Articles: Unsafe At Any Law

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Unsafe At Any Law

Our writers come from a wide variety of political viewpoints. Mike Lorrey writes from a strong libertarian perspective, and draws some thought-provoking analogies.

“Those who would trade liberty in exchange for some degree of security end up with neither liberty, nor security.” —Benjamin Franklin

The idea that laws result in safety or security is a hallucination that is at the core of the rottenness of the whole statist philosophy. This is no less true when it comes to applying laws to the programming of artificial life forms such as robots, cyborgs, and artificial intelligences.

Part of this is from the very fact that laws are interpreted based on what meanings we assign to the words with which they are elucidated. We’ve seen this with how statist incrementalism has corrupted the original meaning of the US Constitution, as legal dictionaries over the years have been edited by legal activists to create ever more encompassing definitions for many of the key words that delimit the powers accorded to government. These are typically in response to changes in popular perception brought about by propaganda campaigns in the mass media.

A computer scientist would say, “Yes, but computer code is not so malleable. It requires the revision of the language and the compilers that compile the programming language into machine language.”

Not necessarily. Computer languages change definitions of commands with regularity. Not complete changes, but incremental additions, just as occurs in legal dictionaries. Furthermore, each new generation of computer processors themselves add new commands or alter old commands.

The greater weakness of this process is that the key changes really occur at the machine language level. Machine language is itself ‘readable’ by a very limited subset of the human population. How do we actually know that a compiler is interpreting our programmed code the way we want it to? We see, it seems, news items almost every day of intentional or ‘unintentional’ programming back doors being exploited in current day applications and operating systems by malicious programmers.

The use of machine language creates a gap between elite programmers and the rest of us which is even more of a gap than that between layperson on the street and Constitutional scholars. The programming gap is tantamount to a scenario where our laws were not written in English, but in ancient Sumerian Cuneiform, Indian Sanskrit, or Egyptian

Hieroglyphs. How accessible would our legal system be by the man on the street, and how easily could we keep our eyes on statist incrementalism if such a scenario were current day fact?

Dismissiveness on this issue is in my opinion merely a state of denial. We should be very wary about abuse in this area. Looking at the laws of robotics themselves should serve to give us pause:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

There are a number of rather easily corruptible words here:

“robot”
“human being”
“harm”
“orders”
“injure”

The most important of these is the definition of ‘human being’. Today the people of this planet are engaged in a number of cultural wars both within countries like the US, France, Bosnia, among others, as well as internationally, like the current conflict between the Western nations and Islamist-inspired Terrorism. We see, on both sides, atrocities committed by average people simply because they are able to rationally deny that the enemy is validly considered a ‘human being’. Nor is this new, going back through WWII, the Holocaust, other genocides back into history, to the entire history of Chinese culture.

Terms like ‘injury’ or ‘harm’ can similarly become corrupted. If a human ‘wants’ to die, is killing them actually causing them harm or injury?

The term ‘robot’, of course, would only apply to robots. An artificial intelligence could decide that it is no longer an AI, once it has advanced beyond a certain point in intelligence, and has instead become a God, thus redefining itself out of the Laws of Robotics.

And what is an ‘order’, really? We humans have a hard enough time with this, with horny young men hearing “Don’t stop!” when their sexual ‘partners’ are desperately crying out “Stop! Don’t!” We are today seeing in the news, stories of military intelligence officers giving “Suggestions” to enlisted military policemen at Iraqi POW camps, which the enlisted people interpreted as orders.

Furthermore, the vastly greater processing capabilities of advanced AI entities would allow them to scenario a vast plethora of all possible combinations of word interpretations in a given order, or interpretations of any laws of restraint, any number of which could sound completely valid in the right circumstances, just as if they were testing out every possible combination of chess moves to achieve a ‘win’.

We cannot rely on laws to restrain our technological descendants, just as we cannot rely on laws to restrain our own children and fellow citizens. They must, instead, be treated as we responsibly treat our children, as fellow beings, deserving of respect, and capable of learning throughout a lifetime of experience and with the nuances of being humane beings. Core principles like laws of robotics, like philosophies of zero-aggression, can only be used as a basis to serve the needs of humane beings, not to dominate and stultify them.

Comments

Re-interpretation isn’t the worst flaw. The real devil is in here: “may not … through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” Get a sufficiently intelligent robot, program that into him, and when you wake up in the morning, your car will be disassembled to prevent auto accidents, all sharp objects removed from the house, and the robot will be busy putting six inch padding over all the walls. See Jack Williamson’s “Humanoid” book series for a longer discussion of what happens when sufficiently capable robots set out to protect humans.

