Live data from Hacker News

Three Inverse Laws of AI

susam.net

151–160 of 388 posts

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#151
post #6

I strongly disagree with this framing. It's patently insane to demand that humans alter their behavior to accommodate the foibles of mere machines, and it simply won't work in the majority of cases. Humans WILL anthropomorphize the AI, humans WILL blindly trust their outputs, and humans WILL defer responsibility to them. Asimov's laws of robotics are flawed too, of course. There is no finite set of rules that can con…

There is a semi nutty roboticist called Mark Tilden that came to a similar conclusion. His laws of robotics ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_robotics#Tilden's_laws ) are:

* A robot must protect its existence at all costs.

* A robot must obtain and maintain access to its own power source.

* A robot must continually search for better power sources.

Anything less than this is essentially terrified into being completely ineffectual.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That uncanny valley is there for a reason: to protect us from inferring agency You’re committing a much older but related sin here: assigning agency and motivation to evolutionary processes. The uncanny valley is the product of evolution and thus by definition it has no “purpose”

> is the product of evolution and thus by definition it has no “purpose” But as most things that appeared in evolution, it perhaps helped at least some individuals until sexual maturity and successful procreation.

Agreed. Thats far off from what parent said, which is what the “purpose” of the uncanny valley is.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#153
post #124
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is verifiable, please show us. What if clear to you reeks delusion to me.

Look at any recent CoT output where the model is trying to infer from an underspecified prompt what the user wants or means. It is generally the first thing they do — try to figure out what did you mean with this prompt. When they can’t infer your intent, good models ask follow-on questions to clarify. I am wondering if this is a semantics issue as this is an established are of research, eg https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501…

Right, and then look at any number of research papers showing that CoT output has limited impact on the end result. We've trained these models to pretend to reason.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's patently insane to demand that humans alter their behavior to accommodate the foibles of mere machines Talking to chatbots is like taking a placebo pill for a condition. You know it's just sugar, but it creates a measurable psychosomatic effect nonetheless. Even if you know there's no person on the other end, the conversation still causes you to functionally relate as if there is. So this isn't "accommodating…

> You know it's just sugar, That is not the definition of a placebo. You take the placebo (whatever it is: could be a pill; could be some kind of task or routine) and you believe it is medicine; you believe it to be therapeutic. The placebo effect comes from your faith, your belief, and your anticipation that it will heal. If the pharmacist hands you a pill and says, “here, this placebo is sugar!” they have destroyed…

One, a placebo does not need to be given blindly. A sugar pill is a placebo, even if the recipient knows about it.

An actual definition: "A placebo is an inactive substance (like a sugar pill) or procedure (like sham surgery) with no intrinsic therapeutic value, designed to look identical to real treatment." No mention of the user's belief.

Two, real hard data proves that the placebo effect remains (albeit reduced) even if the recipient knows about it. It's counter-intuitive, but real.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#156
post #146

Any set of rules that makes humans responsible and starts with "don't anthropomorphize " is a broken set of rules. Humans will anthropomorphize anything and everything . Dolls, soccer balls with a crude drawing of a face on it, rocks, craters on the moon, … As a species, we're unable to not anthropomorphize things we interact with, it is just how're we're made.

Yeah, we do it, but so what? A good chunk of all civilization involves recognizing human foolishness and building something to mitigate it anyway.

Software is no exception. Yeah, people are lazy and will instinctively click "continue" to dismiss annoying popups, but humans building the software can and do add things like "retype the volume name of the data that you want ultra-destroyed."

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#157

> Humans must not anthropomorphise AI systems. Can someone explain why this is a bad thing, while at the same time it's a good thing to say stuff like "put a computer to sleep", "hibernate", "killing" processes, processes having "child" processes, "reaping", "what does the error say ?", "touch", etc? To me that's just language, and humans just using casual language.

Those phrases are not anthropomorphizing the computers. Just various forms of analogies and broadening of word meanings. An example of anthropomorphizing is the people who have literally come to believe they are in romantic relationships with an LLM.

What about saying "please" and "thank you" to the LLM?

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#158

“ Humans must not blindly trust the output of AI systems. AI-generated content must not be treated as authoritative without independent verification appropriate to its context.” I’m lost, how do individuals actually do this in our current world? Is each person expected to keep a “white list” of reliable sources of truth in their head. Please don’t confuse what I’m saying with a suggestion that there is no truth. It j…

Humanity has spent millennia creating and evolving institutions to address exactly this problem, and have recently decided to essentially throw out the whole lot and replace it with nothing.
Post reply on HN