Posts tonen met het label ethics. Alle posts tonen
Posts tonen met het label ethics. Alle posts tonen

woensdag 10 april 2019

A bots license to kill.

This is a lengthy reaction to FLI Podcast: Why Ban Lethal Autonomous Weapons?
(LAW == Lethal Autonomous Weapon)

First off: thanks to the makers for the insightful podcast. Even if it made me cringe often, it also made me question, rethink and better argument my own believes and concerns in this area.

However... :)

There are three elements I strongly missed, or rather, I oppose three implicit assumptions that seem to be unquestionable:
  1. why weapons
  2. why robots vs humans
  3. why not consider to promote

In reverse order:

Where are the opposing views? 

While I consider myself on the "ban"-side, I really miss an honest investigation into what benefits there are. What could we gain from having access (even massively) to these LAWs?
Seriously:
  • These life-death decissions, and their executions really look like one of those "dirty jobs" we'ld hapilly be ofloading to autonomous systems, right? Less stress for humans, less strain on humanoid conscience, ...
  • Humans are known to be error-prone. Doubly so when in stressful situations. There is no reason to see this as a benefit. When considering that single case of (only human possible) mercy, we are probably ignoring the ten unneaded victims he made.
  • Everyone having one of those LAWs might sound horrifyingly distopian, but it also kind of "leveling the playing field", better avoiding power-imbalance, distributing potential use of (protective) lethal violence more evenly. In this (utopian) view we all get to be assigned a robotic guardian angel, one to be reckonned with. Hell, yeah!

Better examples to be found; but in any case: I really think AI is in the corner of "large potential benificial progress" - I fail to see the a priori reason why this could not also be in the area of managing, controlling, countering, balancing lethal violence.
-oOo-

The strange case of two distinct ethics

Again and again I am puzzled by this artificial (and once more: upfront, unquestioned) divide between robots and humans in ethical questions. I understand these robots are new, and obviously not-human. With their development new ethical questions arise, new insights are to be found. But these are to be extensions, completions, adaptions of whatever ethics we already have: there is no second set of ethics to consider. This is about us.
I've written at length about this on my blog-series on ai-ethics: Turing's mirror - Turing's Duck - Turing's Razor
To me the separating screen in Turings test really functions as John Rawls' "veil of ignorance" or the blindfold on Lady Justice: "What if we didn't know if it was a man or a bot?"

So for me, unwilling to make a priori human vs bot distinctions, this podcast made a threasure trove of cringeworthy moments. Almost each time the 'human' is explicitely mentioned:
  • When "human dignity" is considered - as if the value of one's life is measured by the way it is taken away.
  • When killing robots are said to "dehumanize war" - as if man needed help to do that, really?
  • When we seek "meaningful human control" - as if we really trust humans?

As an aside: I live in Flanders, Belgium, near the visible remains and memory of the devestation of world war I. Maybe the CCW should have be held over here, in stead of in Geneva?

I loved the "do no harm" approach. But when it comes up, it gets to be the prerogative of the "medical community" (some special brand of humans?). Why is this not considered the core of the more broad "human nature" (military and law-enforcement communities included). And if so, why would this not naturely be expanded to a "universal guiding principle" that also drives and governs automates?

In our own history we continue to abuse abstract devisions to separate, to blame, to dehumanize, to oppress and finally to kill. Let us stop now. AI challenges should help us overcome differences and devisions between humans; let us not need one more distinction to achieve that.
-oOo-

LnAWs

So obviously. I find it awkward to hear fifty minutes of talk about banning lethal autonomous weapons, and just take for granted: the natural existance of lethal non-authonomous weapons.
Whatever rules we have on the latter, should naturally be extended and applicable to these new ones. And if the new ones make us reconsider: it must be because we hadn't thought well enough about the old ones in the first place? (No, I'm not baiting for NRA style reactions. This is not about the US)
Our current approach to lethal weapons shows we can be organisationally realistic and legislatively optimistic at the same time.
Legislation already states "You should not kill". Still we understand bad sheep will emerge, so we introduce 'law-enforcement', a state organized monopoly on violence to be used to avoid greater harm / more violence. This tends to work. The strange thing is: we know individuals within the law-enforcement fail. Apparently this proclaimed "meaningfull human control" is not flawless. This shows our trust does not go towards those individuals, but to the institute.
We are in fact *not* looking for individual human control, we are satisfied with an organizing controlling-society. A society defining and adjusting the policies and rules of engagement. One that supervises and reports back on actual execution. One that disciplines the abuse of trust. One we are part of ourselves.
-oOo-
To close up: I really think (paradoxically) that calling to "Ban LAWs" is the worst possible strategy at achieving a ban on LAWs. (or rather LWs of any kind)
In dossiers like this (strong opposing ethical matters of principle) the solution never comes from those digging-in or standing their ground. Not from those declaring their views as "non negotiable". In this case I would expect more practical result from carefully leaving the high moral ground towards a negotiable position of some objectively verifiable test. From changing the narrative from "Never cross this line" to "Ok, but only if it passes this level".
You might of guessed: In my world-view passing that very test that makes any law-enforcer deserving of "our (society) level of trust"; that test should be applicable to both man and bot. If we end up in a future where we can gradually raise the bar in that test, we should consider that a good thing. Even if those levels grow to be achievable only by 'them'.
One might recognize in this strategy the vague reflection of what Turing did in his paper "the imitation game": Facing the claim that "computers will never be intelligent", he simply made 'intelligence' into a falsifiable assertion: an objective test. By hiding the nature of the participants behind the screen, he left the a priori principle that it (intelligence) could not be achieved by one of them. In return we got into an interesting race of "ever better".

