why is this news worthy? This is all a function of the implementation.
Slap the term AI on anything and get automatic press coverage?
An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep
141–150 of 223 posts
Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep
#142The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus argued that computers, who have no body, no childhood and no cultural practice, could not acquire intelligence at all. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0494-4 What he means is that computers, which can learn rules and use those rules to make predictions in certain domains, nevertheless cannot exercise general intelligence because they are not "in the world". This renders them…
A good example of why philosophers are utterly useless mental masturbators who spend all their time arguing about definitions of words. Here he takes something obviously stupid and wrong and says it in such a way that you can feel smart by regurgitating it. Computers don't exist in the world? What? It must be some problem with their Thetans. Er, sorry, I mean "qualia".
Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep
#143There are many such stories of AI "optimizations" gone wrong, because of loopholes the program found that humans didn't consider. Here's a collection of such stories: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.03453.pdf
My favorite story is the genetic evolution algorithm that was abusing analog noise on an FPGA to get the right answer with fewer gates than was theoretically possible.
The problem was discovered when they couldn’t get the same results on a different FPGA, or in the same one in different day (subtle variations of voltage from mains and the voltage regulators).
They had to redo the experiment using simulated FPGAs as a fitness filter.
Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep
#144Folks are missing why this went viral in China. From the article "In an even more philosophical twist, young and demoralized Chinese corporate citizens also saw the suicidal wolf as the perfect metaphor for themselves: a new class of white collar workers — often compelled to work ‘996' (9am to 9pm, six days a week) — chasing a dream of promotions, pay raise, marrying well… that seem to be becoming more and more elusi…
Missed or possibly don’t care.
The technical details aren’t interesting, but I do think it’s interesting just how disjointed life is vs what was promised.
In the US, this was aptly named a rat-race; and the white collar Chinese with a market-based economy are suffering the same.
Our markets and nations promise some combination of wealth or retirement and enjoyment of life, but it’s an ever-moving goal just out of reach for anyone but the lucky few.
Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep
#145It's really rather hard to draw any general conclusions from such simple systems:
"In the initial iterations, the wolves were unable to catch the sheep most of the time, leading to heavy time penalties. It then decided that, ‘logically speaking’, if at the start of the game it was close enough to the boulders, an immediate suicide would earn it less point deductions then if it had spent time trying to catch the sheep."
It's as if the scenario you are thinking about involves "assume a machine capable of greater-than-human-level perception, planning, and action" and then set it to optimize a trivially bad function.
How many people do you know with a single goal of "die with as much money as possible", which has a trivial solution: rob a bank and then commit suicide.
Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we play the analogy further: life is suffering, apart from the brief ecstasy of eating sheep. The AI was trying not to suffer, thus chose the boulder. Did my best to translate the (misguided) fitness function to fiction.
Man is born crying, and when he's cried enough, he dies. -Kyoami in Ran. Cutting one's losses early may appear to be the most rational act if trying to minimize an agent's total suffering.
Which is why some forms of Buddhism are basically a cult of death: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokushinbutsu
Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep
#147Similar story of unexpected AI outcomes... As part of my PhD research, I created a simplified Pac-Man style game where the agent would simply try to stay alive as long as possible whilst being chased by the 3 ghosts. The agent was un-motivated and understood nothing about the goal, but was optimising for maximising its observable control over the world (avoiding death is a natural outcome of this). I spent sometime t…
Same story as one I shared 4 years ago. Seems to be the best tactic! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14031932 Edit: don’t want to sound accusatory
Hah - thank you for sharing!
That is very interesting that this emerged from two different approaches.
I published my result years back, and have never heard of this emerging elsewhere before!
Didn’t take it as accusatory [but thanks to child for sharing link :)].
Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep
#148Seems like a nothing story. Just looking at the game, there's obviously a constant decision to be made of chase more sheep or instantly die. It sounds like in the original model they had a max of 20 seconds, so it's not surprising that you would just tank your losses to maximize your score every now and then. Anyone who tries to devise optimal strategies for things should be able to see this isn't especially interest…
It's good because most people can understand it. I'd say it's a perfect strategy for a game, but if they're using evolutionary algorithms they should require some form of reproduction for the wolves to carry on. That would make the suicide strategy fail to propagate well. I can also see a number of possible strange outcomes even then.
Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep
#149Seems like a nothing story. Just looking at the game, there's obviously a constant decision to be made of chase more sheep or instantly die. It sounds like in the original model they had a max of 20 seconds, so it's not surprising that you would just tank your losses to maximize your score every now and then. Anyone who tries to devise optimal strategies for things should be able to see this isn't especially interest…
"I really hate when people describe an ai as something that cannot be understood because they personally don't understand it."
On the other hand, keep in mind that a significant weakness of most modern AI research is that it's extremely difficult to understand: you have the input, the output, and a bag of statistical weights. In the story, you know the (trivially bad) function that is being optimized; in general you may not. It's not without implications for other systems.
Further,
"At the end of the day, student and teacher concluded two things:
"* The initial bizarre wolf behavior was simply the result of ‘absolute and unfeeling rationality’ exhibited by AI systems.
"* It’s hard to predict what conditions matter and what doesn’t to a neural network."
Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep
#150The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus argued that computers, who have no body, no childhood and no cultural practice, could not acquire intelligence at all. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0494-4 What he means is that computers, which can learn rules and use those rules to make predictions in certain domains, nevertheless cannot exercise general intelligence because they are not "in the world". This renders them…
The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus argued that computers, who have no body, no childhood and no cultural practice, could not acquire intelligence at all.
Similarly, nuclear submarines, which lacking all of the critical organs of fish, are completely unable to swim.