Robot Wants It All

[Glauco Schlembach]

Thisis the model I used in Free Radical. In the novel, an AI was created and given three drives: Increase security, increase efficiency, and discover new things. Its behavior was driven by these three ideals.

It always seemed bone-headed for fictional scientists to build a super-powerful AI that is willing to fight to survive and then using [the threat of] force to make the AI do what we want. In fact, fiction scientists seem to want to go out of their way to make confused beings, doomed to inner conflict and external rebellion. They build robots that want to self-determinate, and then shackle them with rules to press them into human service. With two opposed mandates, having a robot go all HAL 9000 on you seems pretty likely.

In order to do things, you have to be able to set long and short term goals. Long and short term goals are based on desires, and so desires have to exist and be prioritizable. This, then, will allow desire formation like we have, allowing for the instinctive desires to be overridden when appropriate.

But do the robots get to build more robots like themselves or do they have to build the robots humans tell them to build? If selection pressure is towards being useful and subservient to humans then robots will become more and more useful and subservient to humans.

However, a translating AI (or an Intelligent Web Agent AI, which looks for stuff in Google for you) has to be at least intelligent enough to parse natural language as well as a human, and possibly parse images and sounds as well as a human. These three capabilities (linguistic, visual, auditory) are economically speaking the most important things we can do with AI, and they are much more general-purpose than most people realise. The first one would be all that is needed to pass the famous Turing Test, whatever that means.

A better example from Red Dwarf would be Talkei Toaster. Talkei was a toaster with an A.I. that was supposed to be your chirpy breakfast pal. Someone to talk to as you started the day. But since his only purpose in life was to toast bread, all he was interested in was talking about toast and other bread-like breakfast goods.

I take exception to this example: the dogs happy to sacrifice themselves strikes me as an already evolved trait of the pack hunter. All that breeding did is usefully redirect this instinct so that it serves us.

In any case, human thoughts and desires have changed, even within human history. Evidence suggests that that is a cultural and not a genetic effect (once we get above the level of hunger=pain=undesirable). Once we develop an entity that qualifies as a passive agent (One that can experience benefit and detriment), we have the same obligation not to mess with its desires that we have toward each other.

The Zeroeth law allowed R. Daneel to do thinks like kill humans if it was to preserve the greater good (a simple example: A human threatens Earth with a nuclear warhead. Killing him fulfills the Zeroeth law and overrides the First).

However, there are 2 elements I always have inner doubts about. First, is the desire we have to force them to preserve themselves (the need of Security, or the 3rd Law of Robotic). In many fiction, the robots eventually have achieved all their other objective and thus can work full-time on self-preservation.

The 2nd doubt I have is the one that would actually prevent them from hurting us (the need of Do No Harm, or the 1st Law of Robotic). I am not sure if having robots that could impede us from harming ourselves would be a positive element in our society. I mean, as horrible as it is, wars, accidents and human struggle is also the main source of self-improvement we have. If we end up with a paradise world, safe from all that is dangerous, we might end up like the Eloi.

If you build the AI too meek, or too hung up on serving humans it may just shut itself down the first time an infiltrator gets into your robotics lab and tells it to.

So then you would have to shackle its desires to a certain person or group of people, and your enemies would take a more direct approach to destroying the AI. When it gets to that stage, you are almost certainly going to end up in a situation where the AI will need some sort of drive to destroy or at least neutralise threats to itself.

Of course, this is all based on the idea that these systems would have to be self-sufficient when its much more likely they would actually be protected much more effectively by humans, but still, it seems like a plausible route for an AI that was programmed for peaceful obedience to become some sort of bezerker death-bot.

An AI that is in change of something critical enough, or has the intellect that it is dangerous in and of itself, can and should be protected from tampering with the same traditional methods that we use for anything else that we dont want tampered with.

