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AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

nimishg.substack.com

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Re: AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

#41

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

DSingularity wrote: post #33
scotty79 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might make a comeback when we finally get good at teachning AI what's real and what's imagined and also logical reasoining. I think it does moral evaluation of actions mostly well already (bacause humans are not great at it anyways). Then a rule like "don't harm humans" might suffice.

I’m not sure we will ever get good at teaching them to distinguish reality from imagination. Feels like there are too many generative models pushing everything from fake songs to fake video clips.

We can’t even do it ourselves. People live in their own “truth”.

Re: AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

#42

Post by i_dont_know_ »

Levitz wrote: post #31
i_dont_know_ wrote: post #2

I keep seeing "AI ethics" being redefined to focus on fictional problems instead of real-world ones, so I wrote a little post on it.

It's interesting how I think our experience differs completely, for example, regarding people's concerns for AI ethics you write: >People are far more concerned with the real-world implications of ethics: governance structures, accountability, how their data is used, jobs being lost, etc. In other words, they’re not so worried about whether their models will swear or philosophically handle the trolley problem so much…

Thanks for the perspective. For me I think it's a matter of degree (I guess I was a bit "one or the other" when I wrote it).

These things are also concerns and definitely shouldn't be dismissed entirely (especially things like AI telling you when it's unsure, or, the worse cases of propaganda), but I'm worried about the other stuff I mention being defined away entirely, the same way I think it has been with privacy. Tons more to say on the difference between "how you use" vs "how you share" but good perspective, and interesting that you see the emphasis differently in your experiences.

Re: AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

#43

Post by qualeed »

krapp wrote: post #37
qualeed wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty good example of what parent comment was referencing, I think. You say " Asimov’s three laws are not a good framework. ", then don't present any arguments to why it is not a good framework. Instead you bring up something separate: the framework can facilitate story writing. It could be good for story writing and a good framework. Those two aren't mutually exclusive things. (I'm not arguing that it is…

The most obvious evidence that Asimov's three laws are not a good framework is the fact that they are not a framework, they are a plot device. Isaac Asimov was a professor of biochemistry, he had no clue about how robots or AI might actually work. The robots in his stories have "positronic brains" because positrons at the time were newly discovered and sounded cool. They aren't simply "good for story writing," their…

This would probably be better suited under the original comment so that the original commenter has a better chance of seeing/reading it.

Re: AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

#45

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

myrmidon wrote: post #18
Isamu wrote: post #8

This has been happening for a long time. I first noticed this with the hand waving dismissals of older concepts like Asimov’s laws. Not a carefully reasoned argument why “not causing harm to a human” is outmoded, but just pushing it aside. I would love to see a good reasoned argument there. No, instead there is Avoiding talking about harm to humans. Just because harm is broad doesn’t get you out of having to talk abo…

I think a big factor in Asimov's laws specifically being sidelined is that the whole process of building AI looks very different from what we pictured back then. Instead of us programming the AIs by feeding it lots of explicit hand-crafted rules/instructions, we're feeding the things with plain data instead, and the resulting behavior is much more black-box, less predictable and less controllable than anticipated. Tr…

> the whole process of building AI looks very different from what we pictured back then.

Right, and so do the harm risks. We need a framework centered around how humans will use AI/robots to harm each other, not how AI/robots will autonomously harm humans.

Re: AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

#46

Post by stephencanon »

myrmidon wrote: post #18
Isamu wrote: post #8

This has been happening for a long time. I first noticed this with the hand waving dismissals of older concepts like Asimov’s laws. Not a carefully reasoned argument why “not causing harm to a human” is outmoded, but just pushing it aside. I would love to see a good reasoned argument there. No, instead there is Avoiding talking about harm to humans. Just because harm is broad doesn’t get you out of having to talk abo…

I think a big factor in Asimov's laws specifically being sidelined is that the whole process of building AI looks very different from what we pictured back then. Instead of us programming the AIs by feeding it lots of explicit hand-crafted rules/instructions, we're feeding the things with plain data instead, and the resulting behavior is much more black-box, less predictable and less controllable than anticipated. Tr…

Raising children involves a whole lot of simple constraints that you gradually relax.

