Regulate, says Musk – OK, but who writes the New Robot Rules?

Re: Working out what AI is thinking and why

@John Riddoch

Your argument is valid. Only one minor correction: it's not just about AI. It's also true of humans. "The most powerful computing resources available" (your words) but it can be a bit of a bugger figuring out why they did what they did. Even when you ask them, they may not know.

According to one school of thought, we don't know why we do things. We do something because one part of our neural net decides to and then our consciousness comes up with a reason why we did it. This is particularly true of children: remember when you did something wrong, adults asked you why and your answer was that you didn't know? The adults refused to believe you (they must have forgotten similar events in their own childhoods), so kept pressing until you invented a reason. As you grew older, you invented reasons more or less automatically (because you had become used to having to explain your actions) and eventually adopted the delusion that those invented stories were why you did something. Neurologists have shown that the bits of the brain involved in conscious thought come into play after the bits responsible for performing actions.

So yeah, to quote you again, "transparency isn't their strong point." Or ours. Unlike AIs, we are capable of inventing explanations, but invention is all that it is. Informed speculation about our own actions, with more knowledge of internal state to go on, but it's still speculation not fact.

The best we'll be able to do with AI is keep a record of all the inputs. That will at least tell us if the AI is at fault in a given situation and then we'll have to find training that eliminates the error.

Re: Working out what AI is thinking and why

ship something whose workings they don't and, more importantly, can't understand.... Should they even be allowed to?

Then you are going to have a hard job doing most machine vision without deep learning type nets.

Writing procedural code for "if this horizontal line at the top of the image is n pixels long AND ... AND ... AND " then Peckham high st - is going to be a bit limited

Re: will the rise of the Robots

A good point, and one long discussed down the decades of industrial relations. It takes far fewer people now to run a car assembly line than it did decades ago. Nobody likes being replaced by a pay-less machine, and never have.

The stock answer to this is that the people no longer employed, say, assembling cars are now employed doing something else instead that machines cannot do. The idea being that the economic productivity of the nation is higher for the same number of man hours, and we're all better off as a result.

The trouble with that idea is that actually it's very difficult to come up with an idea for what all those people are actually going to do instead. Just because one industry no longer needs thousands of people, there's no reason why another is going to magically spring up in its place. Couple that with the fact that after being encouraged to go to university, etc. the younger generation seem less keen on doing things like manual labour no matter what the renumeration is (and who can blame them?), there is even less incentive for anyone with a suitably expansive industrial idea requiring a lot of manual labour to actually set up in an area which used to depend on such things.

Thus the politics of the UK over the past 40 years or so (if not longer when one looks back to the closure of the cotton mills, etc). Personally speaking I think it could have been a whole lot worse than it actually was. Just think what it'd be like without the inward investment from the Japanese car manufacturers.

Jobs that are robot proof? Plumbing. Electrician. Undertaker. Tax man. That's probably about it.

I sincerely doubt that AI will advance to the point where it can replace delivery drivers (or any drivers), but with the impending legal clamp down on the Gig economy the likes of Amazon, etc. will decide they have less of a need for delivery drivers (it'll become cheaper to buy it in a shop as Amazon are forced to actually employ their drivers as staff, and Amazon's business will shrink).

Re: will the rise of the Robots

"Exactly,wherefore common sense governing ,if ever in existence,would mandate limits on childbirths,planned population portals..."

IOW, Overpopulation, which seems to be about as politically suicidal as being caught with kiddie porn.

Re: Asimov

Don't we actually need Susan Calvin? She can then interrogate any dodgy car in question and get to the bottom of things?

Then it should TAKE NO ACTION.

Until it's something capable of reasoned thought such that it could explain it's reasoning in a court of law (i.e. decades away from happening).

In your thought-experiment example, the machine has no concept of whether the 5 people who die if it does nothing are terrorists chasing the one innocent person who would die if it pulled the lever.

Whichever way around you put the lever (i.e. to squish or not squish either party/parties in the absence of further command), it cannot make that decision in a reasonable manner without contextual understanding of the implications.

Until it's capable of that reasoning, and it's proven in a court to be that capable, the MACHINE should not be left in any position where inaction will cause more harm than ANY SPECIFIC ACTION. This is why industrial controls are "fail-safe", etc.

Even then, it's a horribly contrived situation with no right answer (i.e. even a human would struggle depending on a very, very, quick split-second decision and getting the right answer, e.g squishing the cop chasing the group of muggers instead of the muggers because it's "less people dead" and a court would recognise that and hold them pretty blameless).

It's either responsible for all its own actions (in which case it gets brought before a court as an independent entity and has to find its own representation, etc. and the manufacturer won't defend it or take responsibility for it) or it's not (in which case it's a machine made by a company which gave it poor defaults and put it into a situation where it was required to think when it wasn't capable of that).

Look up "Trolley Problem" and other scenarios where there simply is no right answer.

The Trolley Problem is easy, just pull the lever part way so that the trolley derails - therefore there are no casualties on either fork of the track.

That's not a difficult one either - if you pick up your hammer, walk up to your neighbour's cat and start hitting it - who's responsible for that, you or the manufacturer of the hammer?! Exactly the same scenario in your example.

Re: Liabilty? No difference!

> all our self driving cars will then start crawling through town at a snail's pace, just in case.

Which brings us nicely to the second part of the unfolding AV saga (part 3 would deal with: what crime has been commited, and where should the offence be prosecuted?).

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Part 2. The ability of individuals to hold up traffic indefinitely would soon need to be addressed - within minutes of the first herd of AVs hitting the streets. We clearly cannot have pedestrians simply walking out to cross the road at will, safe in the knowledge that whatever they do, the AVs will be forced to bend to their will. So what will happen is that people will become subject to much more stringent "jay walking" regulations. Just to keep the traffic flowing.

So it will become illegal to walk in the road just because you feel like it. And just as illegal to cross except when the traffic lights permit. The AVs will enforce this law with their 360° cameras and the police's facial recognition systems.