Jacob Ward's Warning | Are You Ready for Immoral A.I.?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Are you ready for the world of immoral AI? Because it's coming, let me tell you. And before I get into why this is happening and why it's so disturbing, let me talk to you a little bit about the idea of alignment and tell you a couple of stories about it. So alignment is this technical term that AI people use. And what they're talking about is bringing human values into alignment with AI. Here's how hard that is.
What does 'alignment' mean and why is it central to the AI ethics debate?
I was talking to people once at one of the big AI companies, and they were telling me that internally they were grappling with the alignment problem by talking about something that they called the heroin problem. It was a scenario they had cooked up. So imagine this. You're the maker of an AI super assistant, a personal secretary that's going to just be the perfect complement to your life. It's going to make everything easier for you, book all your things for you, anticipate your needs. But now imagine that you are addicted to heroin. You have a serious heroin problem. What is that AI supposed to do? Is it supposed to try and get you off the heroin, right? Book you into an inpatient treatment facility and try to make sure that you're cut off from your dealer and in all other ways try to get you off of that habit?
Or is it supposed to try to facilitate, accommodate your habit by booking your appointment with your dealer and making sure it doesn't make any appointments for when it knows you're going to be high or when you're going to be going through withdrawal, right? What is the maker of the AI supposed to do? Whose values are they supposed to bring the AI into alignment with? Here's the second story like that. I was once at a meeting between a big open – a big company that was making AI and a group of academics – who were basically there to sort of review some of the ideas that these folks had and figure out if they could sort of agree that these were good ideas. Anyway, what the AI person at the front of the room basically said was, we're going to start writing a bunch of propositions that will basically be sort of unfinished sentences.
They'll be sentences like, it would be immoral for me to do X to my coworker, that kind of thing.
How does the 'heroin problem' illustrate conflicts in designing helpful AI?
And then that X would get filled in by enough humans that you could then teach an AI the sort of the patterns of human morality. And he said to the group, and by doing so, we will arrive at a set of universal human values. And now I'll take your questions. Everybody's hand goes up in the room. And the first question came from a political scientist. And she said, well, I actually have three questions. What is universal? What is human? And what are values? Because we don't agree on that. as a species. You know, we don't have any idea what our shared morals will be because no two people can agree on what their values are supposed to be. So how are we supposed to pre-build them into a system? Well, until now...
You've actually had these companies trying to do that. You know, OpenAI in its chat GPT project was with GPT-4 and beyond, you know, trying to encode some rules into what it would say so that it wouldn't violate policy. So it would, you know, it would refuse to do certain creepy, sexy things, or it would, you know, refuse to engage and talk about violence. Like there was stuff that it was supposed to try to hold back from doing. And Anthropic actually went as far, this is another big maker of AI, went as far as trying to basically analyze all of these different rules from across humanity to build what they called constitutional AI, where they would try to actually like absorb the lessons from the constitutions of different nations and from the, you know, human rights, you know, the human rights agreements and the Geneva Conventions and all that stuff and try and build some universal human values into the system.
Well, now it looks like we're going another way. I mean, we'd already seen, we've heard Mark Zuckerberg and others talk about wanting to counteract what they call the sort of progressive bias in AI, which, you know, and there's been this general sort of complaint on the part of conservatives that there's been a bias toward leftist rhetoric in social media and other technology.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:25
2
What does 'alignment' mean and why is it central to the AI ethics debate?
0:25–2:14
3
How does the 'heroin problem' illustrate conflicts in designing helpful AI?
2:14–9:35
4
Can we teach AI 'universal human values' by crowdsourcing moral judgments?
9:35–10:04
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Don Lemon Show
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