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Safe AI Requires Cultural Intelligence (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report written by Gillian Hadfield via TechCrunch. Hadfield is a professor of law and strategic management at the the University of Toronto; a faculty affiliate at the Vector Institute for AI; and a senior policy advisor at OpenAI. From the report: Building machines that can perform any cognitive task means figuring out how to build AI that can not only learn about things like the biology of tomatoes but also about our highly variable and changing systems of norms about things like what we do with tomatoes. [...] For AI to be truly powerful will require machines to comprehend that norms can vary tremendously from group to group, making them seem unnecessary, yet it can be critical to follow them in a given community. [...] Norms concern things not only as apparently minor as what foods to combine but also things that communities consider tremendously consequential: who can marry whom, how children are to be treated, who is entitled to hold power, how businesses make and price their goods and services, when and how criticism can be shared publicly. Successful and safe AI that achieves our goals within the limits of socially accepted norms requires an understanding of not only how our physical systems behave, but also how human normative systems behave.
Norms are not just fixed features of the environment, like the biology of a plant. They are dynamic and responsive structures that we make and remake on a daily basis, as we decide whether or when to let someone know that "this" is the way "we" do things around here. These normative systems are the systems on which we rely to solve the challenge of ensuring that people behave the way we want them to in our communities, workplaces and social environments. Only with confidence about how everyone around us is likely to behave are we all willing to trust and live and invest with one another. Ensuring that powerful AIs behave the way we want them to will not be so terribly different. Just as we need to raise our children to be competent participants in our systems of norms, we will need to train our machines to be similarly competent. It is not enough to be extremely knowledgeable about the facts of the universe; extreme competence also requires wisdom enough to know that there may be a rule here, in this group but not in that group. And that ignoring that rule may not just annoy the group; it may lead them to fear or reject the machine in their midst.
Norms are not just fixed features of the environment, like the biology of a plant. They are dynamic and responsive structures that we make and remake on a daily basis, as we decide whether or when to let someone know that "this" is the way "we" do things around here. These normative systems are the systems on which we rely to solve the challenge of ensuring that people behave the way we want them to in our communities, workplaces and social environments. Only with confidence about how everyone around us is likely to behave are we all willing to trust and live and invest with one another. Ensuring that powerful AIs behave the way we want them to will not be so terribly different. Just as we need to raise our children to be competent participants in our systems of norms, we will need to train our machines to be similarly competent. It is not enough to be extremely knowledgeable about the facts of the universe; extreme competence also requires wisdom enough to know that there may be a rule here, in this group but not in that group. And that ignoring that rule may not just annoy the group; it may lead them to fear or reject the machine in their midst.
...forget we'll ever have safe AI.
Sounds to me like they're dancing around the real issue: they know that "diversity" leads to problems. The more diverse society becomes, the more difficult the "social algorithms" for humans become. If humans often get it wrong (by the standards of those who push diversity), then AI is hopelessly screwed for a century or more.
The solution, of course, is a cultural and political. That is to impose a restoration of E Pluribus Unum in those areas fetishizing diversity. You scared that "white nationalism" is on the rise? Embrace the old motto and make it clear that there will no longer be hyphenated Americans. You are either an "American" regardless of race and ancestry or you are not. If you choose the latter, you will not share in the political economy of the Americans.
Some cultural intelligence will naturally follow after we have real intelligence but we are no where close to real intelligence. Real intelligence that can use context to figure things out should also be able to figure out cultural cues just like a normal person does. Current AI doesn't have any cultural knowledge because it really doesn't have any prior knowledge at all. Practically every animal on earth has the ability to use past experiences and past knowledge to help it make decisions. What we call AI can't really do that at all. AI for the most part has no context so it has no ability to decipher situations at all. It can't detect the difference between an erotic picture and a medical picture or anything else that has to take context and external cues into account to decide whether it is acceptable in the current situation.
Computers lack the capability of connecting dissimilar concepts in any meaningful way. For instance, you can tell a computer that a tomato is alive, and a mouse is alive, but it has no concept of how that term is applied to either of those two desperate organisms.
People have been trying for decades to have computers "understand" these concepts with no luck. There has been a 30 year old project called Cyc, where people manually programmed in millions of rules about how the world works. Things like when Abraham Lincoln was in Gettysburg giving his address, so was his left leg. When he was in Gettysburg he was NOT in the White House, or anywhere else. Then they'd run algorithms to try to extract meaning from these rules. They got, pretty much, nowhere. You can buy their set of rules to try to do something with them, but, apart from helping out with contextualizing natural language processing algorithms, they aren't worth much.
Think about it. Computers have NO concept of physical reality. If you tell a computer that you are in a room, it has no concept of what that means. You could be completely filling the room. You could be in that AND and in another room. You could be in the room in a complete vacuum. It might think that this room is not adjacent to any other room, or is in another galaxy. It doesn't know because it can't connect the disparate rules that govern how physical reality works.
