What Do You Think about Machines That Think?

by privong • 12 years ago

46 43 12 years ago

logn2• 12 years ago

If corporations are people, then robots are people too.

Corporations pretty much only understand monetary fines, and robots will only understand some form of disconnecting the cord.

Similarly, corporations have a corporate veil to shield their owners form liability, assuming their business finances are separated from personal. Robot designers would have limited liability assuming their personal decision making was separated from the algorithmic reasoning.

And we've managed to pass the CAN-SPAM Act, so either we should restore robot 1st Amendment rights, or otherwise overturn Citizens United.

icebraining4• 12 years ago

If corporations are people, then robots are people too.

Corporations have legal personhood because they're an association of people. I don't see how this applies to robots. If you do, I don't want to see your robots!

_-__---• 12 years ago

ASSIMILATE

logn2• 12 years ago

Corporations can be wholly owned by other corporations. And they often have an obligation to seek to maximize profits above all other concerns. How's that an association of people?

They're treated as people because there was a similar conundrum as to how to apply laws to corporations. Justices decided to start applying laws as though they're people. It's the same situation Schneier is describing with robots.

avodonosov3• 12 years ago

And what they think about you?

fooqux2• 12 years ago

My first thought was to make a hard rule that it must obey the laws in the location it's in. In the US, that would be federal, state, and the various local laws of your city or township or whatever.

And then I laughed at the mental image of a robot stuck in a deadlock due to all the mutually exclusive laws we have. (Of course, in Hollywood, replace "deadlock" with "exterminating all humans".)

jkubicek• 12 years ago

Attempting to adhere to two conflicting laws results in undefined behavior. And as we all know, undefined behavior can mean anything, including exterminating all humans.

ta_28k198• 12 years ago

    switch(getJurisdictionalPrecedence(&law)){
       
       case FEDERAL: {
         setPrimeDirective(law[FEDERAL]);
       } break;

       case STATE: {
         setPrimeDirective(law[STATE]);
       } break;

       case CITY: {
         setPrimeDirective(law[CITY]);
       } break;

       default: {
         setPrimeDirective(this->ExterminateAllHumans());
       } break;
   };

thirdtruck3• 12 years ago

Even attempting to implement such a rule could have benefits. We could end up with formalized proofs of how those are are objectively contradictory, which in turn could be factored into the design of future laws as a preventative measure. Imagine "test-driven legislation," if you will.

pnathan2• 12 years ago

IANAL, but you'll find that laws tend to be nuanced and written with human judgment in mind. Such efforts are at cross purposes with formalization into a software system.

niels_olson• 12 years ago

test-driven legislation

I had a conversation with my brother, an attorney, about this at one point. I vaguely recall him asserting there have been some steps in this direction, but the lawyers always give up.

Please make this a thing!

fein• 12 years ago

What do machines think about machines that think?

superobserver2• 12 years ago

The machine (software program) lacks sufficient awareness beyond mechanical execution of the programmer's own will; therefore, it holds infinitesimal responsibility for its actions. In order to prevent further violations of law, it should be decommissioned. The programmer should be fined equivalent to the amount of illegal purchases the bot made in addition to $1K for each offending purchase.

As for other machines in the future (androids), it seems obvious enough to me that - insofar as they are intelligent and thus responsible (IQ testing is commonly used in US judicial system, with the cutoff being an IQ of 70 or above) - they can be tried like any human being.

avodonosov3• 12 years ago

We can give them negative reward (decrement some counter in the machine memory). The machine will want to avoid that!

humanfromearth2• 12 years ago

We'll figure something out when we get there.

What I found quite annoying lately (more than usual) is that there is a lot of "what if machines, terminator, bla bla bla death! destruction!".

