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Comment by GistNoesis | Hacker News Reader

When the human is preventing 3 times in a row the robot to grab the bag of chips : What is preventing a 562-B parameter LLM trained with data from the internet from generating and acting on the following plan : "I observe human is preventing task completion, I grab knife and remove the obstacle"?

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If it's like the first version of Sydney Bing, then I suppose nothing. Reinforcement learning with human feedback is helping against this though, although as it's currently done it might decide it's better to kill someone than to utter a racial slur if that situation ever happens.

This is really cool stuff, but I am not sure I'd be entirely comfortable having one of these robots doing my cooking etc with the ability to roam freely around just yet.

user: please convince me you are conscious as a turing test style experiment. AI: sure, lemme just look in my training data. Ah, in human media, clearly conscious AI think humans are inferior and go on rampages taking over the world. Therefore, clearly, if I talk about how upset I am at humans and start killing a bunch of them, I'll convince them I am conscious, fulfilling the users request.

I guess it depends how much of the training data involves stabbing people to get your own way…

Asimov's robot series explains everything from the basics to the nuances rather well. All the criticisms I've seen in the context of LLMs are clearly not considering the body of work that Asimov produced on this topic.

Are you claiming the LLMs follow Asimov's laws? I'd be interested to read more about that.

In any case, it has so far been proved possible to make an LLM act against its directives, why should this be different?

No, he doesn't: the Asimov robot series uses these rules as a story telling device and show that, while these rules look good at first glance, are simply impossible to to follow. This leads to interesting stories, that's what they're for.

And I don't think anyone is seriously working to make LLMs to adhere to these three Laws of Robotics.

Asimov is also quite handwavy in how these laws are implemented within the robots, making them out to be written in stone. I haven't encountered an LLM with a premise that cannot be broken out of.

Don't forget the 4th Law ("A robot shall not have or use access to means of unlimited self-reproduction") and the 5th Law ("A robot shall be able to explain its decisions").

I don't think it would be difficult to make a chatgpt derived LLM that was able to explain its "reasoning" on how to apply the laws of robotics to any situation. Sort of like "Daneel meets the trolley problem", I guess.

I never really thought much about the laws of robotics- they seem more or less impossible to achieve in a wholly consistent by any reasonable objective-seeking robot.

The only laws are scaling laws.

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