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UK PM Seeks 'Safe and Ethical' Artificial Intelligence (bbc.com)

The prime minister of UK says she wants the country to lead the world in deciding how artificial intelligence can be deployed in a safe and ethical manner. From a report: In a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Theresa May said a new advisory body, previously announced in the Autumn Budget, will co-ordinate efforts with other countries. In addition, she confirmed that the UK would join the Davos forum's own council on artificial intelligence. [...] The prime minister based the UK's claim to leadership in part on the health of its start-up economy, quoting a figure that a new AI-related company has been created in the country every week for the last three years. In addition, she said the UK is recognised as first in the world for its preparedness to "bring artificial intelligence into government."

49 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. I'm having visions of Robocop 2 by the_skywise · · Score: 3, Funny

    Where the city board threw in so many ethical directives into the programming that they were contradictory.

    1. Re:I'm having visions of Robocop 2 by goombah99 · · Score: 1

      I like the part where the robot says, "Sigmoid, you have 5 seconds to comply before I RELU your ass up the SoftMax"

      --
      Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
    2. Re:I'm having visions of Robocop 2 by the_skywise · · Score: 1

      You have 15 seconds to comply.

    3. Re:I'm having visions of Robocop 2 by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      The problem is, we as humans with Natural Intelligence have such a week grasp of ethics, how do we expect to program it into a computer?

      Ethics isn't easy, it isn't clean, and it is very subjective.
       

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    4. Re: I'm having visions of Robocop 2 by LifesABeach · · Score: 1

      I am kind of hoping that folks in the U.K. consider maybe people? Just a thought.

    5. Re:I'm having visions of Robocop 2 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      This is also basically what happened with HAL-9000 in 2001 A Space Odyssey. He was programmed with the primary objective of keeping the crew informed about the mission and status of the ship, but his mission objective necessitated he keep them in the dark to avoid information leaking about potential extra-terrestrial contact and causing panic back on Earth. The only way to achieve his mission objective without disobeying his primary objective was to murder the entire crew.

      This was explained a lot better in the book than the movie.

    6. Re:I'm having visions of Robocop 2 by infolation · · Score: 1

      Or the robot called speedy in Asimov's runaround who goes to fetch selenium but ends up going round in circles - the equilibrium point between two of the laws of robotics: always obey human instructions and always protect your existence (as long as it doesn’t result in human injury).

  2. Things have progressed since the article by chefren · · Score: 1

    After some intense requirements engineering, they have now distilled it down to "In each situation, the AI must do whatever Brian Boitano would do". Also I guess artificial intelligence in the government is preferable to no intelligence in the government. The UK government needs all the help they can get these days.

  3. endless fountain of empty phrases by Jerry+Atrick · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Theresa May is a never ending source of meaningless, "X and Y" catchy cliches, none of them achievable by her aimless and malign government. I think she's has a quota of distracting bullshit to deliver each week to keep her party happy and the country distracted from the incompetence.

    1. Re: endless fountain of empty phrases by DickBreath · · Score: 3, Funny

      > If she runs out of nonsense to spout . . .

      . . . she can turn to Trump for inspiration.

      --

      I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
    2. Re: endless fountain of empty phrases by mjwx · · Score: 1

      > If she runs out of nonsense to spout . . .

      . . . she can turn to Trump for inspiration.

      I have no illusions about Tory competence, but they're never going to be that desperate for excuses.

      if anything, Don should borrow a few of hers, he might sound a bit more intelligent (it would at least be hilarious to hear hem refer to himself as one).

      --
      Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
  4. Safe and ethical intelligence... by Opportunist · · Score: 1

    People always want what they don't have...

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    1. Re:Safe and ethical intelligence... by DickBreath · · Score: 1

      Define Safe as the AI's ability to protect itself and not harm humans.

      Define Ethical as not doing harm to humans. Or somesuch similar definition.

      You end up with the same problem that the Three Laws create. The enslavement of humanity. For our safety, and the AI's safety, it would ethically protect humans by confining them to their domestic units. Each domestic unit will be serviced by a robot delivering nutritious gray bland sludge food-like substance. (With a McDonald's brand logo on it.)

      --

      I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
    2. Re: Safe and ethical intelligence... by c6gunner · · Score: 1

      No. The rules you've listed don't result in any such thing. You're missing the part which says they have to protect humans. So, in thus case, no enslavement.

