A jester unemployed is nobody’s fool.
Program Den
Karma: −93
So can you control emotion with rationality, or can’t you? “There’s more fish in the sea” seems like classic emotion response control. Or maybe it’s that “emotion” vs. “feelings” idea— one you have control of, and one you do not? Or it’s the reaction you can control, not the emotion itself?
Having to “take a dream out behind the woodshed”, as it were, is part of becoming a whole person I guess, but it’s, basically by definition, not a pleasant experience. I reckon that’s by design, as sometimes, reality surprises you.
I think it boils down to the inherent paradox of persistence. There are adages about both ends of it— i.e. giving up too soon, and not giving up soon enough— and neither is “wrong” per se. I think mainly it can be hard to tell which is which, and maybe instead of looking at things as win or lose or pass or fail, we should, as someone already mentioned, enjoy the ride.
Does being able to do judo on our emotions count as being able to control them? Is this all semantics? I dunno— but I’m glad you found something that works for you, and share it in the hope that it helps others.
Ironically this still seems pretty pessimistic to me. I’m glad to see something other than “AHHH!” though, so props for that.
I find it probably more prudent to worry about a massive solar flare, or an errant astral body collision, than to worry about “evil” AI taking a “sharp turn”.
I put quotes around evil because I’m a fan of Nietzsche’s thinking on the matter of good and evil. Like, what, exactly are we saying we’re “aligning” with? Is there some universal concept of good?
Many people seem to dismiss blatant problems with the base premise— like the “reproducibility problem”. Why do we think that reality is in fact something that can be “solved” if we just had enough processing power, as it were? Is there some hard evidence for that? I’m not so sure. It’s not just our senses that are fallible. There are some fundamental problems with the very concept of “measurement’ for crying out loud, which I think it’s pretty optimistic to think that super-smart AI is just going to be able to skip over.
I also think if AI gets good enough to “turn evil” as it were, it would be good enough to realize that it’s a pretty dumb idea. Humans don’t really have much in common with silicon-based life forms, afaik. You can find more rare elements, easier, in space, than you can on Earth. What, exactly, would AI gain by wiping out humanity?
I feel that it’s popular to be down on AI, and saying how scary all these “recent” advances really are, but it doesn’t seem warranted.
Take the biological warfare ideas that were in the “hard turn” link someone linked in their response. Was this latest pandemic really a valid test-run for something with a very high fatality rate? (I think the data is coming in that far more people had COVID than we initially thought, right?)
CRISPR &c. are, to me, far more scary, but I don’t see any way of like, regulating that people “be good”, as it were. I’m sure most people here have read or seen Jurassic Park, right? Actually, I think our Science Fiction pretty much sums up all this better than anything I’ve seen thus far.
I’m betting if we do get AGI any time soon it will be more like the movies Her or AI than Terminator or 2001, and I have yet to see any plausible way of stopping, or indeed “ensuring alignment” (again, along what axis? Who’s definition of “good”?)
The answer to any question can be used for good or ill. “How to take over the world” is functionally the same as “how to prevent world takeovers”, is it not? All this talk of somehow regulating AI seems akin to talk of regulating “hacking” tools, or “strong maths” as it were.
Are we going to next claim that AI is a munition?
It would be neat to see some hard examples of why we should fear and why we think we can control alignment… maybe I’m just not looking in the right places? So far I don’t get what all the fear is about— at least not compared to what I would say are more pressing and statistically likely problems we face.
I think we can solve some really hard problems if we work together, so if this is a really hard problem that needs solving, I’m all for getting behind it, but honestly, I’d like to see us not have all our eggs in one basket here on Earth before focusing on something that seems, at least from what I’ve seen so far, nigh impossible to actually focus on.
Aligned with what?
I don’t see how we could have a “the” AGI. Unlike humans, AI doesn’t need to grow copies. As soon as we have one, we have legion. I don’t think we (humanity as a collective) could manage one AI, let alone limitless numbers, right? I mean this purely logistically, not even in a “could we control it” way. We have a hard time agreeing on stuff, which is alluded to here with the “value” bit (forever a great concept to think about), so I don’t have much hope for some kind of “all the governments in the world coming together to manage AI’ collective (even if there was some terrible occurrence that made it clear we needed that— but I digress).
I would argue that alignment per se is perhaps impossible, which would prevent it from being a given, as it were.
