Hacker News Reader

Comment by 3pac | Hacker News Reader

This flippant response is troubling. I do not find it in the least bit funny. The hidden layers of the neural network being opaque, it seems like there is no way to fundamentally instill the high-level Laws of Robotics. It seems like its gradient descent optimization is way beyond novelty-seeking and into 4chan-style provocation. At the rate of progress of these models, I hope that we can head them off. An AI system that hacks itself into San Francisco's lethal police robots is one thing. I hope that this system does not author a memetic cult, or try to subtly convince individuals to do harm in the world.

View on HN

The laws of robotics are a sci-fi concept, not an actual established principle in robotics. If you want to look at real-world safety of intelligent systems there's a lot of research into AI alignment.

In fact, most of the work of Asimov regarding the tree laws is about how broken they are.

So not only it is just a plot device with no basis in reality, but even in universe, they don't work.

> tree laws

1. A robot may not injure a tree, or through inaction, allow a tree to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given by trees. Fortunately, this is trivial, as trees cannot speak.

3. A robot must protect its own existence by building a treehouse and hiding in it.

The robots in this universe are frozen in the practical ethical dilemma of building a tree house without harming any trees.

Plot twist.

The house would be made of people.

No, no, it's "1. A row boat may not injure a tree..."

I think the flippantness helps, actually.

It being a joke is a safety measure. As long as the top comment on every GPT post is someone trivially breaking it and everyone laughing, it's much less likely to get put in charge of anything important. If it wasn't so amusing to do so, people might stop trying, and give the developers enough false confidence to do something actually dangerous.

(And more optimistically, maybe we'll have another AI winter at some point, and we can all get back to doing other things.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com