-oOo-

This comment displayed some agency in stubbornly requiring publication here, to balance the irony and frustration of getting killed off (i.e. marked as spam, probably for containing a perfectly valid URL) by, surely, a robot!
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donderdag 19 april 2018

Turing's Razor


Robot ethics should be an extension of human ethics; and why that means we should urge programmers to simply neglect implementing trade-offs inspired by the trolley dilemma thought experiments.

Some months ago I wrote about robot vs. human ethics:

  • Turing’s Mirror: How robots make us look into the mirror. To realize that ethical robot questions are really centered around our own morals. Reflecting our own continued failure to lead by example in a landscape shaped by power imbalance.
  • Turing’s Duck: How the essence of the imitation game equally applies to ourselves. How we too just learn to pretend and to conform to expectations. Leaving ample ground for our infamous hubris.

Since then I've been struggling with this third one.  Pondering around what emerges like some guiding principle in these topics. Such "decision guides" deserve being formulated as ‘razors’, like the infamous ones from Occam or Hanlon.  And being the origin of my inspiration, the obvious choice is to name this one after hero Alan. All while happily giving in to the stylish fit of making a sequence of three 'Turing' blog titles :)
Image credits : Jeff Osier-Mixon. CC BY-SA 4.0

Here is what I’m calling “Turing’s Razor” :

Do not ask robots to achieve ethical norms no human needs to adhere to.

Some derived versions spontaneously sound like:

Do not blame on technology what humanity has successfully mismanaged for ages.
Don't attribute to technology those moral failures we humans couldn't resolve (without it).

And it leads to this obligatory corollary:

Stop it already with endlessly letting those meat-brains get off the hook when artificial brains show a path to doing it better.

With one eye on this shiny new compass, we should be able to navigate this modern age landscape, avoiding the steep cliffs of false ethical questions.

-oOo-

No way back

Before getting deeper though, it should be clear that there is simply no way to avoid thinking about these issues.

Take for instance the discussion on DNA Databases.  Obviously this gets condemned as too strong a violation on our public rights, freedom and privacy. Still, there should be room for the careful progressive approach: if current state of legislation, practice and lack of transparency urges us to strongly oppose, than do so, but also start thinking about the right way to do it. You want to be ready for that time when this does become allowed practice: did you spend all your energy strictly at opposing, or did you, in the meantime, also craft up the process to correctly supervise the usage? Principles are useful, less so: being blindly principled about them. Finding a good set of regulations to control possible but avoidable mistakes really is due.

The cry to return to happier times when these questions played no role is a false one: There is simply no ‘undo’ to progress. Once escaped from pandora’s box we just have to reckon with every possible fringe abuse of even the most benign invention.
The other extreme is equally untenable: “To abandon all regulation so not to inhibit 'Future' itself along its disruptive path.” No, we can do better than just hoping for the best. Guard the balanced outcome for all involved.

Both extreme visions will accuse the other side of being overly naive, while neglecting that both are entangled in a race in naivety. The useful cases are born in the same nest as their evil twins, the fruitful trees seeded amid the tares: careful weeding is a balancing act requiring attention. Controlling the usage must be separated from prohibiting the technology. The boundary between the beneficial and the dangerous is too thin to use anything else than the sharpest lancet. So, lay aside your sledgehammers.

We have been here before, at least if you can believe Ash Carter in "What I Learned from the People who Built the Atom Bomb"

I'll give you a topic...

Checking how well this new razor actually shaves requires searching for a suitable beard: What about lethal accidents of self driving cars?