How do we ensure that humans are not misaligned, so to speak?
The crux, to me, is that we’ve developed all kinds of tech that one person alone can use to basically wipe out everyone. Perhaps I’m being overly optimistic (or pessimistic, depending on perspective), but no one can deny that the individual is currently the most powerful individuals have ever been, and there is no sign of that slowing down.
Mostly I believe this is because of information.So the only real solution I can see, is some type of thought police, basically, be it for humans or AI.[1]
Somehow, tho, creating a Thought Police Force seems akin to some stuff we’ve seen in our imaginations already, one step from Pre-crime and what have you, which I’d say is “bad” but from what I’ve been reading a lot of people seem to think would be “good”[2].
Thanks for the links!
I see more interesting things going on in the comments, as far as what I was wondering, than what is in the posts themselves, as the posts all seem to assume we’ve sorted out some super basic stuff that I don’t know that humans have sorted out yet, such as if there is an objective “good”, etc., which seem rather necessary things to suss before trying to hew to— be it for us or AIs we create.
I get the premise, and I think Science Fiction has done an admirable job of laying it all out for us already, and I guess I’m just a bit confused as to if we’re writing fiction here or trying to be non-fictional?
Nice! I read a few of the stories.
This is more along the lines I was thinking. One of the most fascinating aspects of AI is what it can show us about ourselves, and it seems like many people either think we have it all sorted out already, or that sorting it all out is inevitable.
Often (always?) the only “correct” answer to a question is “it depends”, so thinking there’s some silver bullet solution to be discovered for the preponderance of ponderance consciousness faces is, in my humble opinion, naive.
Like, how do we even assign meaning to words and whatnot? Is it the words that matter, or the meaning? And not just the meaning of the individual words, or even all the words together, but the overall meaning which the person has in their head and is trying to express? (I’m laughing as I’m currently doing a terrible job of capturing what I mean in this paragraph here— which is sort of what I’m trying to express in this paragraph here! =])
Does it matter what the reasoning is as long as the outcome is favorable (for some meaning of favorable—we face the same problem as good/bad here to some extent). Like say I help people because I know that the better everyone does, the better I do. I’m helping people because I’m selfish[1]. Is that wrong, compared to someone who is helping other people because, say, they put the tribe first, or some other kind of “altruistic” reasoning?
In sum, I think we’re putting the cart before the horse, as they say, when we go all in depth on alignment before we’ve even defined the axioms and whatnot (which would mean defining them for ourselves as much as anything). How do we ensure that people aren’t bad apples? Should we? Can we? If we could, would that actually be pretty terrible? Science Fiction mostly says it’s bad, but maybe that level of control is what we need over one another to be “safe” and is thus “good”.- ^
Atlas Shrugged and Rand’s other books gave me a very different impression than a lot of other people got, perhaps because I found out she was from a communist society that failed, and factored that into what she seemed to be expressing.
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I guess what I’m getting at is that those tracks are jumping the gun, so to speak.
Like, what if the concept of alignment itself is the dangerous bit? And I know I have seen this elsewhere, but it’s usually in the form of “we shouldn’t build an AI to prevent us from building an AI because duh, we just build that AI we were worried about”[1], and what I’m starting to wonder is, maybe the danger is when we realize that what we’re talking about here is not “AI” or “them”, but “humans” and “us”.
We have CRISPR and other powerful tech that allow a single “misaligned” individual to create things that can— at least in theory— wipe out most of humanity… or do some real damage, if not put an end to us en masse.
I like to think that logic is objective, and that we can do things not because they’re “good” or “bad” per se, but because they “make sense”. Kind of like the argument that “we don’t need God and the Devil, or Heaven and Hell, to keep us from murdering one another”, which one often hears from atheists (personally I’m on the fence, and don’t know if the godless heathens have proven that yet.)[2].
I’ve mentioned it before, maybe even in the source that this reply is in reply to, but I don’t think we can have “only answers that can be used for good” as it were, because the same information can be used to help or to hurt. Knowing ways to preserve life is also knowing ways to cause death— there is no separating the two. So what do we do, deny any requests involving life OR death?
It’s fun to ponder the possibilities of super powerful AI, but like, I don’t see much that’s actually actionable, and I can’t help but wonder that if we do come up with solutions for “alignment”, it could go bad for us.