“Don’t touch the knife” becomes “You can use _this_ knife, if an adult is watching,” which becomes “You can use these knives but you have to be careful, tell me what that means” and then “you have free run of the knife drawer, the bandages are over there.” But there’s careful supervision at each step and you want to see that they’re ready before moving up. I haven’t seen any evidence of that at all in LLM training—it seems to be more akin to handing each toddler every book ever written about knives and a blade and waiting to see what happens.

Re: AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

#47

Post by i_dont_know_ »

positron26 wrote: post #14
blibble wrote: post #12

> If we give companies unending hype, near unlimited government and scientific resources, all of our personal data including thoughts and behavior patterns, how do we know their leaders will do what we want them to, and not try to subvert us and… take over the world? How do we know they stay on humanity’s side? I've been saying this for a while malevolent unaligned entities have already been deployed, in direct contr…

Distribute power or go home. Something missed by many in these conversations is the role of open source in raising the floor so that we have a gazillion companies that have more interest in there being a fair, predictable market than a winner-take-all market.

Really good point on open source and the nudges it provides, and definitely a point that isn't made often enough!

Re: AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

#48

Post by tucnak »

nathias wrote: post #11

I don't know why people allow others to proclaim they're 'ethicists' if they have no relevant philosophical education. There are whole fields of 'ethics' that are just PR departments trying to escape the now bad connotations of 'PR departments'.

It could be the case that Wittgensteinians have won completely, and if that is, indeed, the case—a great chunk of academic ethics should be considered hubris...

Re: AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

#49

Post by morsecodist »

qualeed wrote: post #17
JackFr wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not hand waving, Asimov’s three laws are not a good framework. My claim is that the whole point was so that Asimov could write entertaining stories about the ambiguities and edge cases of the three laws.

This is a pretty good example of what parent comment was referencing, I think. You say " Asimov’s three laws are not a good framework. ", then don't present any arguments to why it is not a good framework. Instead you bring up something separate: the framework can facilitate story writing. It could be good for story writing and a good framework. Those two aren't mutually exclusive things. (I'm not arguing that it is…

I think it's fair to point out that they were never intended to be a good framework for aligning robots and humans. Even in his own stories they lead to problems. They were created precisely to make the point that encoding these things in rules is hard.

As for practical problems they are extremely vague. What counts as harm? Could a robot serve me a burger and fries if that isn't good for my health? By the rules they actually can't even passively allow me to get harmed so should they stop me from eating one? They have to follow human orders but which human? What if orders conflict?

Re: AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

#50

Post by diggan »

myrmidon wrote: post #18
Isamu wrote: post #8

This has been happening for a long time. I first noticed this with the hand waving dismissals of older concepts like Asimov’s laws. Not a carefully reasoned argument why “not causing harm to a human” is outmoded, but just pushing it aside. I would love to see a good reasoned argument there. No, instead there is Avoiding talking about harm to humans. Just because harm is broad doesn’t get you out of having to talk abo…

I think a big factor in Asimov's laws specifically being sidelined is that the whole process of building AI looks very different from what we pictured back then. Instead of us programming the AIs by feeding it lots of explicit hand-crafted rules/instructions, we're feeding the things with plain data instead, and the resulting behavior is much more black-box, less predictable and less controllable than anticipated. Tr…

> Instead of us programming the AIs by feeding it lots of explicit hand-crafted rules/instructions, we're feeding the things with plain data instead, and the resulting behavior is much more black-box, less predictable and less controllable than anticipated.

I dunno, we do feed them lots of explicit hand-crafted rules/instructions, it's just that does don't go into the training process, but instead goes into the "system"/"developer" prompts, which is effectively the way you "program" the LLMs.

So you start out with nothing, adjust the weights based on the datasets until you reach something that allows you to "program" them via the system/developer prompts, which considering what's happening behind the scenes, is more controllable than expected.

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