There’s a fascinating article on LegalAffairs.org (the self-styled “magazine at the intersection of law and life” on artificial intelligence and legal/ethical/socialogical considerations relating to it. Despite disagreeing with a few of it’s points, it’s well-written and excellently-presented. Go read it.
In case the site stops publishing the article, I’ve made a copy, below. Click on the ‘next page‘ link to read it here.
Do you remember a week or two ago I wrote about a guy who patented the “Ethical Rules Of Artificial Intelligence”? Well - it looks like he’s read my article and placed his own comments. I’m quite surprised and impressed that he took the time (away from his heavy schedule of philosophising or book-signing or whatever) to come and read my counter-arguments to his ideas, and placed comments of his own (albeit mostly pre-fabricated stuff).
Here’s to you, John LaMuth.
Some goon (sorry: Californian counsellor) has patented Inductive Inference Affective Language Analyzer Simulating Artificial Intelligence (including the Ten Ethical Laws Of Robotics). It’s nothing but unintelligible babble, interspersed by (inaccurate) references to artificial intelligence theory. The author (who also writes a book on family values with a distinct evangelic slant, from which most of the text of the patent seems to be taken) appears to know nothing about A.I. or computer science. In addition, I find his suggestion that ‘wooly’ and ‘vague’ rules and ‘commandments’ are sensible choices for A.I. safeguards -
While a meaningful future artificial intelligence may be more than capable of understanding rules set out in a way that a human might like to express it - indeed, for some machine intelligences (artificial or not) this capacity to understand human speech and expressions could be a very useful feature - this is not the level at which safeguards should be implemented.
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[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]
Fun in the sun.
Kit and I had an idea for something like this a while back, and we were wondering if it constituted entrapment: after all, under UK law, it’s illegal for a human to attempt to trick another human into committing a crime, as it cannot be determined whether that person would have c…
I’ve just written an articficial intelligence gamebot, designed to pseudointelligently play simple board games which involve a finite upper number of moves and a board of tokens - for example: Connect Four, Noughts & Crosses, Go!, or Othello. It uses the (appropriately-written) rules of the game in order to pre-anticipate a vast number of moves, and select the ‘best’ ones based on the likelyhood of them winning. It’s not terribley powerful, but I’d never written such a widely-scoped A.I. before, and I fancied the challenge.
I let it out for it’s first run this afternoon, and started a game of Connect Four with it. Here are the results:
I took the first turn, and put one of my pieces into the first column of the grid.
The gamebot took the second turn, picked up an enormous handful of pieces, and put six of them into the grid (two in the first column and four in the next four adjacent columns). These four-in-a-row, of course, won it the game.
Perhaps I need to define ‘cheating’ for it. Hmm… back to the drawing board…
Claire drove me to work this morning. We had a fascinating discussion on the way, on Cyberethics Of Artificial Intelligence Slavery. Cool.
This morning I gave a tour of the office to our new interviewee, Phil, who for some reason I keep trying to call Chris. If he gets the job, he’ll be working full-time as an industry year student when I become a part-timer again later this month.
Now I have to go get some work done…