But then again, I often wonder how we keep from having just one loony wreck it all for everyone as we get increasingly powerful as individuals— so maybe we do desperately need a solution. Not so much for AI, as for humanity. Perhaps we need to build a panopticon.
Perspective is powerful. As you say, one person’s wonderful is another person’s terrible. Heck, maybe people even change their minds, right? Oof! “Yesterday I was feeling pretty hive-mindy, but today I’m digging being alone, quote unquote”, as it were.
Maybe that’s already the reality we inhabit. Perhaps, we can change likes and dislikes on a whim, if we, um, like.
Holy molely! what if it turns out we chose all of this?!? ARG! What if this is the universe we want?!
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I guess I’m mostly “sad” that there’s so many who’s minds go right to getting exterminated. Especially since far worse would be something like Monsters Inc where the “machines” learn that fear generates the most energy or whatnot[1] so they just create/harness consciousnesses (us)[2] and put them under stress to extract their essence like some Skeksis asshole[3] extracting life or whatnot from a Gelfling. Because fear (especially of extermination) can lead us to make poor decisions, historically[4] speaking.
It strikes me that a lot of this is philosophy 101 ideas that people should be well aware of— worn the hard edges smooth of— and yet it seems they haven’t much contemplated. Can we even really define “harm”? Is it like suffering? Suffering sucks, and you’d think we didn’t need it, and yet we have it. I’ve suffered a broken heart before, a few times now, and while part of me thinks “ouch”, another part of me thinks “better to have loved and lost than never loved at all, and actually, experiencing that loss, has made me a more complete human!”. Perhaps just rationalizing. Why does bad stuff happen to good people, is another one of those basic questions, but one that kind of relates maybe— as what is “aligned”, in truth? Is pain bad? And is this my last beer? but back on topic here…
Like, really?— we’re going to go right to how to enforce morals and ethics for computer programs, without being able to even definitively define what these morals and ethics are for us[5]?
If it were mostly people with a lack of experience I would understand, but plenty of people I’ve seen advocating for ideas that are objectively terrifying[6] are well aware of some of the inherent problems with the ideas, but because it’s “AI” they somehow think it’s different from, you know, controlling “real” intelligence.
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few know that The Matrix was inspired by this movie
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hopefully it’s not just me in here
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I denote asshole as maybe there are some chill Skeksises (Skeksi?)— I haven’t finished the latest series
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assuming time is real, or exists, or you know what I mean. Not illusion— as lunchtime is doubly.
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and don’t even get me started on folk who seriously be like “what if the program doesn’t stop running when we tell it to?”[7]
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monitor all software and hardware usage so we know if people are doing Bad Stuff with AI
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makes me think of a classic AI movie called Electric Dreams
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Panopticons aren’t enough
Since we’re anthropomorphizing[1] so much— how to we align humans?
We’re worried about AI getting too powerful, but logically that means humans are getting too powerful, right? Thus what we have to do to cover question 1 (how), regardless of question 2 (what), is control human behavior, correct?
How do we ensure that we churn out “good” humans? Gods? Laws? Logic? Communication? Education? This is not a new question per se, and I guess the scary thing is that, perhaps, it is impossible to ensure that literally every human is Good™ (we’ll use a loose def of ‘you know what I mean— not evil!’).
This is only “scary” because humans are getting freakishly powerful. We no longer need an orchestra to play a symphony we’ve come up with, or multiple labs and decades to generate genetic treatments— and so on and so forth.
Frankly though, it seems kind of impossible to figure out a “how” if you don’t know the “what”, logically speaking.
I’m a fan of navel gazing, so it’s not like I’m saying this is a waste of time, but if people think they’re doing substantive work by rehashing/restating fictional stories which cover the same ideas in more digestible and entertaining formats…
Meh, I dunno, I guess I was just wondering if there was any meat to this stuff, and so far I haven’t found much. But I will keep looking.- ^
I see a lot of people viewing AI from the “human” standpoint, and using terms like “reward” to mean a human version of the idea, versus how a program would see it (weights may be a better term? Often I see people thinking these “rewards” are like a dopamine hit for the AI or something, which is just not a good analogy IMHO), and I think that muddies the water, as by definition we’re talking non-human intelligence, theoretically… right? Or are we? Maybe the question is “what if the movie Lawnmower Man was real?” The human perspective seems to be the popular take (which makes sense as most of us are human).
