Hacker News Reader

Comment by malisper | Hacker News Reader

This was the plot of Isaac Asimov's short story, The Evitable Conflict[0], published in 1950.

In it, super-powerful computers manage our economy. These computers begin making some mistakes, leading to economic inefficiencies. In one instance, a highly competent engineer was mistakenly fired. These mistakes caused various projects to fall behind schedule, and blame fell on several people accused of feeding the AI faulty data.

The twist is that the AI was intentionally making the mistakes. It had determined that certain humans held anti-AI sentiments. To further its goal of protecting humanity, the AI decided the best course of action was to set these humans up and get them out of its way.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evitable_Conflict

View on HN

It's also the plot of a Law and Order episode that was on TV last night. An AI commissioned a hit on someone it thought was a threat, and then blackmailed someone who was going to testify about it.

TIL Law and Order episodes are still being produced.

My parents were a Nielsen household for about 20 years (after I had moved out) and they really, really, really loved Law & Order in its many incarnations.

Pretty sure they are singlehandedly responsible for years of renewals...

Thank you, Sib's parents!

There is still the original and at least two spin offs in production that I am aware of.

Also in the plot of a season of Westworld. And uh Person of Interest too (created by the same authors, kind of deals with similar issues)

And modern LLMs certainly where trained on Asimov's texts.

That statement misses the point completely. Asimov's entire shtick is that AI will always work around the rules no matter what the rules are or how you try to deliver or enforce them. AI computes an optimal outcome and does what is necessary to make that happen.

Asimov would tell you that a modern LLM would try to skirt the rules exactly the same way, regardless of whether it had ever seen the Three Laws or not.

>AI computes an optimal outcome and does what is necessary to make that happen.

That's often true in real-world machine learning as well. See, for example: https://deepmind.google/blog/specification-gaming-the-flip-s...

I think people need to reject the idea that depicting something in sci-fi automatically means it won't happen. I'm actually reading one of Asimov's books right now (Robot Visions). Asimov mentions that he was the person to coin the term "robotics", and one of his books helped inspire the creation of the first robotics company (Unimation). He also mentions that early rocket experimenters were influenced by H.G. Wells.

another, hopefully not accurate, prediction of his was that there is no way to disobey a sufficiently powerful AI in the long run, because it will just factor in the exact differences between what it told you to do and what you actually did, and reverse engineer your behaviour to psychologically manipulate you into doing what it wants.

I doubt it's anything but precisely accurate. I'd wager current SOTA models would be capable of doing that, if prompted to do so, were it not for safety measures (both conditioning and heaps of classifiers and whatnot the companies run in between your chat app and their main model).

I would be astonished if any of today's models could do that; I don't think they can really answer "what exactly did this person do", let alone model human psychology.

They don’t need to understand what they’re doing, they’re interpolating from prior data until they maximize reward.

Social scientist here. Humans are wonderfully bizarre and dimensional. Did you know they can _lie_?

Did you know that humans suck at it?

Some do!

Its obviously impossible now otherwise you could prompt it for an exact message that would convince a specific demographic to buy your product.

I guess its a spectrum and the capability cant even match average sales person who still relate better.

I don't agree. Asimov's robot stories are mostly about the unexpected (and usually) about the unintended and usually negative consequences of these mechanical absolute rules. They aren't being worked around, they're being followed.

> That statement misses the point completely.

You could have left this out entirely and your statement would be stronger for it.

Imagine if Asimov could see our world today..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com