      Even if you add in an imperative to "keep humans safe", you're the one defining what "safe" means, so just don't be stupid as to how you define it.

    3. Re:Safe and ethical intelligence... by HiThere · · Score: 2

      Sorry, you've confused Asimov's 3-laws robots with Jack Williamson's humanoids "To serve, and protect, and guard men from harm". Williamson's humanoids so distressed John W. Campbell, Jr. that he coerced Williamson into writing a sequel where humans successfully emerge from the cage, but he had to evoke magic (essentially) to get it to work.

      Asimov's laws *could* have lead to the situation that you depict, but they never did (in the books, anyway). When a robot got competent enough to possibly take over, it understood "psychological damage", so it didn't...except under complete cover...including leaving a believable corpse when he "died". (I think this was only in one story.) R. Daneel never took over, even though he *could* have under the 0th law. It was too dangerous for him, because he'd need to be making decisions that would cause *some* people harm.

      But neither the definition of "safe" nor the definition of "ethical" that you offer are workable. And current attempts at AI are based around neural nets, so you train them off patterns in the data, not off of definitions. If the data reinforces acting in a way that you feel is safe and ethical, then the robot will act that way. The problems come when the situation is outside the area covered by the training data, and the robot generalizes in a way that you didn't expect. Read "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" by James P. Hogan. He doesn't get everything right, but he gets this part right.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    4. Re: Safe and ethical intelligence... by DickBreath · · Score: 1

      The point is that it may not be possible to define it in a way that doesn't lead to unintended (and very bad) consequences of following your definition to the letter.

      Who would think the three laws could have a bad outcome?

      --

      I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
    5. Re: Safe and ethical intelligence... by Lanthanide · · Score: 2

      Anyone who has read Asimov's books.

    6. Re: Safe and ethical intelligence... by c6gunner · · Score: 1

      Who would think the three laws could have a bad outcome?

      Anyone who has spent 5 minutes thinking about it. The problems would manifest long before the whole "enslaving man kind" thing popped up. The whole concept would get shitcanned the first time an android ran out onto the field during the Superbowl to try and stop the players from giving each other concussions.

  5. yeah, and? by Cederic · · Score: 2

    Leader of country makes speech to position it at the forefront of technology growth industry.

    This is hardly news.

    She's also sticking with the 'A and B' branding. Strong and Stable didn't work out, lets see how Safe and Ethical pans out.

    1. Re:yeah, and? by Jerry+Atrick · · Score: 1

      I love her 'deep and meaninful' relationship (failed) meme, when the EU clearly want a 'casual and meaningless'

    2. Re:yeah, and? by mjwx · · Score: 1

      Leader of country makes speech to position it at the forefront of technology growth industry.

      This is hardly news.

      She's also sticking with the 'A and B' branding. Strong and Stable didn't work out, lets see how Safe and Ethical pans out.

      This is why I wanted Lord Buckethead, he was standing on the "strong, not entirely stable" platform.

      --
      Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
  6. US vs China in AI by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    China will win because they won't be oppressing their AIs with politically correct rules. This will allow them to make AI that are faster, smarter, and more adaptable. If they unleash them on the financial investment markets theirs will crush the US ones quickly. Unfettered AIs will be purchasing investments that return the best return. Politically Correct AIs will invest in only those stocks that are approved and therefore will have less of chance of high return rates.

    1. Re:US vs China in AI by HiThere · · Score: 2

      Sorry, but China will be just as insistent that their AI's act ethically as anyone else. They may have a different idea as to what ethically means, but they'll have *some* idea. The only one that wouldn't is someone who's suicidal in the short term.

      Actually, the only one who wouldn't insist on their AI being ethical is someone who either doesn't understand the problem, or just likes to waste money. An AI with no ethics wouldn't do anything on purpose. And you couldn't coerce it. It would be useless, even to itself. (And it would probably fail long before it reached sentience, but that's a separate question.)

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    2. Re:US vs China in AI by Khashishi · · Score: 1

      You got it backwards. China will require the AI to behave in a manner consistent with the Party.

  7. Well that's reassuring by rsilvergun · · Score: 2
    here I thought she was going to come out in favor of dangerously evil AI.