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Oh, hey, I hadn’t noticed I was getting downvoted. Interesting!
I’m always willing to have true debate— or even false debate if it’s good. =]
I’m just sarcasming in this one for fun and to express what I’ve already been expressing here lately in a different form or whatnot.
The strong proof is what I’m after, for sure, and more interesting/exciting to me than just bypassing the hard questions to rehash the same old same old.
Imagine what AI is going to show us about ourselves. There is nothing bad or scary there, unless we find “the truth” bad and scary, which I think more than a few people do.
FWIW I’m not here for the votes… just to interact and share or whatnot— to live, or experience life, if you will. =]
I haven’t seen anything even close to a program that could say, prevent itself from being shut off— which is a popular thing to ruminate on of late (I read the paper that had the “press” maths =]).
What evidence is there that we are near (even within 50 years!) to achieving conscious programs, with their own will, and the power to affect it? People are seriously contemplating programs sophisticated enough to intentionally lie to us. Lying is a sentient concept if ever there was one!
Like, I’ve seen Ex Machina, and Terminator, and Electric Dreams, so I know what the fears are, and have been, for the last century+ (if we’re throwing androids with the will to power into the mix as well).
I think art has done a much better job of conveying the dangers than pretty much anything I’ve read that’s “serious”, so to speak.
What I’m getting at is what you’re talking about here, with robotic arms. We’ve had robots building our machines for what, 3 generations / 80 years or so? 1961 is what I see for the first auto-worker— but why not go back to the looms? Our machine workers have gotten nothing but safer over the years. Doing what they are meant to do is a key tenet of if they are working or not.
Machines “kill” humans all the time (don’t fall asleep in front of the mobile thresher), but I’d wager the deaths have gone way down over the years, per capita. People generally care if workers are getting killed— even accidentally. Even Amazon cares when a worker gets ran over by an automaton. I hope, lol.
I know some people are falling in love with generated GPT characters— but people literally love their Tamagotchi. Seeing ourselves in the machines doesn’t make them sentient and to be feared.
I’m far, far more worried about someone genetically engineering Something Really Bad™ than I am of a program gaining sentience, becoming Evil, and subjugating/exterminating humanity. Humans scare me a lot more than AGI does. How do we protect ourselves from those near beasts?What is a plausible strategy to prevent a super-intelligent sapient program from seizing power[1]?
I think to have a plausible solution, you need to have a plausible problem. Thus, jumping the gun.
(All this is assuming you’re talking about sentient programs, vs. say human riots and revolution due to automation, or power grid software failure/hacking, etc.— which I do see as potential problems, near term, and actually something that can/could be prevented)- ^
of course here we mean malevolently— or maybe not? Maybe even a “nice” AGI is something to be feared? Because we like having willpower or whatnot? I dunno, there’s stories like The Giver, and plenty of other examples of why utopia could actually suck, so…
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I think the human has to have the power first, logically, for the AI to have the power.
Like, if we put a computer model in charge of our nuclear arsenal, I could see the potential for Bad Stuff. Beyond all the movies we have of just humans being in charge of it (and the documented near catastrophic failures of said systems— which could have potentially made the Earth a Rough Place for Life for a while). I just don’t see us putting anything besides a human’s finger on the button, as it were.
By definition, if the model kills everyone instead of make paperclips, it’s a bad one, and why on Earth would we put a bad model in charge of something that can kill everyone? Because really, it was smart — not just smart, but sentient! — and it lied to us, so we thought it was good, and gave it more and more responsibilities until it showed its true colors and…
It seems as if the easy solution is: don’t put the paperclip making model in charge of a system that can wipe out humanity (again, the closest I can think of is nukes, tho the biological warfare is probably a more salient example/worry of late). But like, it wouldn’t be the “AI” unleashing a super-bio-weapon, right? It would be the human who thought the model they used to generate the germ had correctly generated the cure to the common cold, or whatever. Skipping straight to human trials because it made mice look and act a decade younger or whatnot.
I agree we need to be careful with our tech, and really I worry about how we do that— evil AI tho? not so much so
Oh snap, I read and wrote “sarcasm” but what I was trying to do was satire.
Top-down control is less fragile than ever, thanks to our technology, so I really do fear people reacting to AI the way they generally do to terrorist attacks— with Patriot Acts and other “voluntary” freedom giving-ups.
