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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

> Anthropic started with a list of around ten principles that, taken together, formed a sort of “constitution” (hence the name “constitutional AI”). The principles haven’t been made public, but Anthropic says they’re grounded in the concepts of beneficence (maximizing positive impact), nonmaleficence (avoiding giving harmful advice) and autonomy (respecting freedom of choice).

This is giving me very strong Asimov's "three laws of robotics" vibes:

First Law

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

Second Law

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

Third Law

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

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What the three laws of robotics didn't predict, is how much our current AI is pure heuristics, and so it doesn't quite have the ability to strictly follow rules, or even interpret rules in an unambiguous manner.

Hard-coded behaviors cannot express the abstract ideas in those laws, while the ML part cannot be relied upon to accurately behave.

That's a contradiction: you're saying that the AI cannot follow clear rules because it is a large heuristic, but then you talk about the limitations of hard-coded behaviors :)

I believe the ML part can be relied upon to accurately behave as long as it can exhibit logical thinking at all (which, at least to a significant degree, it seems to be able to) -- in principle it would seem like its ethics potential should be proportional to its general (linguistic) reasoning potential.

I think this is exactly the benefit we have: AIs are fuzzy (like humans are), so then can understand fuzzy laws (which seemed to be a huge problem in the early days). The problem is how to get them to incorporate those laws that they can surely understand into their motivation. This doesn't seem insurmountable to me: a parallel critic prompt "Does this question and answer follow the following ethical guidelines: ... ?" (or something more complex but largely equivalent), or maybe some other form of engineering the AI thinking and motivation to include abstract goal evaluation at some stage.

What I was trying to say, and perhaps failed to clearly convey, is that neither approach seems sufficient. What we want, is for robots to not harm people. We want robots to understand what this rule means semantically, and at the same time we want to hard code it into their behavior. And I'm saying that we don't know how to do that, yet. In other words, we haven't quite figure out how to hard-code a rule that involves a high-level, abstract idea.

And I'm not talking about logic or fuzziness here. I'm talking about something much more basic. For instance, do you have confidence that our AI can identify humans correctly? A robot can fail to follow rule 1, when it misidentifies a human as a walking cabbage. Do you have confidence that AI can identify "harm"?

I'm not saying that I don't like AI, or that they don't have benefits. I love robots and artificial intelligence, and I see plenty of practical benefits.

Um, actually!

Asimov's theorized robots ("positronic brains") used potential-based computing (interestingly, AFAIK they predate digital computers; there's actually a few scenes in some stories where characters start using computers as New Shiny Thing) - so I'd actually argue that the original Three Laws are specifically for heuristic-based computing.

The three laws aren't really "strict", nor are they what we'd commonly consider "laws". An Asimovian robot (approximately, and IMO) doesn't think of things to do, and then discard the ones that don't match the laws; the three laws are the direct creative impetus for generating possible actions, each action "coming with" some % value in each law, and if the sum passes some threshold, the robot "decides" to do the action.

Basically every story in the "I, Robot" anthology is a story of debugging this system... which is essentially a heuristics system. One of the clearer one is the rover orbiting a hazard that it's supposed to investigate at a radius where the balance of the 2nd and 3rd laws even out.

Armchair AIist that I am... if I were to try to implement the Three Laws with current AI systems, I'd probably stick one system on at the "front" to add/modify/create/interpret prompts in a way that adds the three laws, and then stick one at the end to measure (and then filter on) how well the output adheres to them.

I'm more thinking of the much more basic kind of bugs.

AI might fail to follow rule 1, simply by misidentifying a human as something else, or misidentifying what is harmful. Like how a Tesla can crash into an obstacle, because it failed to recognize that there is an obstacle.

This isn't a criticism of Asimov, of course. I think we simply haven't solved many basic problems that he probably regarded as "surely by the time robots need rules to follow, these aren't going to be issues".

> I'd probably stick one system on at the "front" to add/modify/create/interpret prompts in a way that adds the three laws, and then stick one at the end to measure (and then filter on) how well the output adheres to them.