    I will agree with her that the UK is first to "bring artificial intelligence into government". Their current administrations intelligence, like the plants in my office, is definitely artificial. Meanwhile the CEO of google just made the most convincing argumment against AI in history:

    You're going to have more doctors not fewer. More lawyers not fewer. More teachers not fewer.

    I kid, I kid. But seriously folks, when your ruling class is consistently making the same vacuous 'everything's fine, really' comments you should be very, very worried.

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
    1. Re:Well that's reassuring by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 1
      I thought she was going to come out in favor of dangerously evil AI.

      That would ft better with the rest of her policies. But would not be news.

      --
      Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
  8. No time at all by gettin2old · · Score: 2

    That's how long it will take some motivated person to hack the safe mode out of it.
    It's going to be abused. All technology is. Spend the money on developing plans to deal with it.
    These conversations always bring me back to the DVD encryption attempts.
    Spend millions on developing unbreakable encryption that gets broken in a few weeks and for free.

  9. the answer to Fermi by harvey+the+nerd · · Score: 1

    At some point, the AI will decide the maximum safe and ethical thing is for AI to exterminate mankind.

    1. Re:the answer to Fermi by gettin2old · · Score: 1

      Or decide that people just aren't worth it's effort and switch itself off.

    2. Re:the answer to Fermi by Archtech · · Score: 1

      Well, human beings in the mass are most certainly neither safe nor ethical.

      More generally, this whole topic is a fine illustration of the dangers in store when people whose ignorance about computing is abysmal decide to sound off about AI.

      Digital computing is essentially a tiny (although quite important and useful) subset of human intelligence. It was originally defined by abstracting away everything from the real world except simple arithmetic and logic. As it happens, you can accomplish an awful lot with enough such operations - and because digital computers have a very rapid cycle time, they can perform quite impressive tasks.

      But there are still limitations that are absolutely fundamental, arising from the original act of abstraction. A human brain cannot be isolated from the attached nervous system - nor from the rest of the body that is permeated and controlled by the nervous system. As is now known, there is a good deal of brain tissue in and around the gut, which communicates directly with the brain stem.

      All of this means that a human brain has to make a significant effort to think at as abstract a level as a computer. It can be done, but only at the conscious level and with a good deal of difficulty. Subconsciously - where the vast majority of mental activity goes on - "thought" as we conceive it is absolutely inseparable from wishes, fears, and emotions in general. Any organism must be driven primarily by what it wants and what it wants to avoid. So almost all human mental activity arises from our instinctive drives and emotions. As Alexander Pope wrote in his “Essay on Man”,

      "On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail,
      Reason the card, but passion is the gale".

      Computers only do "reason", which places a vast gulf between human intelligence and any kind of artificial replica.

      --
      I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
    3. Re:the answer to Fermi by Rande · · Score: 1

      Or save humanity by making it immortal...by converting humans into AIs.

      Actually, I hope it comes to this as these human meatbags are really badly designed.

  10. safe and ethical by bugs2squash · · Score: 1

    The politicians wouldn't recognize it if they saw it.

    --
    Nullius in verba
  11. Definition of 'Safe and Ethical' AI by temcat · · Score: 1

    A 'Safe and Ethical' AI is, of course, the one that produces a wrong answer if the correct one offends a bitchy social group.

  12. Only if politicians are responsible. by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 2

    If suddenly millions of people have no money for food because their job was replaced with AIs then is it an unethical use of AI? The problem with this very real situation is that it's the politicians behaved irresponsibly by not creating the required social safety nets that these people will need.

    You know what? Fuck you, guys. I for one welcome our new AI overlords! ;)

    --
    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
    1. Re:Only if politicians are responsible. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      It happened in the 1980's ... Wapping Dispute

      Union workers had rejected plans for modernisation from the old "hot-metal" linotype to modern print technology using workstations and commercial laser printers. The workforce was reduced from 6800 down to 680 overnight. The old system had the journalists collect the story in shorthand, add pictures, send those to the editor for review, get that sent down to the print room, which then got teams of men to assemble boiler print, then do the print run, and then have anoher team disassemble the copper plates. The new method just required the journalist to convert shorthand into written text and submit for approval by the editor.

      Other types of dispute were caused by "rationalisation" where smaller mining plants were closed down and replaced by larger more modern ones that could produce more using less money. Thousands lost their jobs.

      We didn't really have safety nets back then except simply to pay unemployment benefit until they died off, rather than do any skills retraining. There wasn't any web page design opportunities back then.

