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The Sci-Fi Myth of Robotic Competence
malachiorion writes: "When it comes to robots, most of us are a bunch of Jon Snow know-nothings. With the exception of roboticists, everything we assume we know is based on science fiction, which has no reason to be accurate about its iconic heroes and villains, or journalists, who are addicted to SF references, jokes and tropes. That's my conclusion, at least, after a story I wrote Popular Science got some attention—it asked whether a robotic car should kill its owner, if it means saving two strangers. The most common dismissals of the piece claimed that robo-cars should simply follow Asimov's First Law, or that robo-cars would never crash into each other. These perspectives are more than wrong-headed—they ignore the inherent complexity and fallibility of real robots, for whom failure is inevitable. Here's my follow-up story, about why most of our discussion of robots is based on make-believe, starting with the myth of robotic hyper-competence."
We all know robots aren't competent. They are consistently being defeated by John Connor, the Doctor, and Starbuck.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Given this article mere moments ago on /. indicating that Google's autonomous cars have driven 700,000 miles on public roads with no citations, it's difficult to argue that they're not more competent, if not hyper-competent, compared to human drivers (most of whom get traffic tickets, and most of whom don't drive 700,000 miles between doing so).
Article has many good valid points, though, but that point irked me.
There was an article a short while ago written by a journalist who rode in a driverless car for a stretch. There was one adjective that really stood out, an adjective that most people don't take into consideration when talking about driverless cars.
That one word: boring.
Driverless cars drive in the most boring, conservative, milquetoast fashion imaginable. They're going to be far less prone to accidents from the outset simply because they don't take the kind of chances that many of us wouldn't even begin call "risky". They drive the speed limit. They follow at an appropriate distance. They don't pull quick lane changes to get ahead of slowpokes. They don't swing around blind corners faster than they can stop upon detecting an unexpected hazard. They don't nudge through crosswalks. They don't cut off cyclists in the bike lane. They don't get impatient. They don't get frustrated. They don't get angry. They don't get sleepy. They don't get distracted. They just drive, in a deliberate, controlled, and entirely boring fashion.
The problem with so, so many of the "what if?" accident scenarios is that the people posing said scenarios presume that the car would be putting itself in the same kinds of unnecessarily hazardous driving positions that human drivers put themselves in every single day, as a matter of routine, and without a moment's hesitation.
Very, very few people drive "boring" safe. Every driverless car will. Every trip. All the time.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Robots stores in Science Fiction are about powerful artificial sentient minds wrapped in an mobile and often human like container.
Robots in real life have been defined as machines with mechanical appendages that can programmed and reprogrammed for a variety of tasks. Their computational capabilities are seldom extraordinary and they usually don't even employ AI.
More recently, "robot" has also been used to describe machines with ai-like programming even if they are single function (like a robotic car).
When a word is used in three greatly different ways, should we be surprised that there is is confusion about that a "robot" can do?
Your entire premise is wrong. And now you're posting it again.
This will be a legal issue, not an issue solved by the "roboticists" whatever that is...
In a legal sense, taking an action that kills 1 person to save another puts you in jeopardy of being liable. Swerving or taking other actions that lead to someones death makes YOU responsible. If someone runs out in the road, you apply the breaks firmly and appropriately, then that is not your fault. It's the person who ran out into the road. So in cases where the computers unsure what to do, it will follow the first commandment "STOP THE CAR" and it will let things play out as they will. Any other choice opens up a can of worms... how old are the other occupants? If 1 car has a 90yr old in it and the other has a baby, which do you hit? What if ones the mayor? The problems increase exponentially as soon as you get away from "STOP THE CAR" so just stop the dang car and be done with it.
With regards to your comment about Scifi... you're reading pretty terrible SciFi. Most of the stuff I read is written by actual scientists so... yea...
I used to do software for industrial robots. Safety for the people around the robot was the number one concern, but it is amazing how easy it is for humans to give orders to a robot that will lead to it being damaged or destroyed. In practice, the robots would 'prioritize' protecting themselves rather than obeying suicidal orders.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
911 vehicles on the other hand should always value their own occupants less than than others,
The first rule taught in first responder classes is that if you become a casualty then you become worthless as a first responder. For example, as a lifeguard, if you die trying to save someone then they aren't going to survive, either. If that means you have to wait until the belligerent victim goes unconscious (and maybe unsavable) before you approach him, you wait.
The idea that every first responder vehicle must sacrifice itself and its occupants is going to result in very few people being first responders, either through choice or simple attrition.
The irony is that he's 180 degrees off from the main problem with his story, which is that he thinks robots are magic too. The reason robots will not be making ethical decisions is that they can't, not only because getting them to reason ethically would require us to agree on a system of ethics for them to follow, but because even if they had such a system, they don't have enough data to act on it with the degree of accuracy that would be required for the premise of the article to make sense. The author essentially assumes that these car-driving robots will be omniscient, or that they will be able to trust the omniscience of the robots in other cars with which they are communicating. The first supposition is nonsensical; the second is unlikely to be true, for the same reason that video game cheats are a problem.
Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics are justly famous. But people shouldn't assume that they will ever actually be used. They wouldn't really work.
Asimov wrote that he invented the Three Laws because he was tired of reading stories about robots running amok. Before Asimov, robots were usually used as a problem the heroes needed to solve. Asimov reasoned that machines are made with safeguards, and he came up with a set of safeguards for his fictional robots.
