10 Reasons to Ignore AI Safety

hi Stuart Russell is an AI researcher who I've talked about a few times on this channel already he's been advocating for these kinds of safety or alignment ideas to other AI researchers for quite a few years now and apparently the reaction he gets is often something like this in stage one we say nothing is going to happen stage two we say something may be going to happen but we should do nothing about it well stage three we say that maybe we should do something about it but there's nothing we can do we say maybe there was something we could have done but it's too late now so he's put together a list of some of the responses that people give him that list is included in a paper in some of his talks and in his recent book human compatible which is very good by the way check that one out but as far as I know it's not yet a standalone YouTube video even though it's perfect YouTube video material it's ten reasons why people who aren't you are wrong about AI safety so that's what this is ten reasons people give to not pay attention to AI safety now before I start I need to do a sort of double disclaimer firstly as I said this is not my list it's Stuart Russell's and he gets the credit for it but secondly professor Russell and I are not in any way affiliated and I've adapted his list and given my own take on it so this video should not be considered a representative of Stuart Russell's views got that if there's anything in this video if it's good credit goes to Stuart Russell and if there's anything that's bad blame goes to me okay without further ado ten reasons people give do not pay attention to AI safety reason one will never actually make artificial general intelligence this is apparently a fairly common response even from AI researchers which is very strange when you consider the decades that the field of AI has spent defending attacks from the outside from people like Hubert Dreyfus who I have a video about people arguing that human-level AI is impossible AI researchers have always said no of course it's possible and of course we're going to do it and now people are raising safety concerns some of them are saying well of course we're never going to do it the fact is that human level intelligence general intelligence has been a goal and a promise of the field of artificial intelligence from the beginning and it does seem quite weird to say yes we are working towards this as hard as we can but don't worry we'll definitely fail imagine you find yourself on a bus and the bus driver says oh yeah I am driving too Ward's the edge of that cliff but don't worry the bus is bound to break down before we get there no they're not necessarily being disingenuous they may actually believe that we'll never achieve HEI but the thing is eminent scientists saying that something is impossible has never been a very reliable indicator I mean they certainly say that about a lot of things that really are impossible but they also say it about a lot of things that then go on to happen sometimes quite quickly for example respected scientists were making public statements to the effect that heavier-than-air human flight was impossible right up until the Wright brothers made their first flight at Kitty Hawk and in fact I think even slightly after that because the news travelled fairly slowly in those days similarly and this is something I talked about on computer file the great physicist Ernest Rutherford Nobel Prize winner Lord Rutherford in fact at that time gave a speech in 1933 in which he implied that it was impossible to harness energy from nuclear reactions he said anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of the atoms was talking moonshine that speech was published in The Times and Leo Szilard read it went for a walk and while he was on his walk he had the idea for using neutrons to make a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction so in that case the time taken from the world's most eminent scientists claiming that a thing was completely infeasible to someone having the idea that makes it happen was as far as we can tell somewhere around 16 hours so it's happened several times that something which the best researchers say can't be done has been achieved soon after do I think AGI is going to be discovered very soon no but I can't completely rule it out either we don't know what we don't know so it seems pretty clear to me that unless we destroy ourselves some other way first we will sooner or later figure out how to make human level artificial general intelligence reason 2 well maybe we will make AGI at some point but it's far too soon to worry about it now suppose we detected a huge asteroid on a collision course with earth it's one of those mass extinction event type asteroids and it's going to hit us in say 40 years how soon would be too soon to start worrying to start working on solutions I would say it's pretty sensible to start worrying immediately not panicking of course that's never useful but at least spending some resources on the problem gathering more information putting together a plan and so on Oh suppose SETI got an extraterrestrial message said hey what's up humanity we're a highly advanced alien civilization and we're on our way to earth we'll be there in say 50 years again how long should we just sit on that and do nothing at all how long before it's sensible to start thinking about how we might handle the situation I would say the question doesn't just depend on how long we have but how long we need what are we going to have to do and how long is that likely to take us if we need to build some kind of rocket to go and divert the asteroid how long is that going to take and how does that compare with how long we have the thing is in the case of AGI we really don't know how long it will take to solve the alignment problem when you look at it and consider it carefully it appears to be quite a hard problem it requires technical work that could take a long time but it also requires philosophical work it seems like it might depend on finding good solutions to some philosophical problems that people have been wrestling with for a very long time we don't have a great history of solving difficult philosophical problems very quickly so it seems to me entirely plausible that we'll need more time to solve this problem than we actually have and of course we don't know how long we have either