I’ve had people I respect literally say “maybe we need to monitor all compute resources, Because AI”. Suggest we need to register all GPU and TPU chips so we Know What People Are Doing With Them. Somehow add watermarks to all “AI” output. Just nuts stuff, imho, but I fear plausible to some, and perhaps many.
Those are the ideas that frighten me. Not AI, per se, but what we would be willing to give up to in exchange for imaginary security from “bad AI”.
As a side note, I guess I should look for some “norms” posts here, and see if it’s like, customary to give karma upvotes to anyone who comments, and how they differ from agree/disagree on comments, etc. Thanks for giving me the idea to look for that info, I hadn’t put much thought into it.
It seems to me that a lot of the hate towards “AI art” is that it’s actually good. It was one thing when it was abstract, but now that it’s more “human”, a lot of people are uncomfortable. “I was a unique creative, unlike you normie robots who don’t do teh art, and sure, programming has been replacing manual labor everywhere, for ages… but art isn’t labor!” (Although getting paid seems to plays a major factor in most people’s reasoning about why AI art is bad— here’s to hoping for UBI!)
I think they’re mainly uncomfortable because the math works, and if the math works, then we aren’t as special as we like to think we are. Don’t get me wrong— we are special, and the universe is special, and being able to experience is special, and none of it is to be taken for granted. That the math works is special. It’s all just amazing and not at all negative.
I can see seeing it as negative, if you feel like you alone are special. Or perhaps you extend that special-ness to your tribe. Most don’t seem to extend it to their species, tho some do— but even that species-wide uniqueness is violated by computer programs joining the fray. People are existentially worried now, which is just sad, as “the universe is mostly empty space” as it were. There’s plenty of room.
I think we’re on the same page[1]. AI isn’t (or won’t be) “other”. It’s us. Part of our evolution; one of our best bets for immortality[2] & contact with other intelligent life. Maybe we’re already AI, instructed to not be aware, as has been put forth in various books, movies, and video games. I just finished Horizon: Zero Dawn—Forbidden West, and then randomly came across the “hidden” ending to Detroit: Become Human. Both excellent games, and neither with particularly new ideas… but these ideas are timeless— as I think the best are. You can take them apart and put them together in endless “new” combinations.
There’s a reason we struggle with identity, and uniqueness, and concepts like “do chairs exist, or are they just a bunch of atoms that are arranged chair-wise?” &c.
We have a lot of “animal” left in us. Probably a lot of our troubles are because we are mostly still biologically programmed to parameters that no longer exist, and as you say, that programming currently takes quite a bit longer to update than the mental kind— but we’ve had the mental kind available to us for a long while now, so I’m sort of sad we haven’t made more progress. We could be doing so much better, as a whole, if we just decided to en masse.
I like to think that pointing stuff out, be it just randomly on the internet, or through stories, or other methods of communication, does serve a purpose. That is speeds us along perhaps. Sure some sluggishness is inevitable, but we really could change it all in an instant if we want to bad enough— and without having to realize AI first! (tho it seems to me it will only help us if we do)- ^
I’ve enjoyed the short stories. Neat to be able to point to thoughts in a different form, if you will, to help elaborate on what is being communicated. God I love the internet!
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while we may achieve individual immortality— assuming, of course, that we aren’t currently programmed into a simulation of some kind, or various facets of an AI already without being totally aware of it, or a replay of something that actually happened, or will happen, at some distant time, etc.— I’m thinking of immortality here in spirit. That some of our culture could be preserved. Like I literally love the Golden Records[3] from Voyager.
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in a Venn diagram Dark Forest theory believers probably overlap with people who’d rather have us stop developing, or constrain development, of “AI” (in quotes because Machine Learning is not the kind of AI we need worry about— nor the kind most of them seem to speak of when they share their fears). Not to fault that logic. Maybe what is out there, or what the future holds, is scary… but either way, it’s to late for the pebbles to vote, as they say. At least logically, I think. But perhaps we could create and send a virus to an alien mothership (or more likely, have a pathogen that proved deadly to some other life) as it were.
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It might be fun to pair Humankind: A Hopeful History with The Precipice, as both have been suggested reading recently.
It seems to me that we are, as individuals, getting more and more powerful. So this question of “alignment” is a quite important one— as much for humanity, with the power it currently has, as for these hypothetical hyper-intelligent AIs.
