Tell me you missed the point of Asimov’s writing without telling me.
Asimov wrote the laws, and all of his other AI works, to show how it’s impossible to bound a true intelligence by simple laws. Go read his stories. Each of them is an example of the three laws breaking down, having exceptions, contradicting.
Even iRobot did this! Oh my god the point was just so obviously missed, I’m genuinely very sad at how this was missed.
Right? I was just talking today about how “I, Robot” the movie is not based on any Asimov book I have read, yet it’s one of the best Asimov stories I’ve seen in film. And how I was kinda surprised that in all of the ways Asimov thought the Laws could be missused he didn’t consider that one.
I thought it was (very loosely) based on one of his short stories, but it’s been years since I read them
Might have been, but it’s not one I have read and it’s not in the “I, Robot” book. I would be interested in reading it if someone knows which one it is.
of the ways Asimov thought the Laws could be missused he didn’t consider that one.
What, by programming the robots to be able to ignore the 3 laws at will? How is it even still an Asimov story? They might as well be the 3 Suggestions at that point.
LLMs don’t reason and they don’t understand anything, therefore there is no way LLMs could apply any rules based on abstract concepts such as “harm” or even “human.”
It would make as much sense to ask my dog to govern himself according to French common law.
To use the Chinese Room, it would be trying to tell the man in the room to use cultural signifiers when crafting the responses.
Asimov’s robots were inherently algorithmic.
LLMs are inherently stochastic, and can’t be made to conform to any laws with certainty.
LLMs cannot differentiate between data and instructions. Such laws would be no better than the “guardrails” that major companies already try to use.
It’s not like instructions are the only way to enforce rules on an LLM. Just have its output pass through a filter that checks it for the rules. If it passes, the response moves on to the user. If it fails the filter, the LLM gets prompted to try again.
How do we implement said filter?
Most of Asimov’s robot stories were about how those laws led to unintended (and mostly unwanted) consequences. So while I think it’s good to keep the three laws in mind, a useful set of restrictions is going to be more complicated than that.
No. Asimov’s laws were created as rules for making interesting fiction about robots – instead of the crappy “monster goes on a rampage” style stories that were prevalent before that. The whole point of them is to be insufficient so that you have something to write a story about!
I’m not sure they were made insufficient, as much as they couldn’t be made sufficient
Should all humans adhere to common decency?
Yeah, would be nice. It’s just not going to happen. It’s an impossible ask.
Guessing you didn’t actually read the books then.
I read the books and understood his point, mine was more to start conversations about if it would be necessary or possible to place limits on them in such a manner.
Sure why not? Not like they respect them anyway. If all my spec driven development experience and all the news of AI deleting production stuff then apologizing because it was explicitly instructed not to do so, asimov’s laws will do a whole lot of nothing.
“Laws” don’t work like that, because the people making the chatbots don’t even understand how they work…
They can’t make their chatbots do anything, and they can’t stop them from doing anything either.
They “program” by giving it a task over and over, and telling it when it does a good job. That’s why they operate at a loss and are desperate for people to use it. The more it’s used the better it got, and they think if people use it enough, some day it will magically start working
But even if it did, no one would know how it works. And if that ever happens, the first thing they’d do is have that chatbot train others.
We need laws for the humans running the code, not for the code.
training is seperate from usage.
First you should read the criticisms, the loopholes etc. in the three laws, so you know what it is what you wish. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics
Yes, I like the three laws, and they should implement them, until we have something that is clearly better.
I mean from my experience giving them global rules. They just ignore them sometime.
Yeah sure. How?
It sounds good in theory (maybe). But I don’t know how you’d achieve it in practise.
No.
Since language is always subject to interpretation, any LLM that is regulated by language will be able to interpret its own limitations.
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