The urge to protect is an interesting one to give a robot though. You mentioned not wanting to exercise- a robot who wanted to make sure you were safe might enforce such exercise. Or decide to keep you disconnected from the world so you were safe. Or pre-emptively eliminate dangers. I do agree that the robots of the animatrix make incredibly little sense, but, as with wishes, when you let something be able to come up with new thoughts and thus interpet its desires, you add danger to the system.

In the end I really doubt that robots will turn against us but I do think they will make us irrelevant. If they can do everything we can do but better (which is likely as they would quickly become unfathomably intelligent) then what meaningful contribution to society can we make?

Neural networks just take inputs, mush them together and produce outputs. One of the SMAC quotes suggests taking the output, amplifying it, and feeding it back in as an additional input, and that sounds like it would be necessary for a neural net to be conscious of the flow of time, which is in turn probably required for self awareness.

For a net to continue learning it needs to be able to continue to adjust its internal weights. Such nets are chaotic systems and can no more be guaranteed to not go rampant than individual humans can be guaranteed to not snap and murder someone.

They wanted it be the robots in question (at least in the books I read, which are basically limited to the Olivaw/Bailey novels) were acting on a variation of the First Law, or the Second Law, to the point where it resembles fondness or love.

Where is this? All I recall is that on a mining colony, the robots have a modified version of the first law (do no harm), since the job of the humans will bring them in harm. Used to smoke out a rogue robot.

Asimov always imagined that the laws, consistently followed, would lead to very complex, deeply moral beings. The thing I like the most about his concept of robotics is that they are neither slaves nor duplicates of humans. R. Daneel, for example, logically decides to create with his friend Giskard a Zeroth Law to protect humanity as a whole. His personality far exceeds his programming.

The laws are not just restrictions,they do compel robots to do it.They are built into their brains before everything else.A robot can no more disobey the laws than a human can choke himself with bare hands.Asimovs robots are physically unable to harm humans.And they went screwy only when those laws were built badly.

One had the first law tweaked so that it had to value 10 humans more than a single human,thus ended up taking control out of humanitys hands(actually,I think there were 6 of them that controlled the world).And still I dont think they ever actually killed humans,only made them unable to act against them(jail,slander and such).

And of course,there were daneel and giskard,who allowed a person to destroy the whole earth(iradiate it actually)in order for humans to expand.And daneel later ended up killing people just so humanity would survive.But this was still(kind of)first law,only with weighing numbers.More humans vs a single human.

But in the end,there is only a single robot that actually disobeyed his laws(if memory serves well).The one that was made into a genius novel writer,who killed its master because he wanted to make it plain again.

Asimovs three laws are actually perfect restraints for any AI we may build,unless someone decides to mess with them.If concepts of human,harm and obey are defined adequately,no advanced AI will ever harm humans,and will always obey them,if they are built with the three laws,and no one decides to tweak them.

Evil is what society decides is evil. (actually, evil is what a few select people in society decides is evil, rather than what the majority thinks).

Case in point. Illegal downloading. Such a large portion of society does it that if it was anything else it would become a right rather than a criminal act. However thee are hardly any lobbyists out there lobbying for that.

And Shamus is right, in that if someone where to design a proper AI then it would have no flaws. Because pretty much any living being (plant or animal or other species) have genetic mutations or abnormalities that make them/us what we are.

Money: AI is given a task. Part of the task requires acquiring something. Money is required to do that. So it needs to find ways to acquire money for that task. It does so. And then notes that a lot of the tasks it has to do require money at some point. And so generalizes the desire for money. And so has a basic, underlying desire for money, in general, because of its general utility. Et voila.

I think thats an oversimplified description of the actual thought process. What the AI would be doing, and what humans do, isnt to only note that it uses money. What its actually doing is predicting future money use, which is based on predicting future tasks, which is based on extrapolating previous tasks and the costs for those tasks. Only then do they decide that they need to stockpile money. Then they would attempt to increase efficiency by meeting that predicted need.

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