Comment by tokyovigilante
4 days ago
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
So first off, Asimov's entire point was these laws don't work. But also the entire setup of the trolley problem means that the robots only option is to violate 1. by either pulling or not-pulling the lever (though the server case is different - at least in the philosophical interpretation - I can easily see Asimov justifying it by saying that destroying the train-control-robot is going to cause a lot of human beings to come to harm).
> So first off, Asimov's entire point was these laws don't work.
Don't always work in all scenarios, was the takeaway.
There's a metric ton of salt to be taken with the mental concepts and possible interpretations of such "laws".
Largely, they do work in the stories, despite the inherent ambiguity.
I don't know how you could come to that point of view. His point is that there will always be a loophole. There does not exist a set of rules that make a completely safe and useful robot.
2 replies →
The ambiguity is the stories!
>Asimov's entire point was these laws don't work
Was it? I haven't read the short stories in some times, but I remember the case in which they don't work always being treated like an extremely rare, newsworthy exception.
Inverse laws for humans, when interacting with robots
1. Do not humanize the Ai
2. Do not blindly trust output from the Ai
3. Humans are to remain ultimately responsible and accountable for actions of the Ai
adapted / paraphrased from
https://susam.net/inverse-laws-of-robotics.html
The joke I heard was:
Don't anthropomorphize computers - they hate that.
Rules 2 and 3 would be great for interacting with humans as well (figure 1: US politics)
Actually brilliant!
Aren't they?! Susam nailed it
I've been working on an Ai mini-zine series to help rationalize the conversation in our dysfunctional social/news media ecosystem. I include these rules on the back cover.
I wish Anthropic employees read this… sigh
I liked their models but they really started to follow weird path which was not all hard to foreseen considering their past wording and founding values.
OpenAI seems more relaxed at least and rational instead of cultish.
Lovely competition.
I don't use either, open weight is the way
> A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
The trolley problem with this would be an Asimov story (it's pretty close already). Pulling the lever injures a human, not pulling the lever allows a human being to come to harm via inaction. The positronic robot probably ends up stuck trying to pull and not pull the lever at the same time.
you forgot to add "no mistakes"
Although Asimov writes great fiction, he’d be a terrible alignment engineer
Aside from the cringeworthiness of quoting fictional speeches as social media performance, have you not considered just how poorly thought out these rules are?
C3PO, torture that puppy for my entertainment is a perfectly valid request under this framework. They work OK in the stories because Asimov set them up that way, both as sort of just-so stories and (perhaps) to explore socially created barriers in contemporary society.
But they don't work in contexts where people deliberately exploit holes in the logic or definition. Literally yesterday, the news provided us with an example of how some people will absolutely abuse robots in pursuit of being awful: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck9dzj40nzj5o
>A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
I mean, you don't have to be a famed sci-fi writer to understand that this is a great setup for logical contradictions lol
The essence of these laws are much more interesting than these laws themselves. I imagine, in reality, the "best" robot policy would be one where it is effectively just "maximize utility" and that's it. Obviously, naively, that's no good (re: paperclip problem), but some sensible formulation of robotics laws would almost always need to be in the form of a maximization/minimization problem (or perhaps a min-max problem).
A lesson I am drawing from my testing is that if one of these rules has to be evaluated by the robot, at all, we should take over for it.