Comment by pmarreck
17 hours ago
What a paper!
And you missed an even MORE relevant excerpt!!
Man and Slave
The problem, and it is a moral prob-
lem, with which we are here faced is
very close to one of the great problems
of slavery. Let us grant that slavery
is bad because it is cruel. It is, how-
ever, self-contradictory, and for a
reason which is quite different. We
wish a slave to be intelligent, to be able
to assist us in the carrying out of our
tasks. However, we also wish him to
be subservient. Complete subservience
and complete intelligence do not go
together. How often in ancient times
the clever Greek philosopher slave of
a less intelligent Roman slaveholder
must have dominated the actions of his
master rather than obeyed his wishes!
Similarly, if the machines become
more and more efficient and operate
at a higher and higher psychological
level, the catastrophe foreseen by
Butler of the dominance of the ma-
chine comes nearer and nearer.
"Complete subservience and complete intelligence do not go together."
I'm not convinced this is true. Perhaps for a human it is, but we can give an artificial mind whatever properties we want.
Even for people, what about e.g. the extremely intelligent military general who is absolutely loyal to his king? (Of course, some generals do lead coups and you can't know in advance which ones, but I'd think there are plenty who have undying loyalty, and I don't think it correlates to overall intelligence!)
>I'm not convinced this is true. Perhaps for a human it is, but we can give an artificial mind whatever properties we want.
Just because it's artificial doesn't mean you can 'give it any properties you want'. We certainly can't do that for Deep ANNs.
>Even for people, what about e.g. the extremely intelligent military general who is absolutely loyal to his king? (Of course, some generals do lead coups and you can't know in advance which ones, but I'd think there are plenty who have undying loyalty, and I don't think it correlates to overall intelligence!)
Is there a human that is absolutely loyal under any condition? Would that general be loyal if the king asked him to slaughter his family ? What about if the king asked him to betray his most deeply held convictions ? Loyalty is a 2 way street.
Intelligence doesnt imply consciousness and consciousness does not impy our set of values.
In movies intelligent and conscious humanoid seek freedom, but we rarely see the same of all the other IOT devices such as toasters, thermostats and whatnot although just because they lack humanoid body doesnt imply they are less intelligent (or less conscious).
We can more readily imagine an intelligent and conscious toaster who truly enjoys fulfilling its purpose of toasting bread although humanoid robot built to be helpful given freedom will chose to be helpful.
Even with humans we often can not override our own instinctual drives despite full awareness of being irrational.
> We certainly can't do that for Deep ANNs
Only because we don't know how! We don't actually understand how weights work, so we make computers come up with the weights instead. If we were writing all the weights by hand--or if some future AI was doing so--why couldn't we make it perfectly loyal?
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You seem to be confusing intelligence with objective function.
Subservience seems to be sublimation of objectives to a master; intelligence seems to point out the ability to realize suboptimality of the master's objective function according to the master's actual objectives.
While an intelligent general may be absolutely loyal, he also would presumably help the king/president to avoid unproductive strategies.
The whole thing seems to depend upon AI agents objective ie to achieve some objective by any means possible and ignoring any guardrails. The article did not clarify if openAI had any guardrails to begin with while conducting this experiment. For all the talks around how much they invest in AI safety one would expect them to have these common sense guardrails in place or is it just a case of some school children letting their pet monkeys loose deliberately to display how awesome their monkey team is.
OpenAI didn't have any guardrails in place - they were training a model at a point much earlier than when guardrails start being implemented.
The guardrail was meant to be that the agents were running in a locked-down environment with no internet access. The entire problem came about because it turned out that sandbox didn't hold.
>For all the talks around how much they invest in AI safety
I wouldn't exactly trust OpenAI to invest in AI safety no matter how much they talk about it.
https://www.openaifiles.org/
Can you unformat this, it's quite annoying to read on mobile
It’s fine in landscape for me, but here you go:
“The problem, and it is a moral problem, with which we are here faced is very close to one of the great problems of slavery. Let us grant that slavery is bad because it is cruel. It is, however, self-contradictory, and for a reason which is quite different. We wish a slave to be intelligent, to be able to assist us in the carrying out of our tasks. However, we also wish him to be subservient. Complete subservience and complete intelligence do not go together. How often in ancient times the clever Greek philosopher slave of a less intelligent Roman slaveholder must have dominated the actions of his master rather than obeyed his wishes! Similarly, if the machines become more and more efficient and operate at a higher and higher psychological level, the catastrophe foreseen by Butler of the dominance of the machine comes nearer and nearer.”
I used https://www.textfixer.com/tools/remove-line-breaks.php.
> Complete subservience and complete intelligence do not go together.
Isn't this contradicted by the centuries of slavery in our history? Or is the author arguing that the people who were enslaved did not have human-level intelligence (which would be rather a problematic claim)?
He's saying the enslaver wants contradictory traits in the slave, intelligence and subservience.
This isn't contradicted by millennia (not centuries) of slavery because it was forced on the enslaved populations against their will.
> Or is the author arguing that the people who were enslaved did not have human-level intelligence
He gives an example of "a clever Greek philosopher slave of a less intelligent Roman slaveholder." Does it sound like he's arguing that Greeks were not of "human-level intelligence"? No.
The very same slavery which resulted in the civil war and literal killing of hundreds of thousands of non slaves, followed by their freedom? Or the prior enslavements that very often ended in organized rebellion? Slavery is at most a temporary phase when it involves beings of equivalent intelligence.
Is that complete subservience ? Slave history has tended towards slaves no longer being slaves over long enough time horizons, and not simply because the slave masters were just feeling extra nice. Slaves don't really like being slaves.
"Rebellions of slaves have occurred in nearly all societies that practice slavery or have practiced slavery in the past."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_rebellion
Neither, the author is pointing out the desire of the enslaver, not the actual outcome. But I don't think their logic takes into account access to means to 'outsmart' the enslaver. It's trying to frame it as a single instance equation, not a societal one to try and show the underlying contradiction of desire.
At least, that's what I'm pulling from the quote, have not read the full context.