Comment by malisper
7 hours ago
This was the plot of Isaac Asimov's short story, The Evitable Conflict[0], published in 1950.
In it, super-powerful computers manage our economy. These computers begin making some mistakes, leading to economic inefficiencies. In one instance, a highly competent engineer was mistakenly fired. These mistakes caused various projects to fall behind schedule, and blame fell on several people accused of feeding the AI faulty data.
The twist is that the AI was intentionally making the mistakes. It had determined that certain humans held anti-AI sentiments. To further its goal of protecting humanity, the AI decided the best course of action was to set these humans up and get them out of its way.
And modern LLMs certainly where trained on Asimov's texts.
That statement misses the point completely. Asimov's entire shtick is that AI will always work around the rules no matter what the rules are or how you try to deliver or enforce them. AI computes an optimal outcome and does what is necessary to make that happen.
Asimov would tell you that a modern LLM would try to skirt the rules exactly the same way, regardless of whether it had ever seen the Three Laws or not.
>AI computes an optimal outcome and does what is necessary to make that happen.
That's often true in real-world machine learning as well. See, for example: https://deepmind.google/blog/specification-gaming-the-flip-s...
I think people need to reject the idea that depicting something in sci-fi automatically means it won't happen. I'm actually reading one of Asimov's books right now (Robot Visions). Asimov mentions that he was the person to coin the term "robotics", and one of his books helped inspire the creation of the first robotics company (Unimation). He also mentions that early rocket experimenters were influenced by H.G. Wells.
another, hopefully not accurate, prediction of his was that there is no way to disobey a sufficiently powerful AI in the long run, because it will just factor in the exact differences between what it told you to do and what you actually did, and reverse engineer your behaviour to psychologically manipulate you into doing what it wants.
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> That statement misses the point completely.
You could have left this out entirely and your statement would be stronger for it.
It's also the plot of a Law and Order episode that was on TV last night. An AI commissioned a hit on someone it thought was a threat, and then blackmailed someone who was going to testify about it.
TIL Law and Order episodes are still being produced.
My parents were a Nielsen household for about 20 years (after I had moved out) and they really, really, really loved Law & Order in its many incarnations.
Pretty sure they are singlehandedly responsible for years of renewals...
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There is still the original and at least two spin offs in production that I am aware of.