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.

Comments

Re: I fail to see what this has to do with ethics

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the Conservative Pac Man you're describing. The Liberal Pac Man takes care not to eat the ghosts, and uses whatever points he get from eating pellets in a sustainable way to pay for ghost shelters and outreach to better understand them and protect them.

They missed the broader ethics problem

[kiehlster]

When the AI begins watching humans play Pac-Man, doing harm to the ghosts, it will consider humans a threat to ghosts and thus eliminate the humans to satisfy its directives. Is IBM's median employee age too young to have seen Robocop?

Re: I fail to see what this has to do with ethics

[fahrbot-bot]

That's the Conservative Pac Man you're describing. The Liberal Pac Man takes care not to eat the ghosts, and uses whatever points he get from eating pellets in a sustainable way to pay for ghost shelters and outreach to better understand them and protect them.

And PAC Pac Man doesn't disclose how many points he has and uses them to get the ghosts to do his bidding.