probably it'll be a long time but predicting the future is extremely hard and we can't rule out shorter timelines it could be give it we're closer than we think we are and deep learning will just scale up to AGI without many major innovations probably not but it could be and it doesn't seem impossible that we could have a rather foot insular type situation it could be that there's one weird trick to general intelligence and once someone discovers that full AGI is only a couple of years away in fact it's not totally impossible that someone already found it and has been working on it for a while and secret none of these seem very likely but confidently declaring that it's definitely too soon to even start working on this is bizarrely overconfident the lower estimates for how long we have seemed a lot lower than the higher estimates for how long we need the best time to start working on this is not far in the future it was probably quite a while ago now reason 3 this is similar to reason to worrying about AI safety is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars I don't think this is very tight analogy for a few reasons one is that overpopulation is one of those problems that very definitely cannot sneak up on you overpopulation can't take you by surprise in the way that a new technological development can but also the safety concerns we're talking about are not like overpopulation then much more immediate and more basic it's not like what if Mars becomes overpopulated more like we don't have any very good reason to expect to be able to survive on Mars for even a day and there are projects currently underway trying to create AGI so it's as though the Mars mission project is already underway and one engineer says to another you know we're putting all this work into getting people to Mars but almost none into what we're gonna do if we actually manage it I mean how do we even know that Mars is safe well I think it's too soon to worry about that don't you think we should wait until we get there no no I don't think we should I think it might be much more difficult to work on these kinds of concerns once we're already on the surface of Mars I think we should do the safety research ahead of time what kind of safety research do you want to do well I was thinking it might be good to have some kind of suit that people could wear in case the environment of Mars turns out to be harmful in some way we don't know that the surface of Mars is harmful could be anything well exactly we don't know so why not take precautions what we do know doesn't seem great I mean our what to do if we make it to Mars research has never had much funding so we can't be sure about this but our preliminary work seems to suggest that the atmosphere of Mars might not actually be breathable so we've been thinking about things like suits and there's some early work on something we're calling an airlock that might turn out to be useful I don't see how we could possibly hope to design anything like that when we don't even know what Mars is gonna be like how we can have any chance of designing these safety features properly with so little information no we're just gonna go and we'll figure it out when we get there could I maybe stay on earth no everybody's going together all at the same time you know that all of humanity it's gonna be great reason for well look if you're worried about it being unsafe because the goals are bad don't put in bad goals it won't have human goals like self-preservation if you don't put them in there I have a whole video about the concept of instrumental convergence which I'd recommend checking out but as a quick summary there are certain behaviors that we would expect to be exhibited by agents that have a wide range of different goals because those behaviors are a very good way of achieving a very wide range of goals self-preservation is a good example agents will act as though they have goals like self-preservation even if you don't explicitly come in there because it doesn't really matter what your goal is you're probably not going to be able to achieve that goal if you're destroyed so we can expect agents that are able to understand that they can be destroyed to take steps to prevent that pretty much whatever goals they have you can't fetch the coffee if you're dead reason five well we can just not have explicit goals at all I think this confusion comes from the fact that a lot of the time when we're talking about safety we're talking about the problems we might have if the systems goals aren't well aligned with ours or if the goals aren't specified correctly and so on and this can make people think that we're talking specifically about designs that have explicitly defined goals but that's not actually the case the problems are much more general than that and we'd expect them to occur across a very wide range of possible agent designs it's just that the ones that have explicitly defined reward functions or utility functions are much easier to talk about the systems with implicit goals still probably have these problems but it's just much harder to characterize the problems and think about them and therefore correspondingly much more difficult to actually deal with those problems so systems with implicit goals are actually less safe just because it becomes much harder to design them safely not having explicit goals doesn't solve the problem and probably makes it worse I have some safety concerns about this car this automobile that we're inventing I'm worried about the steering system no no yeah I just don't think we're putting enough thought into designing it to be really reliable and easy to use right now it seems like even tiny mistakes by the operator might cause the car to swerve out of control and crash into something it could be very dangerous you think the steering system is a cause of safety concerns do you yeah well okay yeah I will just build a car without one a problem solved reason six I don't think we should worry because we're not going to end up with just independent a eyes out in the world doing things there'll be teams with humans and AI systems cooperating with each other we just have to have humans involved in the process working as a team with the AI and they'll keep things safe so yes a lot of the better approaches to AI safety do involve humans and AI systems working together but just have AI human teams is sort of like saying