I bet that we are going to get some sort of end-to-end simulated robot QA system. Imagine pushing your code to Github, and in a few minutes, Travis CI emails you, "28/1000 tests failed. 32 cases of bodily harm against human were reported." What a world to live in!

> CI

That'd be pretty cool, actually! A little... maybe ironic? How many stories are there about "they didn't stop to ask if they should, only if they could", and then... outsourcing that check to an AI system. Like I love it, but also, sus.

> bugs

Yep! I think positronic brains would notionally use a heuristics system ("human detector says 89%"), and AFAIK so do our AI systems. That said, your larger point still stands: what happens when such a system either fails, or is mis-calibrated, or is calibrated in a sus way?

(such as facial recognition, at first, not working on BIPOC faces... because the devs used themselves as the test subjects and weren't BIPOC)

I'm almost certain there's at least one story by Asimov on this issue; I know I've read other SciFi on this issue, although I think it's much more common to have the AIs act "better than the humans" rather than vice versa. Something like: "The rules you programmed in say Group X are humans even tho you don't treat them that way". Usually (I think?) when it's "Group X aren't humans by the programmed rules" it's apocalyptical because no-one / almost no-one fits.

I think you could probably write a cute short story about robots anthropomorphizing a lot of things in order to catch all the odd human edge-cases ("not all humans have a face").

> or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

This has always felt like a gaping hole to me. It seems like to work it would have to a) always make perfect predictions of the future, and b) agree with relevant humans what "harm" is.

That's sort of the point of his stories. The laws do not work, and there is no set of laws that could work perfectly. Any set of rules as simple as this applied to something as complex as humanity will always have a mountain of loopholes.

I confess I haven't read all of his work on robots, but actually (perhaps contrary to popular belief) Asimov was hopeful on robots from the start. His very first short story[1] and one of the first stories about robots (after RUR, which is amusingly and maybe unsurprisingly both the story to coin the term Robot and already feature a robot uprising!): it's essentially a touching friendship story between Gloria and her robot Robbie.

I wouldn't say there's no AI risk, or risk from having robots and powerful intelligences, but he generally seemed to convey that we should be capable of making quite safe and quite friendly robots, given that we can make them at all. Which makes sense to me. The engineering of ethics in robots and AI doesn't seem too much more alien than the task of engineering AI itself (specially goal-oriented AI). It requires effort, attention to detail, and a progress in understanding morality and ethics that is going to be difficult for us, but it shouldn't be that fundamentally scary, as long as we collectively have the will to make them safe (in the spirit of the three laws).

I think Hollywood (in 'I, Robot' the movie) exaggerated his impression of AI danger (perhaps because of the 'Frankenstein complex'[2] Asimov coined), and the interest in catastrophe. I think 'The bicentennial man' is a complementary movie more in the hopeful spirit of Asimov.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbie_(short_story)

Quote: " The story centers on the technophobia that surrounds robots, and how it is misplaced. Almost all previously published science fiction stories featuring robots followed the theme 'robot turns against creator'; Asimov has consistently held the belief that the Frankenstein complex was a misplaced fear, and the majority of his works attempted to provide examples of the help that robots could provide humanity. "

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein_complex

If I recall correctly, the whole point was that aligned goals are super hard to do, and that this is what leads to the robots creating a secret robot illuminati that takes over world leadership without anyone realizing they're voting for robots, and then working to protect humans.

Yup! Ironically, of all the things the movie did... poorly, the robot's realization of the "Zeroeth Law" (first law, but applied to "Humanity" at large) was (IMHO) canon.

Yeah, his stories were about those gaping holes and how things go horribly wrong because of them.

Asimov was thinking about alignment before it was cool.

> First Law

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

Hmmm I wonder about trolley problems

You may already know, but _most_ of Asimov's stories with the three laws are heavily based on problems with said laws, and clever loopholes of various sorts.

So it's always hilarious when people use them unironically/uncritically in other contexts.

Maybe the ML model would start a market maker and exchange in the Bahamas too.

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