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Comment by megaman821 | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me one of the higher hurdles for creating a general purpose intelligence, is human empathy. Without it you are left with creating a nearly infinite-length rules engine.

When you ask your AI maid to vacuum your house, you would prefer it not to plow through closet door to grab the vacuum, rip your battery out of your car and hardwire to the vacuum, and then proceed to clean your carpets. If you don't want to create a list of rules for every conceivable situation, the AI will need to have some understanding human emotions and desires.

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I'm not sure why you connect that behaviour to empathy. There are two simple rules here that apply to almost every possible situation, as well as the one you presented. They aren't even connected to human emotions. That's pure economy.

1. Minimise work (plugging into socket has lower cost / effort than what you described)

2. Minimise irreversible changes (or cost of reversing them)

There are so many people with low empathy who are useful, I don't think this is an issue until someone needs a personal companion rather than general purpose AI.

These rules cannot be applied in every situation. Then you back to writing a bunch of rules. If you told a general AI to take care of a puppy for a few days, it would end up putting a diaper on it and keeping it in a crate 24 hours a day. That would be the least amount of work to take care of the puppy, and minimize the chance of the puppy hurting itself or damaging anything else.

This is close to what happens when you leave your pet at a cheap pet hotel though. General purpose humans do it the same way.

If you don't want to create a list of rules for every conceivable situation, the AI will need to have some understanding human emotions and desires

My roomba does a good job vacuuming around table legs. Also sofa legs. Also stationary human legs. Also lamps. Also random poles sticking out of the floor. I imagine it would even do a good job vacuuming around a stalactite that made it to the floor. Are you saying someone programmed every one of these situations into it? Or does it instead have some understanding of human emotions? Either way, I'm surprised because it was so cheap I figured it has some generalizable built-in rules that applied to some categories of inputs, the infinite possible instances/variations of members of these categories not having to be enumerated. :)

There is a common situation that a Roomba does horribly at, toys on the floor that a person would just pick up or move before vacuuming.

Also, Roombas don't have any capacity to learn. They are just executing their bump and clean algorithm (except for the newest one which actually maps out rooms).

Roombas could learn easily if they just asked you how good of a job they did every time.

i don't think empathy is an appropriate word for this. It is defined as the ability to share the feelings of others. While in this case, what you want the robots to know is what most people would call 'common sense'.

What a strange response. You read that as me comparing human capabilities to roomba's?

The point, which you couldn't have missed more blatantly, is that one doesn't need to program every conceivable situation into an automaton for it to be able to behave properly in a whole range of normal situations.

But you have to program every conceivable 'normal' situations, so really you are just using a variable definition term like 'normal' to tautologically argue.

If you haven't read them yet, I would suggest Isaac Asimov's Robot series, which discusses the implications of hardware-level 'laws' to which robots must abide. His take was that these laws would constrain behavior according to human judgments of harm and benefit. I wonder if there is another way of looking at it, one where AI action is not only constrained by human sensibility, but informed by it.

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