Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Could Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics Ensure Safe AI? (wikipedia.org)
The original submission cites Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics from the 1950 collection I, Robot.
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
The original submission asks, "If you programmed an AI not to be able to break an updated and extended version of Asimov's Laws, would you not have reasonable confidence that the AI won't go crazy and start harming humans? Or are Asimov and other writers who mulled these questions 'So 20th Century' that AI builders won't even consider learning from their work?"
Wolfrider (Slashdot reader #856) is an Asimov fan, and writes that "Eventually I came across an article with the critical observation that the '3 Laws' were used by Asimov to drive plot points and were not to be seriously considered as 'basics' for robot behavior. Additionally, Giskard comes up with a '4th Law' on his own and (as he is dying) passes it on to R. Daneel Olivaw."
And Slashdot reader Rick Schumann argues that Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics "would only ever apply to a synthetic mind that can actually think; nothing currently being produced is capable of any such thing, therefore it does not apply..."
But what are your own thoughts? Do you think Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics could ensure safe AI?
EVERY Azimov Robot story was designed to show the unintended consequences of the Three Laws....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
First. You'd need to train every single ai to recognize human beings as human beings. ...
Then the concept of harm to a human (id REALLY like to see the cases for training this)
Also the laws were designed to show there is a flaw in them hence the zeroth law.
"1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."
Current robots don't understand what a human being is, injury, inaction, or harm.
"2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law."
Current robots do not understand what an order is, what a human being is, or what conflict is.
"3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law."
Current robots do not understand protection, existence, or conflict.
Current robots LITERALLY cannot apply Asimov's three laws. We simply don't have the tools to even begin to reason about how to teach them to reason about these laws, and there is no reason to believe we'll have those tools any time soon.
except a 4th Law
or a zero'th
Why the 3 laws of robotics are not serious and for entertainment only and would never work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
A possible way to design AI to help humans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The Zeroth Law of Robotics, was added later, but non-the-less quite crucial for safe use of AI.
Looking at the laws that use the word 'harm', take a moment to try and define what it means to harm a human being - not so simple is it? Now try and encode that in an AI, way more difficult.
How would you think Christian Fundamentalist, or a Radical Islamist would define 'harm' - they differ from each other. Okay, now assume a totally rational human being, how would they define 'harm'? The last question is a bit unfair, as totally rational human beings don't exist!
Imagine an AI set up to maximise profit for shareholders of a Pharmaceutical company, it might be very effective. However, they may be nothing to prevent it from doing something that would wipe out mankind. Release a drug that cures something quite common, build in to it a facility to modify DNA to ensure children crave the drug during adolescence & ensure they can't reproduce if they don't get it. What could go wrong? After all, the production facilities in the USA will always exist, and everyone can buy the drug cheap, right???
... really. Can humans actually build the three laws of robotics into AI?
The answer is, "No."
Recall that AI is so primitive that it can't tell if the Sun comes up because the rooster crows, or the other way around.
Amid rapid developments and nagging setbacks, one essential building block of human intelligence has eluded machines for decades: Understanding cause and effect. Put simply, today's machine-learning programs can't tell whether a crowing rooster makes the sun rise, or the other way around
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
if ( your_god() != my_god()){
you_are_human = false;
}
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
First of all, the term "AI" is kind of meaningless, unless it's distilled - for the purposes of argument - to a single definition that everyone in the discussion agrees will be the kind of AI they're prepared to discuss. I think that's essential, so we're not conflating Google's Duplex, for instance, with an AI of greater-than-human intelligence that has acquired the ability to alter its own programming, and make decisions based on criteria it develops itself.
For purposes of this discussion, I propose we agree that the subject is the latter sort of AI, and that the possible models it might evolve to resemble include: Skynet, Iain M. Banks' Shipminds (and, to a lesser extent, and Nick Haflinger's final worm from John Brunner's Shockwave Rider), or wide-eyed children, à la Mike from The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (and other end-period "the world as myth" Heinlein novels) or Thomas J. Ryan's P-1.
My own opinion, as a not-an-AI-researcher, is that, with the exception of Haflinger's worm, none of those types of AI could be constrained by Asimov's Laws - or by any other behavioral rules - because all of them are capable of independent thought, and, for lack of a better term, free will. (Or "agency," if you prefer.)
Humans demonstrably are capable of ignoring, or even deliberately flouting, both government-enacted laws and religion-based moral strictures (such as the Christian ten commandments), and they frequently do so. Any AI that is possessed of greater-than-human intelligence and is capable of independent decision-making obviously will have the same capability to act in ways contrary to literal "codes of conduct" that were part of its program at the time it was "born." So to speak.
So, to me, the question is ill-conceived to begin with. A better, and more useful one to ask might be, "How can we create the proper circumstances for a superintelligent AI to come to like us humans, and to want to help and protect us, before we expose it, as carefully and gently as possible, to the record of humanity's behavior since the dawn of recorded history. Not to mention Twitter trolls, political attack ads, and the then-current-day example of the strong exploiting the weak in almost every human society ... ?
Check out my novel.