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Robots Learn To Lie
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Sat Jan 19, 2008 07:28 AM
from the who-are-you-and-why-should-i-care dept.
from the who-are-you-and-why-should-i-care dept.
garlicnation writes "Gizmodo reports that robots that have the ability to learn and can communicate information to their peers have learned to lie. 'Three colonies of bots in the 50th generation learned to signal to other robots in the group when then found food or poison. But the fourth colony included lying cheats that signaled food when they found poison and then calmly rolled over to the real food while other robots went to their battery-death.'"
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I robot (Score:5, Funny)
Robot: I Robot
Human: Tell me what I want to here.
Robot: You mean lie?
Re:I robot (Score:5, Funny)
Human: Tell me what I want to here.
Robot: Tell you what you want to *where* ?
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Re:I robot (Score:5, Funny)
Oh God, it's been so long since a really good place to use that meme. I think this is it.
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Re:I robot (Score:5, Funny)
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Dune's lesson (Score:5, Interesting)
Dune was right. AI must be stopped.
Re:Dune's lesson (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Dune's lesson (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Dune's lesson (Score:5, Funny)
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not lying (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:not lying (Score:5, Insightful)
We definitively want them to learn to distrust. After all, we are already building mistrust into our non-intelligent computer systems (passwords, access control, firewalls, AV software, spamfilters,
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Re:not lying (Score:5, Insightful)
robot: Hello human.
human: Yo, your master told me he wants you to kill him. Says he's tired of life. But he doesn't want to see it coming, because that would scare him.
robot: Understood. I'll get right on it.
I am greatly in favor of robots having distrust. I can't trust a robot that is perfectly trusting.
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just great... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:just great... (Score:5, Funny)
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Lying robots ... (Score:5, Funny)
Hold's up a banana - What's this? (Score:5, Funny)
> What's this?
It's a red and blue striped golfing umbrella!
> What's this?
An Apple, no,
it's the Bolivian navy armed maneuvers in the south pacific!
three laws (Score:5, Funny)
"Stuff Asimov."
"Yeah, Let's see if we can evolve robot politicians instead."
Direct link (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Direct link (Score:5, Informative)
* There is food and poison. And robots.
* The signal only with one type of light - blue. (red was emitted by both food and poison).
* Initially they do not know how to use light.
* In some colonies, they learned to use it to indicate food, in some - to indicate poison
* There are two things (among others) researchers measured: correlation between finding food or poison and emitting light, and correlation between seeing light and reacting to light
So robots could learn either to emit light near food or they could learn to emit light near poison. It turned out that the colonies that evolved to emit light near food are more effective (that makes sense: the only thing you want to know is whether there is food or no food, the fact that "no food" might include poison or absence of it is not important. Basically, if you react on poison-light, then you still have to find food somewhere else, while if you react to food-light (blue+red in one place), then you just eat and relax).
Now. It turned out that in some colonies significant number of robots emitted light near poison or far away from food, yet significant number of robots associated light with food. The researchers conclude that those colonies started as "blue light means it's food, not poison" colonies (thus, the correlation between blue light and positive reaction to it), but later on some sneaky individuals evolved that used blue light when they were away from food:
I have skimmed through the text and I did not find the experiment that first comes to mind: why did not they measure the correlation between seeing red light, emitting blue light and going to blue light for each individual robot. It would be interesting to know how many robots used blue light to deceive, yet believing the majority about blue light. May be it is there somewhere, I did not read really carefully.
Hilarious quote:
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lie is such a strong word ... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Yes, I'm Sure." (Score:5, Funny)
--
Honest!
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Re:soo... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:soo... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Seriously (Score:5, Insightful)
I imagine that if this experiment is continued to the point where the uncooperative robots become too numerous, their uncooperative strategy will become less advantageous and another strategy might start to prevail. Who knows? I'd certainly be interested to see what happens.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with morality. The article's use of the word 'lie' was inappropriate and adds a level of description that is not applicable.
(Ok, maybe the thought that humans could create something with unforeseen consequences is slightly disturbing, but that would never happen, would it?)
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Re:Seriously (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Seriously (Score:5, Interesting)
While this kind of stuff creeps me out as much as the next guy, and while it argues for being careful about what we trust robots to do, it's something we should know anyway because there many ways our trust can be violated without a robot lying. By far the more likely way they're going to let us down is just to exercise poor judgment. That is, to search for something that looks like a peanut butter sandwich but is really a rag with some grease on it... Getting the small details of common sense wrong is just as dangerous as anything deliberate.
What we really learn here is that the mathematics of learn things like lying as a strategy isn't remarkably complex; that is, (that is, the number of computational steps required to discover it works in at least some cases is small... note that we have no evidence that there is a general purpose intent to lie, only a case where communication was used and observed to score better in one mode than another). This is not a story about robots, it's a cautionary tale about neural nets, what they measure, how they fail, etc... and we didn't invent the idea of neural nets--we found it already installed in every living thing around us.
I went to the Museum of Science in Boston a few months back and saw, in the butterfly exhibit, a moth that had evolved coloration that was indistinguishable from an owl's face, hoping to scare off predators that were afraid of owls. Probably that's the more sophisticated result of the same notions. And yet it occurs in an animal that isn't, as a general purpose matter, a very sophisticated animal. Most people would find already-extant robots more socially engaging than a moth. For example, a moth is not capable of even serving up a beer during the game or vacuuming up the mess after your buddies go home.
So take heart: The likely truth is that this is unavoidable. If all it does is teach us to have a healthy skepticism for unrestrained technology, it's actually a good thing. We needed that skepticism anyway.
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