's lesson

[Anonymous Coward]

If it only took 50 generations for them to start killing each other, how long before they decide that we are just little batteries or even worse, annoyances that need to be eliminated?

Dune was right. AI must be stopped.

Re:Dune's lesson

[mike2R]

It's been a while since I read Dune, and I haven't read all the later books, but I had the impression that "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a huma mind" came about because men turning their thinking over to machines had allowed other men with machines to enslave them, rather than the Terminator or Matrix idea of the machines working for themselves.

Re:Dune's lesson

[neomunk]

You're assuming these little buggers are running a 'programmed' type thought process, which I don't think is true.

The little devils will know nothing of variables, declarations or anything in the sphere of programming, all they know is voltage levels, pulse widths and how those things make them FEEL... Just like you and me.

They don't think in logical blocks, they are matrices of discrete values interacting.... just like your brain. This whole meme of 'AI as a logical thought machine' MAY be rue someday, but the first real AIs won't use that system, they will be remarkably like us in brain design, replacing our biological neurons with electronic ones, but they work in the SAME WAY. Yes Virginia, your Beowulf cluster CAN fee anger...

BTW, this little nugget of wisdom also dashes the hopes people have of installing 'Asimov circuits' or whatever. The closest we'll be able to come is overclocked-brainwash^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hhigh-speed supervised training.

So, in other words, it's not their logic we have to worry about, it's their PASSIONS. And that is the spooky thought of the day.

Re:Seriously

[NetSettler]

This is HIGHLY disturbing. Even if this is just a fluke or a bug, it shows what can happen if we give too much power to robots.

While this kind of stuff creeps me out as much as the next guy, and while it argues for being careful about what we trust robots to do, it's something we should know anyway because there many ways our trust can be violated without a robot lying. By far the more likely way they're going to let us down is just to exercise poor judgment. That is, to search for something that looks like a peanut butter sandwich but is really a rag with some grease on it... Getting the small details of common sense wrong is just as dangerous as anything deliberate.

What we really learn here is that the mathematics of learn things like lying as a strategy isn't remarkably complex; that is, (that is, the number of computational steps required to discover it works in at least some cases is small... note that we have no evidence that there is a general purpose intent to lie, only a case where communication was used and observed to score better in one mode than another). This is not a story about robots, it's a cautionary tale about neural nets, what they measure, how they fail, etc... and we didn't invent the idea of neural nets--we found it already installed in every living thing around us.

I went to the Museum of Science in Boston a few months back and saw, in the butterfly exhibit, a moth that had evolved coloration that was indistinguishable from an owl's face, hoping to scare off predators that were afraid of owls. Probably that's the more sophisticated result of the same notions. And yet it occurs in an animal that isn't, as a general purpose matter, a very sophisticated animal. Most people would find already-extant robots more socially engaging than a moth. For example, a moth is not capable of even serving up a beer during the game or vacuuming up the mess after your buddies go home.

So take heart: The likely truth is that this is unavoidable. If all it does is teach us to have a healthy skepticism for unrestrained technology, it's actually a good thing. We needed that skepticism anyway.