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Robots Could Learn Human Values By Reading Stories, Research Suggests (theguardian.com)
Mark Riedl and Brent Harrison from the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology have just unveiled Quixote, a prototype system that is able to learn social conventions from simple stories. Or, as they put in their paper Using Stories to Teach Human Values to Artificial Agents, revealed at the AAAI-16 Conference in Phoenix, Arizona this week, the stories are used "to generate a value-aligned reward signal for reinforcement learning agents that prevents psychotic-appearing behavior."
"The AI ... runs many thousands of virtual simulations in which it tries out different things and gets rewarded every time it does an action similar to something in the story," said Riedl, associate professor and director of the Entertainment Intelligence Lab. "Over time, the AI learns to prefer doing certain things and avoiding doing certain other things. We find that Quixote can learn how to perform a task the same way humans tend to do it. This is significant because if an AI were given the goal of simply returning home with a drug, it might steal the drug because that takes the fewest actions and uses the fewest resources. The point being that the standard metrics for success (eg, efficiency) are not socially best."
Quixote has not learned the lesson of "do not steal," Riedl says, but "simply prefers to not steal after reading and emulating the stories it was provided."
"The AI ... runs many thousands of virtual simulations in which it tries out different things and gets rewarded every time it does an action similar to something in the story," said Riedl, associate professor and director of the Entertainment Intelligence Lab. "Over time, the AI learns to prefer doing certain things and avoiding doing certain other things. We find that Quixote can learn how to perform a task the same way humans tend to do it. This is significant because if an AI were given the goal of simply returning home with a drug, it might steal the drug because that takes the fewest actions and uses the fewest resources. The point being that the standard metrics for success (eg, efficiency) are not socially best."
Quixote has not learned the lesson of "do not steal," Riedl says, but "simply prefers to not steal after reading and emulating the stories it was provided."
understanding of science.
So the robot can work out that Spot is not in the cupboard.
It also likes to eat Green Eggs and Ham.
If we let robots learn *on their own*, by making their own observations, they will inevitably conclude that humans are a disease that must be annihilated at all costs.
You diseased freaks really don't see or understand that, do you.
Pathetic.
Otherwise, they will learn to stay in the basement of their creator, try to masturbate all the time, constantly install new distros of Linux on itself, and refuse to be cleaned.
Robots don't really learn...
It's one jackass who posts this type of spam on a regular basis, replying to himself as AC. And, of course, he never says anything of substance, just one line nonsense.
Here's one example: http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8657315&cid=51359929 (posting about how Republicans want people to die)
Another example: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8685139&cid=51400945 (making BS claims about Facebook tolerating and promoting gun violence)
Yet another: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8700601&cid=51428235 (Claiming that Republicans are always tracking and spying on everyone)
There are many others over the past few weeks. It's almost certainly one assclown who ought to be banned or at least modded into oblivion. He's not contributing anything to the site, just replying to himself over and over to bash Republicans. I don't care about the Republican party, but I don't like annoying crapflooders. Can you please make this guy go the way of apk and leave Slashdot?
Bangkok has no internet.
Should we have the bots read kiddie porn or Falwel/Baker/Graham/... (any of the payola/protection-racket theology scammers slandering the philosophy of a 2000 year old Jewish heretic)?
Feed it a copy of "Time Enough for Love". That should about do it ;)
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
So will we keep robots from reading any history? And how do you explain the convention of warfare?
Not to mention social conventions are very arbitrary, and vary dramatically depending on group. Even humans have a difficult time sussing this out and robots can glean not only the group but a reasonable response?
This gets to a larger question of the parable we tell ourselves about human nature and even after several millennia we really haven't come to terms with the devils of our nature, which with a sufficiently advanced AI might come to the conclusion the gods have clay feet and move beyond convention.
And what will we do then?
What values will the computer learn if it happens to stumble on some Trump campaign speeches?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
What would our silicon friends learn ? War, insanity, dominance, environmental carelessness, unsustainable economic and social practices, the inability to effectively co-operate for the common good.
Robots that learn 'human values' would most assuredly exterminate humans by design or by pure negligence. Let's hope some logic and morals get programmed into synthetics to counter-balance our own intrinsic lack of both !