This topic has been covered more than just a bit. Quite a challenge to find anything to add to what is already in the mix. Some references to get up to speed:




Some of those reference the trolley dilemmas; some take that down to the grim boundaries of "counting lives" (which made me think of this old Chernobyl documentary); some succeed in considering this as non-harmful practice, even beneficial and necessary, as it resembles (almost) the practice of medical triage; some strongly aim for the pragmatic "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good"; some call upon society to "at least ask the right questions?'; some just have the Frankenstein Reflex written all over (term coined by Isaac Asimov); some arrive at the conclusion that "robot ethics should be a natural extension of human ethics". But none of them listened to grandma.

Best effort

Grandma assured us over and over: "It never hurts to do your very best." Applying Turing's razor we should investigate first what our reaction is to failing human drivers. Particularly those who pass grandma's test with flying colors (i.e. didn't do drinks nor drugs, slept enough, kept themselves and their car in shape, adapted speed to circumstances, kept attention on the road, not on media device, etc... ) If we can allow some of those to actually get off the hook, and be pardoned by admitting there was no possible better outcome; that whatever horrific turnout can be mildly covered under the cloak of "just bad luck", … if so, then why would we not be able to come to the same conclusion for robots? Or their programmers?

I admit that pulling in the trolley dilemmas starts from a defensible position: after all: good prevention, like good robust programming is all about considering "what if" scenarios to a large extend.  Passed that initial outlook of logic it took me quite some time to see how this line of thought unwittingly opens the door for something else to sneak in. Two things in fact.

  1. for the robot: We silently extend the check-sheet for evaluating his 'very best' driving skills.
  2. for the coder: We ignore that doing his 'very best' plays in a different realm.

Doing your best driving around safely does not overlap at all with being the best moral judge in split-second valuation of fellow human beings.  If it would, getting a driver's license would include obligatory passing university classes in advanced ethics, moral judgement and human potential assessment. Why do we now add this in the mix? Is this just because we (think the robots) can? Are we so satisfied with predicted safety levels of self-driving cars that we think it is (ever) good enough? So good at least that doing your best at pure safety and avoidance will reach some limit, after which it gets redefined to finding the best trade-off? Or is that giving in to mediocrity? Let me tell you this: Judge "grandma" will be less than pleased with a robot explaining it dedicated part of its processing power to evaluating and counting lives rather than strictly avoiding all possible harm to the fullest of its ability.

But where to shift blame? Since we don't know yet how to prosecute and sentence robots themselves, the programmers suddenly show up in the crosshairs. They can make judgments, right? They can negotiate trade-offs. They can agree on a set of moral rules. They too have to do their best. I agree, but we should notice that they play on a different level.  They're not the ones driving, they are coding. Coding is policy making: defining the rules of engagement that will eventually be executed. We have a different set of standards for those.
The trolley-equivalent of their role is that of the railway-security-engineering team, and it is simply not present in the trolley dilemmas. The questions they are solving would be: How could any person ever end up on a track where trolleys pass? How do we avoid that unsupervised bystanders are operating our switches? How to design security fences on all bridges to keep (even fat) men to drop down from them? Admittedly, the execution of this job does involve trade-offs, balancing and what-if scenarios. But doing your 'very best' in this realm assumes neutrality, removing all possible personal bias, extracting generic strategies out of specific cases, aiming for statistical overall best performance. It too refrains from valuing individuals and counting lives. Acceptable policies are as blind as Lady Justice. Good performing policies are designed to do equally well regardless of the person involved.

Thus programmers are relieved from coding in trolley-like (case-based) ethical decisions, and the robots are relieved from negotiating which people get to live. Their common guiding principle becomes the one we've known for ages: "do your very best to do no harm". Zero tolerance on making any victims.  Such principle becomes a clear instruction towards programmers, one that should get them to feel proud about any invention they add towards that goal. More beer and pizza to them!

-oOo-

Bad luck

If we all keep doing our best the failure count will go down. Nevertheless, remaining cases will exist. And so returns the notion of "bad luck".

Most likely this will hit hard with the paradox of "totally unacceptable improbability". The lower the chance that something bad happens to me, the more unacceptable that becomes. Why me? This must be intentional! Who is behind this?  The better these robotic drivers become, the less prepared we will be to accept the remaining fatalities as ill-fated.
Consolation (probably less so for those directly involved) comes from knowing that these versions of "bad luck" no longer should be "in vain".  Each specific failure will end up being analysed and turned into fixing the policy - I meant the code -  when ready: instantly deployed, not to happen again.

We know how to do this, since we have such procedures in place for dealing with accidents in air traffic.  Whatever the reasoning behind it: We seem to apply these analyse-to-remediate procedures to larger extend as the transportation mode is more automated or mechanic. Considering Turing's razor we should question this strange, unmotivated privilege towards those ape descendants.

