Diary of a Wimpy Kid, a children’s book published by Jeff Kinney in April 2007 and preceded by an online version in 2004, contains a scene that feels oddly prescient about contemporary AI alignment research. (Skip to the paragraph in italics.)
Tuesday
Today we got our Independent Study assignment, and guess what it is? We have to build a robot. At first everybody kind of freaked out, because we thought we were going to have to build the robot from scratch. But Mr. Darnell told us we don’t have to build an actual robot. We just need to come up with ideas for what our robot might look like and what kinds of things it would be able to do. Then he left the room, and we were on our own. We started brainstorming right away. I wrote down a bunch of ideas on the blackboard. Everybody was pretty impressed with my ideas, but it was easy to come up with them. All I did was write down all the things I hate doing myself.
But a couple of the girls got up to the front of the room, and they had some ideas of their own. They erased my list and drew up their own plan. They wanted to invent a robot that would give you dating advice and have ten types of lip gloss on its fingertips. All us guys thought this was the stupidest idea we ever heard. So we ended up splitting into two groups, girls and boys. The boys went to the other side of the room while the girls stood around talking.
Now that we had all the serious workers in one place, we got to work. Someone had the idea that you can say your name to the robot and it can say it back to you. But then someone else pointed out that you shouldn’t be able to use bad words for your name, because the robot shouldn’t be able to curse. So we decided we should come up with a list of all the bad words the robot shouldn’t be able to say. We came up with all the regular bad words, but then Ricky Fisher came up with twenty more the rest of us had never even heard before. So Ricky ended up being one of the most valuable contributors on this project.
Right before the bell rang, Mr. Darnell came back in the room to check on our progress. He picked up the piece of paper we were writing on and read it over. To make a long story short, Independent Study is canceled for the rest of the year. Well, at least it is for us boys. So if the robots in the future are going around with cherry lip gloss for fingers, at least now you know how it all got started.
There are, of course, many differences with contemporary AI alignment research.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid, a children’s book published by Jeff Kinney in April 2007 and preceded by an online version in 2004, contains a scene that feels oddly prescient about contemporary AI alignment research. (Skip to the paragraph in italics.)
There are, of course, many differences with contemporary AI alignment research.