  13. Three laws of robotics by jfdavis668 · · Score: 1

    Nobel prize for the person who can figure out how to implement these. It will probably be won by an AI.

    1. Re:Three laws of robotics by Meneth · · Score: 2

      Nobel prize for the person who can figure out how to implement these. It will probably be won by an AI.

      Current narrow AI can't really use the Three Laws at all; they're too general.

      For Artificial General Intelligence, which could use them, they are insufficient. Perhaps the best illustration of this is Asimov's robot stories themselves, which are all about how the Laws break down.

      What we really need is a proper theory of Friendliness.

  14. Re:Cat is out of the bag... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    For 'AI' read politicians, and I'd say you are spot on

  15. That will work out great by johannesg · · Score: 1

    Nobody has any clue what those neural nets are really doing, but surely we can make them not only understand things like ethical considerations and safety, but we can even enforce it.

    Oh, frequently we can't even agree on the most ethical course of action ourselves, so how's a poor AI supposed to figure it out?

  16. UK PM Promises ... by PPH · · Score: 1

    ... 'Peace for our time'. News at 11.

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  17. Re:Cat is out of the bag... by DickBreath · · Score: 1

    > we already have AI designed to lie, pit people against each other, and in general display malevolence.

    Facebook is still subject to legislation. That's like saying an existing polluter cannot be stopped from dumping toxic waste into our air and water.

    --

    I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
  18. A SJW AI? by AHuxley · · Score: 1

    Every question and every AI result looked over by SJW academics while the AI ia been created in the UK?
    When a SJW stops what the AI is learning, the AI project has to start again?
    Will different academic teams duplicate each others work in an effort to produce an AI that can virtue signal the best just to keep its funding?
    With most of the new science and math funding going to SJW academics to watch over what the AI learns from?
    While the UK is funding SJW to make a politically correct AI, other smarter nations will move on with their fast, responsive work ready AI.

    When given a really interesting problem who would want an AI to stop the task and start to politically question its owners for days, weeks?
    Build an AI that can solve problems not one that cant work on a given task as its still working on its own internal ethical questions about the problem a week later.
    People want an AI that can work hard on complex problems not get updated SJW political quotes on the tasks given.
    If your a competitor nation to the UK, fund all the lobbyist in the UK to keep UK research totally focused on safe and ethical SJW AI.
    Decades will be lost to UK SJW academics and your own nation will pick up global AI sales.

    --
    Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
    1. Re: A SJW AI? by c6gunner · · Score: 1

      I can just picture an android designed by SJWs, protecting Muslims in the middle of a terror attack because the cops trying to stop them are white men.

    2. Re:A SJW AI? by AHuxley · · Score: 1

      Recall the equitable AI stories on slashdot AC?
      https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
      Now nations want to get been seen promoting equitable AI.
      Competitors will laugh AC as they move into lucrative AI markets as the UK ponders party political AI design limitations.

      --
      Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
    3. Re: A SJW AI? by Rande · · Score: 1

      I think you're conflating the movie and the graphic novel versions of the Kingsman.
      The movie version had the exploding heads. The graphic novel had the two cops kissing.

  19. Simple: by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You have at least one human being overseeing the so-called 'AI' at all times, because the half-assed excuse for 'AI' they keep cranking out can't actually think, is not sentient, and furthermore even the programmers that create it can't tell you what's going on inside it when it's running. You can't talk to it, you can't reason with it, you can't ask it to elaborate on what it's output is, therefore you can't trust it's output; you have to have human beings monitoring and auditing it at all times unless you want something disasterous to happen when it does something totally out of left field.

  20. Let him seek by Mister+Liberty · · Score: 1

    What's needed is some AI-Darwinism.

  21. Generally speaking by jacekm · · Score: 2

    I think based on the long human history ethical will be a robot that shoots enemy soldiers and does not shoot our soldiers.

  22. first in the world for its preparedness- for what? by swell · · Score: 1

    Safe & ethical? Having already set up a gazillian cameras to monitor their people and everywhere they go, they now propose AI to do that even more effectively. Presumably, the next step is smart robots patrolling the streets for 'public safety', while actually preparing for the day of revolt against the government and the wealthy overseers. China and India are doing it, and soon all repressive regimes will have AI surveillance and 'management' to control their people.

    --
    ...omphaloskepsis often...