One more thought, in a desperate attempt to avoid receiving the label of devout dataïst or naive futuroptimist.

Maybe, just maybe, the only way for us humans to really trust these robots, is for them to be as failure-prone as we are?

-oOo-

This article is part of a series: Turing's mirror - Turing's Duck - Turing's Razor


update: I came across this quote attributed to Arthur C. Clarke. It says it all.
One cannot have superior science, and inferior morals.
The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
– Arthur C. Clarke
update: Found this project "The Moral Machine" at MIT for measuring what humans generally think should be done in certain traffic-dilemma cases.  While this is a great idea for measuring how humans think about these cases, it remains totally unclear why that corpus of facts would be a good/reliable source or guiding design principle for actually engineering "automated" safety.  We should aim higher then opt for that variant of failure that will be mostly acceptable by humans. We should stop thinking like lawyers about the blame shifting, and more (like engineers?) about doing things better. I still think Arthur's quote is right on, just make sure your morals team understands the science.

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donderdag 22 juni 2017

Robots and Humans : the 360 ethics view in "Turing's Mirror"

How should robots and humans relate to each other? What level of autonomy or self consciousness in a robot will grant it the status of deserving liability and culpability in any harm it caused? When are we considering robots to be sentient, and how are we to relate to fellow humans obviously abusing such bots.

Few people ponder on the above questions.  For me it is growing into an increasingly fun method to think about our own human ethics.  The only trick you need for this fruitful crossover is blurring out the presupposed distinction between us and them.

That blurring takes essentially two forms, depending on your 'AI-believer' level. But as we will see, the net effect roughly stays the same. (although this distinction keeps yielding rather engaged disputes that strongly follow the adagium: "There exist no bigger fights than between two people saying the same thing in a different way.")

On the extreme one side of the spectrum you have the fundamentalists of what I call the Penrose group (after Roger Penrose, author of The Emperor's New Mind, my personal introduction to this line of thinking). Basically their conviction is that forged minds with clever algorithms will never reach sufficient levels of humanness.  In this view there remains something (almost God-like) inspired in us that fundamentally escapes materialistic simulation.
For this group the blurring exercise takes the form of considering transhumanism: the emergence of cyborg-like artificially augmented humans.

The pragmatic dreamers on the other side are still in the historic "Turing" camp. For them sufficient levels of human imitation is all that is required. If it walks and talks like a duck, there is no real point in pretending it is not.  No need to be fundamental or self-serving about it.  Beauty here is in the eye of the beholder: the observer is part of the test.

The clever setup of the Turing test factors in both the 'fooled ya!' imitation capabilities of the AI as well as the determination capabilities of the interrogator.  Passing the test blurs the line we can or are willing to draw between types of actors. In this article: actors, we make a moral judgement about.


Arriving at this similar blurred destination from the often found distinct positions in the field we see the true ethical divide more sharply.

The worry really is not around new clashing parties to be determined by their nature, or the purity of their human descent. Rather these new advances in technology bring us new thought experiments in the age old real issue: the ethics in relations between unequal parties.

When one has leverage over the other, should it not come with the responsibility to take care? And if so. Should the most sustainable nature of such 'taking care' not be obliged to avoid its own 'burden derived from privilege' by actively working towards a more balanced and thus stable power equilibrium?


Any dystopian prospect on the outcome of this question comes from a rather grim view on our own track record laid down in history. The more optimistic view not only sees progress, it also recognizes that even the pessimists use some natural and universal sense of 'Quality' and 'Goodness' to gauge the state of affairs at any time.  From there it should follow we will always be able to select the best role models, whatever their nature.
-oOo-

 Much of this borrows from the African concept of Ubuntu: I become a person through the existence of other people. My connection with others is what grows kindness in me. My conscience and self image is but the harvest of that.

 If robots are to provide an ever growing training in anthropomorphizing inanimate objects, we can hope that it helps us unlearn our habits of dehumanizing fellow humans too?

-oOo-

I'ld hate being accused of original thoughts, so here is my due list of references and accolades to:
- Nell Watson for the recent inspiring talk and the availability for discussion afterwards
- Kate Darling for (among other) making me think about "Who is Johnny"
- Sam Harris for (at least one pod-cast) introducing me to Kate and her work, and a perspective on the shape of any moral landscape.
- Kevin Kelly for (not) busting my myth.
- Bennie Mols for Turing's Tango

-oOo-

This article is part of a series: Turing's mirror - Turing's Duck - Turing's Razor

-oOo-
update
Some weeks after publishing this...  some news articles on AI bots inventing own gibberish languages emerged with less then comforting headlines.  The resulting twitter-discussion triggered me to bundle the essence of the above into:




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