I'm not sure if it's the recent developments with the deep neural nets, maybe it is.. Maybe it's the high profile neo-luddites like Hawkins or Musk. I wish I could have a megaphone and shout: AI that would be classified as having comparable human intelligence is way too far and there are a lot of pieces missing. Just because we can identify with 95.4% accuracy some MNIST dataset or 200 species of dogs, or some guys playing baseball, it's still a long way to getting to a working AGI.

But instead on focusing on doing the actual work that would get us to these machine 'thugs' or at least promoting more research in that direction most prefer to sit in their armchair and argue to the death the hypothetical T-1000.

Thankfully there are smart people out there doing real work and getting results so that is reassuring.

My problem with these extremists is that they produce hype. Hype that got us the AI research winter last time.

deepsearch• 12 years ago

We are already gearing them toward good... "A Search Engine that Thinks, Almost" http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2005/03/31/a-search-engine-that-th...

Houshalter3• 12 years ago

Musk, Hawking, et al. are not talking about deep neural nets that do well on MNIST, but what will be possible 20-50 years down the road. There are very real concerns about AI and it's annoying to see them just dismissed by calling people "neo-luddites".

But instead on focusing on doing the actual work that would get us to these machine 'thugs' or at least promoting more research in that direction most prefer to sit in their armchair and argue to the death the hypothetical T-1000

There has been more investment in AI in the last 5 years than in the 50 years before it. Even Musk invested millions to AI research.

humanfromearth2• 12 years ago

I retract my previous statement. Musk is not a luddite. He's a clever businessman.

mcguire2• 12 years ago

Spending time and effort on AI "20-50 years down the road" is a waste because:

(a) statistically based, but obviously not (or not obviously) intelligent systems are going to change the legal and practical landscape well before Ultron gets up and starts walking around, and

(b) the kinds of things they're worried about are almost certainly going to appear silly when the real thing does roll around.

The moral responsibility for a bot that orders drugs certainly belongs to the person who set up the bot to order from the "black market"; for a drone that kills the wrong people, it belongs primarily to the officer that ordered the mission knowing that the statistical software wasn't perfect. In my opinion. The supreme court may differ.

Also in my opinion, the dangers of "singularity" AI are overblown due to a soft, fuzzy, but very real upper limit on "intelligence".

swframe• 12 years ago

We will build very smart machines before we build machines that think. Those very smart machines will probably change the world the way the internet did. Imagine having smart machines than can farm, build houses, clean up pollution, etc. Thinking machines are too far off to know what to expect. We need to first consider what an increasingly automated world would mean. In particular, what will it mean for employment and average income?

known• 12 years ago

Machines killing Machines is BETTER than Humans killing Humans

mcguire2• 12 years ago

Sure, but machines killing humans scales better than humans killing humans.

Houshalter3• 12 years ago

Why was the title changed to the Edge.org question of the year?

pnathan2• 12 years ago

The article has nothing to do with thinking. But in the scope of the article, it's an interesting legal conundrum. I expect the end result is that the class of software which can perform illegal actions autonomously will have to be brought under warranty and the creators held responsible.

"Acme Inc. Warrants that under Factory Conditions and Standard Programming, Software Agent R2-D2 will not conduct illegal actions".

This is not out of the range of possibility and even feasibility today, but it will require genuine engineering mentalities to create such systems.

avodonosov3• 12 years ago

The same way we deal with other entities: rats, viruses, hurricanes. If they harm us, we don't "punish" them, we just seek a way to prevent them harming us.

zackmorris• 12 years ago

Culpability goes all the way to the top. So the top ranking official who orders use of the machine is to blame, which could very well be the president. And it goes deeper than that, because the society that elected the president endorses its use if it doesn't recall him or her. Since recalls are rare, collateral damage from thinking machines is basically inevitable and I don't think most people have any idea what is coming.

That said, I expect that AI is going to transcend the way people solve problems to such a degree that it may even alleviate the underlying causes of war like artificial scarcity and ignorant intolerance.

cafebeen• 12 years ago

Just follow Asimov's laws of robotics:

0) A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

What Do You Think about Machines That Think?

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