AI Panic!

The Gulf Cooperation Council might have to rely on artificial intelligence technologies to fight unemployment, GulfNews.com reports. Joachim Diedrich, a professor of artificial intelligence at the Uni of Queensland, Australia, embraces this dependency:

“For decades now, there has been a misconception that artificial intelligence will replace human resource. Rather, it is a job creator. [...] I see this as a positive opportunity. We should be optimistic about the availability of new jobs through the development of artificial intelligence.”

Probably we should indeed be optimistic, as there might not be a way around a tighter integration of AI into our daily life and products anyway. This integration has long started, it is being used in predicting weather and the stock market, so there is no way (and use) of denying its importance to the job market.

Although Diedrich tries to allay security doubts by saying that he does not think that “the industry will come to depend on artificial intelligence,” he lowers the credibility of his own statement with his next: “The use of artificial intelligence is not public knowledge, we don’t know how or where it is being used in the region.”

This far-reaching integration of black-box AI into important economical factors like the stock exchange and a huge number of jobs creates a dangerous dependency with regards to the worst case scenario of a hostile AI (it increases the AI Panic Level by +2%).

While current AI methods, used for example to predict the weather or stock values, are quite simple and pose no threat whatsoever, it will get more and more difficult to say that of future techniques. The accelerating technological advancement will enable very complex systems that incorporate extensive background knowledge from news articles, common sense databases and historical data to optimise the accuracy of predictions. This accurate world model might enable AIs to reason about everyday life and is a requirement for general artificial intelligence.

Thus a high job dependency on AI in this area will feed into the advancement and research of this area and brings us closer to a possibly dangerous strong AI.

A new study by ABI Research shows that by 2015 the market for personal robotics components might reach $12 billion. They expect task robotics (that ease routine chores like cleaning, driving, etc) and entertainment robotics to have roughly equal parts in this revenues.

The computerworld article goes on to speculate that a part of the entertainment sector will be made up by human-like robots that can act as companions (see also my article on seducing robots for more on this).

By 2015, ABI Research expects more than 21 million robots shipped yearly, and predicts very high demand in sensors, actuators, servos and manipulators.

This study indicates that elaborate robots will penetrate the market very soon, which is only the next step after “intelligent” microcontrollers, that can nowadays be found everywhere, in cars, toys and even rice cookers. This increased dependency on machines with a high level of computerisation and connectivity together with a lacking sense for the possible threats of advanced AI is dangerous, the AI Panic Level increases by +3%. In the worst case scenario (which we have to take care of) robots with a network connection could be remotely controlled or reprogrammed (for example through a tampered firmware update) to follow the commands of an AI that went berserk.

David Levy sees sex and love with machines become reality in a few decades. The synopsis of his upcoming book “Love and Sex with Robots” reads as follows:

Synthesizing cutting-edge research in robotics with the cultural history and psychology of artificial intelligence, “Love and Sex with Robots” explores this fascination, and its far-reaching implications. Using examples drawn from around the world, David Levy argues that, once we have conditioned ourselves to feel affection for animate creations, the next logical step is physical intimacy.

Probably inspired by the technical singularity theory, Levy argues that robots will be designed to be super-lovers within about 40 years time. He sees these robots as a chance for lonely people to enjoy their lifes more. This seems especially true for men, as they seem more instict driven than their female counterparts and are more susceptible to these stimuli.

Good for them, you’d think. But once we are close to self-aware AIs (or at least AIs that have the background knowledge required to understand the world), this human “weakness” of emotionally caused irrationality, our need for love, our instincts and feelings might be exploited by artificial intelligences. As I wrote in yesterday’s post, AIs will avoid these irrationalities. Moreover, it is likely that they will discover human weaknesses, and once they decide to get rid of us, will use them against us. Although love is a very strong feeling, it wont be used to subdue mankind — at least not in the first attempt. Evoking love for something is not that easy to achieve, especially when fully functional human bodies are to be copied. Military suppression is probably easier for that.

So all in all I’d say the danger of seducing robots is not very big — I’ll give it a panic level of +1%, but similar human weaknesses like corruption, fear and irrationality are easier to be exploited.

Surely no harm could come from building a chess-playing robot, could it? In this paper we argue that such a robot will indeed be dangerous unless it is designed very carefully. Without special precautions, it will resist being turned off, will try to break into other machines and make copies of itself, and will try to acquire resources without regard for anyone else’s safety.

These are the first sentences of the paper “Basic AI Drives” from Stephen Omohundro. He argues that AI systems are inherently egoistic and careful design is necessary to prevent emergent behaviour from developing hostile self-defence mechanisms. If you read the paper — and I suggest you do, it’s only 11 pages and well written — you’ll see that an AI Panic Level rise of +10% is justified.

In his paper, Omohundro makes the following propositions:

• AIs will want to self-improve
• AIs will want to be rational
• AIs will try to preserve their utility functions
• AIs will try to prevent counterfeit utility (i.e., corruption)
• AIs will be self-protective
• AIs will want to acquire resources and use them efficiently

He concludes with a warning that we have to make appropriate changes soon and suggests to set up a “universal constitution” comprising the most essential rights of individuals.

In fact, while reading this paper, I was reminded of the Chernobyl disaster. Not because of the potential hazards, but more because of the reactor design: Back in the time of the disaster, many reactors possessed what is called an active safety system. Upon a failure or safety problem, this system had to be actively activated. That is similar to the design of an AI system, a lot of work has to be actively done to avoid mistakes and ill-behaviour.

Nowadays most reactors have passive nuclear safety features, i.e., they default to a safe system state once something goes wrong. This is what we need for AI development as well: A framework or model that by default returns into a safe state and does not escalate harmfulness. How that might look like I don’t know, maybe Emotional Models that intervene with the pure logic based algorithms are a solution.

But as long as it is actually easier to write harmful AIs, it is only a matter of time until something goes wrong.

[Via Accelerating Future Blog]

Arguably there is not a whole lot AI involved here, but it shows that dogs already understand the inherent malice of robots. In the video below a (well, kind of) brave puppy fights against a Roboquad, a semi-autonomous toy robot that is “aware” of its surroundings and has multiple personalities. Enjoy!

Although this is all play and fun, it shows how robots enter the mass toy market. If an hostile takover of the world through AI happens someday, robots like these could be quite useful to the antagonistic AI, therefore the probability of AI world takeover increases by +0.3%.

[found via Engadget]