His laws are far from perfect, and Asimov himself wrote a whole bunch of stories taking advantage of the grey areas that the laws didn't cover well.
Let's consider a big one, the biggest one: according to the First Law, a robot may not harm a human, nor through inaction allow a human to come to harm. Well, what's a human? How does the robot know? If you dress a human in a gorilla costume, would the robot still try to protect him?
In the excellent hard-SF comic Freefall, a human asked Florence (an uplifted wolf with an artificial Three Laws design brain; legally she is a biological robot, not a person) how she would tell who is human. "Clothes", she said.
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1600/fc01585.htm
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1600/fc01586.htm
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1600/fc01587.htm
In Asimov's novel The Naked Sun, someone pointed out that you could build a heavily-armed spaceship that was controlled by a standard robotic brain and had no crew; then you could talk to it and tell it that all spaceships are unmanned, and any radio transmissions claiming humans are on board a ship are lies. Hey presto, you have made a robot that can kill humans.
Another problem: suppose someone just wanted to make a robot that can kill. Asimov's standard explanation was that this is impossible, because it took many people a whole lot of work to map out the robot brain design in the first place, and it would just be too much work to do all that work again. This is a mere hand-wave. "What man has done, man can aspire to do" as Jerry Pournelle sometimes says. Someone, somewhere, would put together a team of people and do the work of making a robot brain that just obeys all orders, with no pesky First Law restrictions. Heck, they could use robots to do part of the work, as long as they were very careful not to let the robots understand the implications of the whole project.
And then we get into "harm". In the classic short story "A Code for Sam", any robot built with the Three Laws goes insane. For example, allowing a human to smoke a cigarette is, through inaction, allowing a human to come to harm. Just watching a human walk across a road, knowing that a car could hit the human, would make a robot have a strong impulse to keep the human from crossing the street.
The Second Law is problematic too. The trivial Denial of Service attack against a Three Laws robot: "Destroy yourself now." You could order a robot to walk into a grinder, or beam radiation through its brain, or whatever it would take to destroy itself as long as no human came to harm. Asimov used this in some of his stories but never explained why it wasn't a huge problem... he lived before the Internet; maybe he just didn't realize how horrible many people can be.
There will be safeguards, but there will be more than just Three Laws. And we will need to figure things out like "if crashing the car kills one person and saves two people, do we tell the car to do it?"
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
IMOHO, one of the reasons that many people think that robots are "hyper-competent" is that too many people think that a program can encompass and accommodate every possible circumstance. Even if the robot cars, as a group, were able to arrive at omniscience (at least for their own realm) there will still occur events that no program has anticipated.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
If this ever comes up as a question than the person asking the question is obviously NOT an engineer.
Keep
It
Simple,
Stupid
The cars should be programmed to stop and revert to human control whenever there is a problem that the car is not programmed to handle.
And the car should only be programmed to handle DRIVING.
No. The car should not even be able to detect other occupants. Adding more complexity means more avenues for failure.
The car should understand obstacles and how to avoid them OR STOP AND LET THE HUMAN DRIVE.
No. Again, the car should understand obstacles and how to avoid them OR STOP AND LET THE HUMAN DRIVE. Emergency vehicles should ALWAYS be human controlled.
From TFA:
As is that entire article.
The entirety of the car's programming should be summed up as:
a. Is the way clear? If yes then go.
b. If not, are the obstacles ones that I am programmed for? If yes then go.
c. Stop.
Negative. K-9 would be a better example.
The Cybermen have living human brains. They are cyborgs, not robots.
If self-driving cars ceed control back to the real driver when things get "interesting", without all the conditiioning that driving countless kilometers will the driver still be able to react competently? Or will it be like throwing inexperenced learner-drivers into the deep end?
Driving is a skill, and like any skill it needs to be practiced often to stop going rusty...
IMOHO, one of the reasons that many people think that robots are "hyper-competent" is that too many people think that a program can encompass and accommodate every possible circumstance.
This simply reflects the tendency people have to believe in their own hyper-competence. Most interesting ethical issues are unsolvable in any formal sense by virtue of three simple facts:
1) moral values are ordinal, not cardinal (I value my children's lives more than my cats life, no matter how many cats I have)
2) we value outcomes but choose actions
3) outcomes are related to actions by some more-or-less broad probability distribution.
This means we cannot choose outcomes directly, but we cannot do probability calculations to assign values because ordinals don't support simple arithmetic.
There are two special cases that fortunately cover a lot of every-day life:
A) the probability distribution is narrow enough that we can ignore it, so we can effectively choose outcomes based on our ordinal values
B) there is a market in the outcomes we are choosing between, which allows us to compute cardinal (dollar) values from our ordinals, so we can do probability calculations on the domain.
But interesting moral quandries are simply not computable, so talking about them as if they are even by human beings is to go on a hiding to nowhere.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Did you read my original story, though? I wasn't proposing that autonomous cars will or should be magically transformed into ethical beings. I was just picking up Patrick Lin's notion, that we may have to do what current programmers do, in other capacities—work through tons and tons of branching in-then statements, making a staggering amount of decisions ahead of time, and then embed those in the robots before they're deployed. That assumes a lot of stuff, like incredibly advanced sensors and sophisticated networks, in order to detect and "solve" certain ethical problems, but even at a more basic level, shouldn't we decide, in advance, how a car should respond to a pedestrian darting into traffic, if there's no time or room to simply avoid a collision (with someone)?