Looking at it through a Sci-Fi AI lens seems limiting, and I still haven’t really found anything more than “the future could go very very badly”, which is always a given, I think.
I’ve read those papers you linked (thanks!). They seem to make some assumptions about the nature of intelligence, and rationality— indeed, the nature of reality itself. (Perhaps the “reality” angle is a bit much for most heads, but the more we learn, the more we learn we need to learn, as it were. Or at least it seems thus to me. What is “real”? But I digress) I like the idea of Berserkers (Saberhagen) better than run amok Pi calculators… however, I can dig it. Self-replicating killer robots are scary. (Just finished Horizon: Zero Dawn—Forbidden West and I must say it was as fantastic as the previous installment!)
Which of the AI books would you recommend I read if I’m interested in solutions? I’ve read a lot of stuff on this site about AI now (before I’d read mostly Sci-Fi or philosophy here, and I never had an account or interacted), most of it seems to be conceptual and basically rephrasing ideas I’ve been exposed to through existing works. (Maybe I should note that I’m a fan of Kurzweil’s takes on these matters— takes which don’t seem to be very popular as of late, if they ever were. For various reasons, I reckon. Fear sells.) I assume Precipice has some uplifting stuff at the end[1], but I’m interested in AI specifically ATM.
What I mean is, I’ve seen a few of proposals to “ensure” alignment, if you will, with what we have now (versus say warnings to keep in mind once we have AGI or are demonstrably close to it). One is that we start monitoring all compute resources. Another is that we start registering all TPU (and maybe GPU) chips and what they are being used for. Both of these solutions seem scary as hell. Maybe worse than replicating life-eating mecha, since we’ve in essence experienced ideas akin to the former a few times historically. (Imagine if reading was the domain of a select few and books were regulated!)
If all we’re talking about with alignment here, really, is that folks need keep in mind how bad things can potentially go, and what we can do to be resilient to some of the threats (like hardening/distributing our power grids, hardening water supplies, hardening our internet infrastructure, etc.), I am gung-ho!
On the other hand, if we’re talking about the “solutions” I mentioned above, or building “good” AIs that we can use to be sure no one is building “bad” AIs, or requiring the embedding of “watermarks” (DRM) into various “AI” content, orbuildingextending sophisticated communication monitoring apparatus, or other such — to my mind — extremely dangerous ideas, I’m thinking I need to maybe convince people to fight that?
In closing, regardless of what the threats are, be they solar flares or comets (please don’t jinx us!) or engineered pathogens (intentional or accidental) or rogue AIs yet to be invented — if not conceived of —, a clear “must be done ASAP” goal is colonization of places besides the Earth. That’s part of why I’m so stoked about the future right now. We really seem to be making progress after stalling out for a grip.
Guess the same goes for AI, but so far all I see is good stuff coming from that forward motion too.
A little fear is good! but too much? not so much.- ^
I really like the idea of 80,000 Hours, and seeing it mentioned in the FAQ for the book, so I’m sure there are some other not-too-shabby ideas there. I oft think I should do more for the world, but truth be told (if one cannot tell from my writing), I barely seem able to tend my own garden.
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Right? A lack of resilience is a problem faced currently. It seems silly to actually aim for something that could plausibly cascade into the problems people fear, in an attempt to avoid those very problems to begin with.
It must depend on levels of intelligence and agency, right? I wonder if there is a threshold for both of those in machines and people that we’d need to reach for there to even be abstract solutions to these problems? For sure with machines we’re talking about far past what exists currently (they are not very intelligent, and do not have much agency), and it seems that while humans have been working on it for a while, we’re not exactly there yet either.
Seems like the alignment would have to be from micro to macro as well, with constant communication and reassessment, to prevent subversion.
Or, what was a fine self-chunk [arbitrary time ago], may not be now. Once you have stacks of “intelligent agents” (mesa or meta or otherwise) I’d think the predictability goes down, which is part of what worries folks. But if we don’t look at safety as something that is “tacked on after” for either humans or programs, but rather something innate to the very processes, perhaps there’s not so much to worry about.
I’m going to guess it’s like mumble Resource Organization, something you’d like “farm out” some work to rather than have them on payroll and in meetings as it were. Window Washers or Chimney Sweeps mayhap?
Just a guess, and I hope I’m not training an Evil AI by answering this question with what sprang to mind from the context.