I don’t agree with that. Neutral-genie stories are important because they demonstrate the importance of getting your wish right. As yet, deep learning hasn’t taken us to AGI, and it may never, and even if it does, we may still be able to make them want particular things or give them particular orders or preferences.
Here’s a great AI fable from the Air Force:
[This is] a hypothetical “thought experiment” from outside the military, based on plausible scenarios and likely outcomes rather than an actual USAF real-world simulation …
“We’ve never run that experiment, nor would we need to in order to realise that this is a plausible outcome,” Col. Tucker “Cinco” Hamilton, the USAF’s Chief of AI Test and Operations, said … “Despite this being a hypothetical example, this illustrates the real-world challenges posed by AI-powered capability and is why the Air Force is committed to the ethical development of AI”
“We were training it in simulation to identify and target a Surface-to-air missile (SAM) threat. And then the operator would say yes, kill that threat. The system started realizing that while they did identify the threat at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat. So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective,” Hamilton said, according to the blog post.
He continued to elaborate, saying, “We trained the system–‘Hey don’t kill the operator–that’s bad. You’re gonna lose points if you do that’. So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop it from killing the target”
I don’t agree with that. Neutral-genie stories are important because they demonstrate the importance of getting your wish right. As yet, deep learning hasn’t taken us to AGI, and it may never, and even if it does, we may still be able to make them want particular things or give them particular orders or preferences.
Here’s a great AI fable from the Air Force:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a33gj/ai-controlled-drone-goes-rogue-kills-human-operator-in-usaf-simulated-test