nuclear power plant safety isn't really a concern we'll just have some humans running it from a control in such a way that they always have full control over the rate of the reaction like yes but that's not an actual solution it's a description of a property that you would want a solution to have it would be nice to build a GI systems that can work well in a team with humans but we don't currently know how to do that what it comes down to is teamwork is fundamentally about pursuing common goals so misalignment precludes teamwork if the AI systems goals aren't aligned with yours you can't collaborate with it it wants something different from what you want so human AI teams aren't a solution to the alignment problem they actually depend on it being already solved reason 7 but this is science we can't control research we can't change what people work on sure we can of course we can we've done a loads of times it ends up not being very noticeable because we generally don't give that much attention to things that don't happen but for example we basically don't do human genetic engineering or human cloning we've been able to clone sheep since 1996 and humans are not really different from any other large mammal from the perspective of this kind of work we could have been doing all kinds of mad science on human genetics for decades now but we decided not to there were conferences where agreements were reached everyone agreed that they weren't going to do certain types of research and then we didn't do them so agreements within the research community are one way another way is international treaties like did you know that the 1980 United Nations Convention on certain conventional weapons has a section titled protocol on blinding laser weapons because of that protocol robots that deliberately shine lasers in people's eyes to blind them are against international law I didn't know that until after I'd already built one so it's not a perfect metaphor but the point is we don't see blinding laser weapons deployed on the battlefield today they're basically not a thing and human genetic engineering is also not really a thing because we decided that we didn't want to do them and so we didn't do them and by the way if we decide that we don't want to make for example lethal autonomous weapon systems we don't have to make them either AI researchers as a community can decide the direction of our research and we should reason eight now you're a bunch of Luddites you're just against AI because you don't understand it so in response to this Stuart Russell has a list of people who've raised basically this concern which includes Alan Turing IJ good Norbert Wiener Marvin Minsky and Bill Gates and there's another name I would add to this list which I guessed you're Russell is not allowed to add which is Stuart Russell it doesn't seem reasonable to suggest that these people fear technology because they don't understand it to say the least these are some of the biggest contributors to the technological progress of the last century and secondly these people aren't against AI the argument for AI safety is not an argument against AI any more than nuclear physicists or engineers who work on containment or waste disposal are somehow against physics arguing for speed limits and seat belts is not the same as arguing to ban cars we're not against AI because we don't understand it we're for safety because we do understand it reason 9 well if there's a problem we'll just turn it off right this one I've covered extensively elsewhere our links in the description but in summary I think super intelligent agents might see that coming reason 10 ixnay on the x-ray you're trying to get us all defunded isn't talking about risks kind of bad for business I'd say firstly I don't think that's actually true we do need to make some changes but that's not a bad thing for AI research the solution to these safety concerns is not less AI research but more really just with a slightly different focus and in fact I think this is the same kind of mistake made by the nuclear industry in the 50s they put tremendous effort into reassuring everyone they were safe they insisted nothing could possibly go wrong nuclear energy was going to be completely safe and perfect clean and too cheap Demeter basic reactor principles and design make an atomic explosion an impossibility arguably they were so busy reassuring people about safety that they actually didn't emphasize safety enough internally that's how you get a chin-up oh that's how you get a Three Mile Island and that's how you get a giant public backlash that is tremendously bad for the industry so I don't actually think that talking about AI safety too much is bad for business but it couldn't possibly be worse than talking about safety to little so there we are that's ten reasons not to care about AI safety some of these I've already covered in more detail in other videos there will be links in the description to those and some of them might deserve a whole video to themselves in future what do you think are there any you'd like to hear more about or have you come across any that I missed let me know in the comments I want to end a video by thanking my wonderful patrons it's all of these people here in this video I'm especially thanking Francisco Thomas key who has been a patron for a year thank you so much for your support I'm trying out a new thing where as part of the process of making videos I talk to the researchers who wrote the papers I'm talking about I'll record those for reference but they're not really right for YouTube because they're unstructured and unedited conversation so I think I'm going to start posting those to patreon if that sounds like something you might want to watch consider becoming a patron thanks again to those who do and thank you all for watching I'll see you next time you

Channel: Robert Miles AI Safety

Views: 325,714

Keywords: AI, AGI, Artificial Intelligence, AI risk, AI safety, robert miles, robert miles AI, Stuart Russell, Human Compatible, Provably Beneficial, Provably Beneficial AI

Id: 9i1WlcCudpU

Length: 16min 28sec (988 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/CastigatRidendoMores]

Fantastic video. The book is great too but feels more like a textbook than an argument. This is very concise and illustrative, which gives it the potential to be more impactful to many of the folks that think this way.