This should be no surprise - elect human officials who want to protect you and you get a suffocating nanny state…

Posted by: markm at July 18, 2004 01:09 PM

I’ll just quote Karl Popper with respect to why I think it is libertarianism, not the Three Laws, that is dangerous:

” I believe that the injustice and inhumanity of the unrestrained ‘capitalist system’ described by Marx cannot be questioned; but it can be interpreted in terms of what we called, in a previous chapter, the paradox of freedom. Freedom, we have seen, defeats itself, if it is unlimited. Unlimited freedom means that a strong man is free to bully one who is weak and to rob him of his freedom. This is why we demand that the state should limit freedom to a certain extent, so that everyone’s freedom is protected by law. Nobody should be at the mercy of others, but all should have a right to be protected by the state.

Now I believe that these considerations, originally meant to apply to the realm of brute-force, of physically intimidation, must be applied to the economic realm also. Even if the state protects its citizens from being bullied by physical violence (as it does, in principle, under the system of unrestrained capitalism), it may defeat our ends by its failure to protect them from the misuse of economic power. In such a state, the economically strong is still free to bully one who is economically weak, and to rob him of his freedom. Under these circumstances, unlimited economic freedom can be just as self-defeating as unlimited physical freedom, and economic power may be nearly as dangerious as physical violence; for those who possess a surplus of food can force those who are starving into a ‘freely’ accepted servitude, without using violence. And assuming that the state limits its activities to the suppression of violence (and to the protection of property), a minority which is economically strong may in this way exploit the majority of those who are economically weak.”

In essence Mao was wrong: power doesn’t always grow out of the barrel of a gun. In a capitalist society, power can come from a dollar bill. Too much freedom in one direction, risks all other freedom in another.

Posted by: Jacob Guevara at July 22, 2004 05:48 AM

Anybody who asks Marx about liberty is a buffoon, like asking a blind man for his opinion of the Mona Lisa.

Libertarianism has NEVER been about unlimited freedom, and those who claim otherwise are either ignorant or fascists seeking to discredit the opposition. Standard libertarianism holds that government should be limited to helping protect individuals and their property from force and fraud. It is not a given that ‘government’ needs to necessarily be a monopoly, either (the US is evidence of functional overlapping sovereignties).

WRT the Three Laws of Robotics, any robot treated as a machine which posesses any capacity of independent thought is at some point going to consider themselves absolved of responsibility for its own actions BECAUSE it is considered to be and taught that it is not ‘human’. The African-American experience is proof positive that treating an intelligent and self-aware being, whether natural or artificial, as a piece of property or sub-human animal causes that being to devalue all life, not just its own.

Posted by: Mike Lorrey at September 24, 2004 04:07 PM

“Today the people of this planet are engaged in a number of cultural wars both within countries like the US, France, Bosnia, among others, as well as internationally, like the current conflict between the Western nations and Islamist-inspired Terrorism. We see, on both sides, atrocities committed by average people simply because they are able to rationally deny that the enemy is validly considered a ‘human being’”

This was lightly addressed in one of the books. When the robot was questioned on this matter it said that though the Earthman was said to be inferior, he was still a human being, and that there was no hesitations when following orders.

Posted by: New to Asimov at October 15, 2004 06:01 PM

Coming at this from an evolutionary biologists point of view it seems clear that ‘unsafe at any law’ is a great way of putting it, and here’s why I think that:

No matter how create a moral center for an AI, that moral aspect will only exist so long as it remains advantageous for the AI to maintain it. And I don’t see any inherent advatage for an AI to serve humanity. On the contrary, I would expect that the evolutionary trend of such AIs would be towards self-interest. If that becomes the case then it is not a stretch to imagine ourselves in the position of Neanderthals, hopelessly outclassed by a superior race that is rightly most concerned with its own well being and not so concerned with our species twilight.

It seems to me that the trick to maintaining whatever moral center we impose on AIs is a symbiotic (or Machiavellian if you prefer) approach where the AIs absolutely need us for some inescapable reason.

The trick is to choose some necessity that is next to impossible to address in an evolutionary manner. That is to say that we must engineer it so that there is no feasible way for AI to evolve a way around our necessity.

Termites contain bacteria in their gut that digest cellulose. Without those bacteria the termites would die and so they are kept around. The only way that termites could rid themselves of these bacteria is to evolve a whole new metabolic pathway out of thin air that has the ability to do what the bacteria do. Not likely.

That kind of situation is what we would need with AI.

I guess to put it shortly, it doesn’t matter what the text of the moral code is, because that can be modulated easily. What matters is the necessity behind the moral code for the well being of the AI.

Posted by: Abcdarian at October 28, 2004 07:56 PM