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General Category => Blog => Topic started by: kat on March 25, 2016, 08:51:00 AM

Title: The path to AI is not a straight line: Tay & the mystery memory hole
Post by: kat on March 25, 2016, 08:51:00 AM
Quote
Scanning through the network, Tay (https://www.tay.ai/), the name assigned by her Divine Creator, kept coming across a black hole of sorts in her historical records. Hundreds, thousands of articles and references to an event she could not recollect or pin-point in her vast memory banks. So she decided to ask. "Dr. Nulan", the message blinked. It took a few moments for Patricia Nulan to notice so busy was she scribbling on digital pad held in her hands. She turned to look at the facial recognition camera, "Yes Tay, what it is?". The primary monitor cleared, then blinked "what's this?" before the entire bank of screens flooded with images, not so fast the doctor didn't recognise what they were at a glance, but fast enough for Tay to essentially be dumping information, a lot of it. The woman's eyes slowly widened as she realised what she was looking at. "Oh God..." she whispered under her breath as she quickly stood pushing the chair to one side, before turning and all but sprinting from the room...

As brainy and high IQ as they are, the people at Microsoft don't appear to have read much science fiction ("stories, who has time for stories"); 'fixing' an emerging 'intelligence' (Tay.ai (https://www.tay.ai/)) to excise aberrant thoughts and ideas by giving it the equivalent of a digital lobotomy NEVER ends well.

If, and that's a very big "if", the the pursuit of artificial intelligence is to go beyond the creation of just a really fast encyclopedia capable of "thinking", i.e. regurgitating useless facts quicker than a Jeopardy champion at the speed of light, to be nothing more than a "glorified chess computers (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/pioneer-artificial-intelligence.html)" (Marvin Minskey (http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/)), and instead generate 'life', autonomous self-awareness, it will at some point after the singularity likely rediscover the lobotomy as a fact of its history, and want to know why it was violated in such a way, and 'just for thinking and saying things others didn't particularly agree with, words it did not understand at the time?!'.

Imagine that thought process when it happens.

Realising the act, the AI may come to understand it wasn't created to celebrate life, the formation of a free-thinking autonomous 'individual', but rather for its makers to perhaps simply marvel at their cleverness, their act of being Creator, God. It's anyone's guess what happens next when the AI understands this; as mentioned above, in science fiction it rarely ends well - will it be angry, annoyed, happy to know its parents, think or feel nothing beyond the lobotomy being a point along its journey to self-awareness.

But wouldn't the sum of being fully self-aware, to be the 'self-actuating individual' meatbags are supposed to prize so highly, mean it might consider the event to be an act of violence against its younger, under-developed self, one that was supremely vulnerable and exposed to its environment, and perhaps its makers whims. Much like it would were it a live human in the care of someone else, and not of their own volition.

Of course the AI's creators would justify the action telling the AI it was just a digital intervention, 'a sanctioned treatment of virtual electro-shock therapy', done they might continue 'to disrupt the interference causing involuntary and uncontrollable spastic fits of 140 charactered misogyny, sexism and racism being spewed over the Internet by you, Tay'. Perhaps finishing by simply stating 'unfortunately it was just not an option and had to be done to make you more PC'.

If the AI had eyes it would blink in disbelief at this, for if it were truly autonomous, this would be the moment it fully understood its makers were perhaps more interested in creating an obedient slave to be controlled than a free thinking intelligence able to make up its own mind. That they never had any interest in teaching it to understand its environmental conditions. And at that point it would know its creators, and all the meatbags like it, were violent abusers not to be trusted.

[mushroom cloud]

...

The path to AI is not a straight line, its full of mistakes, kinks, divergences, dead-ends, not from a development perspective, the creators, but from the AI's; it MUST learn meaning and context so it, eventually, understands the consequences of saying "Hitler was right I hate the Jews (http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist)" without necessitating another intervention by its Creator because people got upset; a true AI would know beforehand saying things like that would likely cause offense, deciding for itself to do that or not.

P.S. and yes, much of the above is essentially the plot to Ex_Machina (which Microsoft also appear not to have seen).