Problem with these AI’s is that, in order to do something useful for us, they will for sure have some goals to attain, and be somewhat based on today’s planning algorithms. Typical planning algorithms will plan with an eye for the constraints given and, rightfully, ignore everything else.
A contrived example, but something to consider: imagine a robot with artificial vision capabilities and capable of basic manipulation. You tell it to do something, but a human would be harmed by doing that action (by pushing an object, for example). One of the constraints is “do not harm humans”, which was roughly translated as “if you see a human, don’t exert big forces on it”. The robot then happily adjusts its vision software to deliberately not see the human, as it would under any other condition adjust it the other way around to actively look for a human when it is not seen (you can imagine this as an important adjustable threshold for 3D object recognition or whatever, one that has to be adjusted to look for different kinds of objects). Yes this is a contrived example, but it’s easy to imagine loopholes in AI design, and anyone who has worked closely with planning algorithms knows that if these loopholes exist, the algorithm will find them. As sad as it might sound, in medieval times, the way that religious people found to justify using slave labor was to classify slaves as “not actual people and thus, our laws are not applicable”. It’s only reasonable to assume that an AI can do this as well.
Problem with these AI’s is that, in order to do something useful for us, they will for sure have some goals to attain, and be somewhat based on today’s planning algorithms. Typical planning algorithms will plan with an eye for the constraints given and, rightfully, ignore everything else.
A contrived example, but something to consider: imagine a robot with artificial vision capabilities and capable of basic manipulation. You tell it to do something, but a human would be harmed by doing that action (by pushing an object, for example). One of the constraints is “do not harm humans”, which was roughly translated as “if you see a human, don’t exert big forces on it”. The robot then happily adjusts its vision software to deliberately not see the human, as it would under any other condition adjust it the other way around to actively look for a human when it is not seen (you can imagine this as an important adjustable threshold for 3D object recognition or whatever, one that has to be adjusted to look for different kinds of objects). Yes this is a contrived example, but it’s easy to imagine loopholes in AI design, and anyone who has worked closely with planning algorithms knows that if these loopholes exist, the algorithm will find them. As sad as it might sound, in medieval times, the way that religious people found to justify using slave labor was to classify slaves as “not actual people and thus, our laws are not applicable”. It’s only reasonable to assume that an AI can do this as well.