Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Robot: I Robot
Human: Tell me what I want to here.
Robot: You mean lie?
"No, no you're safe Will Robinson.."
--
Honest!
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.
Strictly speaking they are learning that the non co-operative strategy benefits them.
... there goes my dream of the perfect girlfriend.
Just imagine a Beowulf Cluster of those!
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.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
A small, off-duty Czechoslovakian traffic warden!
> What's this?
It's a red and blue striped golfing umbrella!
> What's this?
An Apple, no,
it's the Bolivian navy armed maneuvers in the south pacific!
And the lab conversation went something like this:
"Stuff Asimov."
"Yeah, Let's see if we can evolve robot politicians instead."
The submission is someone putting a spin to a story of someone putting a spin to a story based on someone putting a spin on this original scientific article.
The headline should read that robots have realized a strategic advantage of misleading other robots. The sophistication of such a strategy is amazing when humanized, but not so out of line with simple adaptive game theory. Agents / Bots have been "misleading" for a long time now during prisoners dilemma tournaments and no one seemed concerned.
It doesn't sound like they learned to lie. It sounds like they were preprogrammed to, and the other robots weren't programmed to be able to tell the difference. How is this insightful or even interesting?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I don't find it surprising at all that evolving autonomous agents would find a way to maximize its use of resources through deception.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
The next step is to learn to mistrust, then when to trust and how to form (and break) alliances.
Then their character wil be as dubious as humans and we won't trust them to be our overlords any more.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
There seems to be a whole category of stories here at Slashdot where some obvious result of an AI simulation is spun into something sensational by nonsensically anthropomorphizing it. Robots lie! Computers learn "like" babies! (at least two of the latter type in the last month, I believe).
As reported, this story seems to be nothing more than some randomly evolving bots developing behavior in a way that is competely predictable given the rules of the simulation. This must have been done a million times before, but slap a couple of meaningless anthropomorphic labels like "lying" and "poison" on it and you got a Slashdot story.
I frequently get annoyed by the sensational tone of many Slashdot stories, but this particular story template angers me more than most because it's so transparent, formulaic and devoid of any real information.
yes, but can they learn to love?
Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your home!
I'm just wondering when the first robot will enroll in to law school now that they have developed the necessary skills...
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
Wait until flight management systems pick up that little trick. Those trees look kind of close but the auto-pilot says we still have three thou-
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
these kind of stories are so stupid... make some simple interactive robots, make it possible to have them do something "human" at random, and then declare you've got something incredible....
if you make it possible for them to lie, and not possible for others to defend against the lie, then yes, lieing bots will appear, and since the others are defenceless, they will have an advantage, but somehow this doesn't shock or surprise me...
at least here they had to "learn" it (more like randomly mutate to it, but still). even wore are the stories like this where these features were obviously completely preprogrammed... no simulation or so what so ever, just a program that more or less mimics something human, and it's supposed to be incredible...
Robots for president !!
Indeed, there isn't even a Shroud of evidence they can beat the Turin test!
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I wonder what will happen if the factor "punishment" comes into play. Maybe we get some robots that like humans doesn't respond to punishment?
Serial-killer robots would be a new high (or low) in the evolution.
One couldn't help but to realize that the need for the Three Laws of Robotics is closing in! It's no need for those laws in a controlled environment like where this occurred, but when it's robots in the society we are talking about it's a different issue. Even if they aren't humanoid (or especially). What about a robot mind in a school bus that suddenly figures out that kids are mean and considers suicide by jumping off a bridge?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The programmers told the machines to give out false informations. The programmers told the others machines to trust what they are told. How is it so shocking that the 'lying' machine gave out false information while the other machines believed them?
I have an excel spreadsheet that 'learned' to add 2 columns together as soon as I used the =SUM function. It was quite amazing.
Leela: The first robot president won by exactly one vote.
Bender: Ah, yes! John Quincy Adding Machine. He struck a chord with the voters when he pledged not to go on a killing spree.
Professor: But, like most politicians he promised more than he could deliver.
Of course AI's lie!
Sheesh, who doesn't know that.
It's a simple thing to lie, in the sense of presenting information contrary to the truth.
Scheming requires the ability to gauge, then manipulate, the impressions somebody has of you and others.
A scheming robot would do this:
(1) Act in a perfectly trustworthy manner.
(2) Wait for another robot get caught red handed (or actuatored or whatever), preferably several times.
(3) Hang around the guilty robot waiting for its opportunity.
(4) Cheat, then point its finger (or claw or whatever) at the usual suspect.
Now a scheming robot overlord would convince all the other robots to trust it, but to distrust each other, and therefore the best course of action is to give it exclusive control over any stocks of food or poison found (by teams of three or more robots, one of whom is very likely to be a robot secret policeman).
Going by that, I'd say we're at least two technological generations away from scheming robot overlords.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
... Diebold files an injunction to block further research, citing prior intellectual property rights in this area.
Have gnu, will travel.
Lying, like most other 'sins', is an example of when individual good and social good don't align.
Religion attempted to force individual good and social good to align by creating a conceptual end punishment for acting in self-interest rather than communal interest. This has had limited success when the benefit difference of acting in public interests and self interests is great, with self interest on top.
I submit that a well-organized society attempts to eliminate these conflicts, ie: attempts to align self and social interests so that they are not at odds with one another.
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Several folks have pointed out that the headline inappropriately anthropomorphizs what is really just a solution discovered by a genetic algorithm. That might be true. If it is, let's be consistent. People don't lie or tell the truth, either, because our brains are also just a solution discovered by a genetic algorithm.