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IBM Researchers Teach Pac-Man To Do No Harm (fastcompany.com)

harrymcc writes: The better AI gets at teaching itself to perform tasks in ways beyond the skills of mere humans, the more likely it is that it may unwittingly behave in ways a human would consider unethical. To explore ways to prevent this from happening, IBM researchers taught AI to play Pac-Man without ever gobbling up the ghosts. And it did so without ever explicitly telling the software that this was the goal. Over at Fast Company, I wrote about this project and what IBM learned from conducting it.

The researchers built a piece of software that could balance the AI's ratio of self-devised, aggressive game play to human-influenced ghost avoidance, and tried different settings to see how they affected its overall approach to the game. By doing so, they found a tipping point -- the setting at which Pac-Man went from seriously chowing down on ghosts to largely avoiding them.

2 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. Re: I fail to see what this has to do with ethics by cascadingstylesheet · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    That's the Conservative Pac Man you're describing. The Liberal Pac Man ...

    -

    No, the Liberal Pac Man is a poseur who expects someone else to take care of the world's problems because he is too busy trying to be cool to actually get his hands dirty.

    He also insists that you call him Zhe Pacman. He identifies that way.

  2. Re: Precisely. Just like AI. by nospam007 · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    "Its just an applied dataset. Nothing magical. Nothing world-changing."

    You have no instinct for science.