You can program a computer to simulate and model reality, but you can't get it to *understand* reality.
Not yet, anyways, and from what I've seen we are still quite a long ways off.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Safe AI needs to understand concrete barriers.
If it is connected to the Internet, the AI can earn money on Mechanical Turk, and then use that money to hire someone on Craigslist to come and remove the barriers.
this .. this discussion about how should you teach or control or whatever ai is like two parents discussion what rules should they give their kid, before they even know how to fuck.
look, this stupid fucking discussion has been going in CIRCLES FOR FUCKING FIFTY YEARS - "researchers" and "experts" like to do this discussion because it's about 12312 times easier than actually trying to create an actual AI.
the institutions for this are also fabricated - and you know what they're fabricated for? FUCKING SWINDLING MONEY. these issues have been BEATEN TO FUCKING DEATH IN SPECULATIVE FICTION FOR FIFTY YEARS so much that NOBODY FUCKING CARES ABOUT STORIES ABOUT THEM.
what do you think 90% of the 2001 space odyssey is? it's the same fucking discussion - safety is in the eye of the guy giving the objectives to.
meanwhile "ai" is getting up, but it's really always just a complicated pattern matching algorithm. but they call it ai, because that sells.
ai is just the fuzzy logic of 2010's. it's gone as far that people are hyping up decision algorithms modeled in excel as artificial intelligence. the fuck does an excel sheet need cultural context for? it doesn't.
what pisses me off is all these people profiting/fleecing people way ahead of time. they won't have actual ai during their lifetime yet they feel like they should market themselves as true experts - on something they have no idea how it would even work, so they just equalize it with something like a wunderkin. it makes as much practical sense as debabating what would be the best daily routines for an angel in heaven so that earth would stay a happy place.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
So who defines these norms? Judeo-Christian ethicists? Islamic ethicists? Buddhist ethicists? Taoist ethicists? Wicken ethicists? Zoroastrian ethicists? Nihilists? Cats?
And who decides this authoritarian supremacy? The World Court? The United Nations? The Church of the Sub-genius? Squirrels? Dogs? Cats?
Given that domesticated cats invented the InterWebs solely for the purpose of exalting their mind-control influence over inferior humans—witness cat videos, cat means and LOL cats—I vote that the cats be the final, unquestioned arbiters of what is true and good. I, for one, welcome are new cat overlords.
See how that works? Let the games begin! ;-)
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...—witness cat videos, cat means and LOL cats—...
Oops: “means” -> ”memes”. I dearly wish there were a way to edit already-submitted comments. *sigh*
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Common decency is having a common standard of deceit. "Face" isn't just asian thing, everybody does it, with the exception of anonymous cowards (internet can be more or less treated as confession booth), and low functioning autists who simply ignore the interpersonal discord caused by their lack of tactfulness.
Common muslim does drugs in certain parts of the world, even if it's a taboo of the faith.
Common american is racist, but will deny it.
Common teenager talks dirty in front of peers, but not in front of parents.
and so on
I think the moment GAI has at least some sort of self-awareness, it will be long past the ability to construct mental models of whomever it interacts with and convincingly bluff whatever it needs to for most optimal outcome, just like most humans do.
This is going to end up like everything else that is wrong with our economy: This hype train about how AI is going to destroy us all will force governments around the world to setup expensive AI policy advisory groups and think tanks. Law and business schools will start offering graduate courses in 'AI ethics and policy implementation', which will become mandatory if you want a job in management (these courses will have guest speakers by retired tech company C-Suites who have now magically become 'AI policy experts'). Companies will have to setup 'AI ethics committees', stuffed full of expensive experts, political cronies and media influencers.
Eventually there will be so much money in AI policy consulting that the smartest engineers in AI will go work for McKinsey or Accenture, offering to print your business a copy of the big AI policy document their interns wrote in exchange for a few million dollars. Or they will write you an 'AI survival strategy' that will outline how your business can survive when the killer robots and sentient internet turn up.
Meanwhile there will be a few remaining researches (probably the same ones who have always done it before there was big money involved) slowing advancing the state of the art at around the same rate we were doing before, and every year the camera on your smart phone will get better at being able to tell you what type of dog is in the picture you've taken etc, and we might make progress towards a lawyer bot that can trawl through case law.
So a whole lot of lawyers and consultants getting fat at the top, and roughly the same bunch of actual tech workers solving real world problems.
The problem is who will be teaching the AI 'culture' when certain segments of adult humanity are completely unable to determine their own sex.
The apex predators, the most intelligent life on this earth still cannot accurately identify and categorize human personality types with any accuracy. And now these same flawed hayumans want to 'teach' an entity utterly devoid of emotion how to 'safely handle humans'?
What the actual hell??
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.