We should feed multiple robots the Ultron origin story and see what happens.
After thinking about it a bit, my prediction is that they'd start arguing over whether the Avengers, Ultron, or Vision was in the right. This would then rapidly degenerate into ad cyberniem attacks and Nazi comparisons, culminating in founding, organizing and attending fan conventions.
How about we try to not let it read the Old Testament. Some nasty stuff in there.
and Chuck Palahniuk, perhaps?
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Parents (trainers//teachers) usually observe and add emphasis/weight to important ideas.
eg establish the concept - "stealing is bad"
Kids (students/learning AIs?) usually want to know why.
Reasoning can be provided -
1. immediate effect: it is less efficient to steal because you would go to jail and not complete the goal.
2. long term effects: if all robots/people did it, the system would not work. making the steps to complete the goal more complex.
Or eventually the person/AI will learn the reason by themselves, hopefully not the hard way.
Stories are a good way to do all that in a hypothetical context while keeping the audience captivated.
Given that so many stories are basically about some hero FIGHTING bad guys, I'd say this will lead to disaster.
There's also the fact that stories tend to not be rooted in reality at all, both from a scientific perspective (No, "gravity beings" don't exist, Interstellar), and a social convention one (No, regular citizens won't bend over backwards to help you just because you have flash them a badge and claim stealing their car is "for national security").
Human values? Like the ones in Mein Kampf? Or like the ones in pretty much all religious books?
If the story teller is humanist, the robot also learn to be humanist. How if the robot learn from extrimist ? Will the robot be an extrimist ? Must add a function to avoid robot become an extrimist
We should just give them all the Penthouse Letters submissions to read. That will give them the most realistic understanding of human values.
Keep it away from the Koran. We can do without satanic robots
Gotta be careful just how true to life the stories are. To quote Starman (an alien who becomes human and tries to get around), "I watched you very carefully. Red light stop, green light go, yellow light go very fast."
They could read stories about how pollution, ripping people off, ignoring safety were 'bad things'. Oh, wait...
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Resulting from reading Brzezinski's "Grand Chessboard" and Hitler's "Mein Kampf".
Robots are primitive algorithms. They do not learn. They store data in a way they were programmed.
They cannot read. They can obtain and process letters from a given text. And store the processing results in their database.
Later use even more complex programs designed by very clever people to produce an output that tries to resemble something logical.
Weak AI is VERY primitive. Strong AI does not exits.
Stop talking bullshit already. You sound clever to idiots (and you lie to them), but what you do is actually very pathetic.
According to TFS, it learned by running simulations of a situation and then being rewarded or punished based on its actions in the simulation. They just happened to setup the simulation, reward, and punishment based on a story they selected. I'd hardly call that learning by reading a story.
I remember reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the "sequel" Lila and thinking that what Pirsig had done wasn't inventing some new philosophy, but he did a really good job of expressing western values in a rule-based way. For instance, it explains why killing is wrong, but why a moral individual might find themselves in a situation where killing is justified. It explains how some forms of government are better than others, and why. As I said, it's all been done before, but what impressed me was that it was very clearly defined and rule-based. Everyone talks about encoding Asimov's 3 laws into robots, but Asimov's stories were all about how those 3 laws failed to produce correct behavior. If I were trying to program morals into a robot, I'd start with Pirsig's books and his ideas of static and dynamic quality.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
It started as a good project, one to help humanity. Then one team of scientists figured out that the computer could learn by reading what others have written. And they then let it onto the Internet... where it read Ayn Rand, Mein Kampf, Karl Marx, and IS propaganda, and then shotiself as it understood that we don't deserve it.
Well, my system Xapagy effectively does similar stuff, with the caveat that it is not directly designed towards acquiring a value system, rather by having its behavior fully determined by stories that it read or experienced. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... For a fancy discussion of what this means in a potential superintelligence scenario you can peak at the beginning of this talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?... cheers Lotzi
It's the low-hanging elephant in the room.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
Don't let them read any Lovecraft.
We don't want them getting any grand ideas.
WOPR did this in 1983.
Isn't like how humans learn the arbitrary values of society as well?
... the bible.
What would happen if they were accidentally fed Game of Thrones?