Nine years ago, American comedian Chris Rock produced a short video styled after a Public Service Announcement (PSA) entitled “How To Not Get Your A** Kicked By The Police.” I found it uproariously funny, as it juxtaposed some seemingly obvious “tips” against commonly-observed behaviors during interactions with law enforcement, with the “wrong” choice leading to the targets getting beaten by officers wielding batons. The whole schtick reminded me of…
Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management Artificial Intelligence World…
…the fact that soooo much of the dystopian future presented as possible, if not probable, by those fearing the advance of artificial intelligence (AI), can be easily avoided with some easy-to-follow tips, including:
- Do NOT give your AI app the option of launching nuclear weapons. This one seems kind of obvious, but one of the very first AI-induced cataclysmic scenarios in fiction was Colossus: The Forbin Project, the film coming out in 1970. Naturally, the computer becomes self-aware, and uses its ability to launch nuclear weapons as a way to control the whole world. So, yeah, don’t do that.
- In fact, don’t give your AI access to any weapons, nuclear or not. Think about all of the problems that self-driving cars are encountering. To us humans, driving is a fairly simple proposition, though, that having been said, I pretty sure I could never successfully drive around in either Boston or Rome (I’ve been to both places. I wouldn’t last a day.). But self-driving cars have been making a go of it, with mixed results. Turns out that even fairly advanced computers are prone to mis-interpreting sensor data and “responding” (actually, initiating a sub-routine) in an inappropriate fashion, leading to property damage that could perhaps have been avoided had a real person been behind the wheel. Now consider the difference in sophistication involved in the decision-making process from driving a car to the election of the option to engage in violence. It’s not even close, meaning that, if any machine is ever given the option to operate a weapon, it had better be in very specific circumstances. Think of the “robot sentries” in the movie Aliens. In the scenes involving them, they appeared to be comprised of three basic elements: motion sensors, a computer, and a gatling gun. Once activated, they simply shot at anything that moved in front of them. Pretty simple, as long as the good guys know to never move in front of an activated robot sentry. But add layers of complexity, where the computer has access to a variety of responses and other input parameters beyond “Is it moving, Y/N?”, and you’re just asking for a cataclysmic outcome.
- Another tip that seems kind of obvious and yet never seems to make it into the programming of the dystopian-generating computers or robots from the movies is this: don’t allow your computer program the ability to choose an option that’s not from a defined set. If there’s any element of randomness entering into how a computer is programmed to approach a problem, then the set of tactics or decisions has to be a closed set, otherwise it very well might produce either gibberish (“hallucinations”) or make a selection that causes chaos or damage. Computers running code that involves a random factor when formulating a strategy, for either playing a game or seeking a solution to a problem, have no idea what is moral, appropriate, or even relevant. They’re just churning out possible solutions, needing either a binding parameter within the programming to reject poor, inappropriate, or just weird ones, or else a human who is capable of judging of fit and meet, before anything gets actually implemented. This is where the “large language” AI models get into trouble. These programs review all forms of writings seeking patterns, and then set out to assemble their own sentences consistent with these patterns. But what is a “word” to a computer? Like all data, it’s a series of zeros and ones. As much as we tend to marvel at a non-human generator of articles or even poetry, the program generating that output has no idea what its context may be. It is oblivious to the appropriateness of returning “Peace is the optimal goal in this situation” from “Nuke the scoundrels!” if its review and pattern recognition of the ingested verbiage informs it in that direction.
- And last but not least, do not, under any circumstance, write an AI program that is both able to actuate weapons AND is not confined to a definitively limited decision set. If it “learns” that actuating available weapons regardless of circumstance is a usable strategy, and there’s nothing in the code to un-learn that strategy, then that programmer is setting the stage for the exact scenarios depicted in all the fear-mongering going on about AI.
Follow these simple rules, and AI will be all about offering novel solutions to problems, and entertaining us with images and verbiage that can rival the work of the masters of old. Ignore these rules, and grant a whole batch of doomsday scenario-writers unlimited “I told you so” license.
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