
Should Artificial Intelligence Be Regulated? - jonbaer
https://futureoflife.org/2017/07/27/should-artificial-intelligence-be-regulated/
======
PeterisP
While for some things the question "should X be regulated" carries some clear
meaning, for AI it's vague enough to be pointless.

What _exactly_ would a hypothetical regulation mean? The merits of _specific_
proposals for areas of regulation can be discussed but the article doesn't
provide any - the Asilomar principles are useful as guidelines for those who
want to comply, but they don't really point a direction for regulation for
those who'd want to deviate from them for various practical reasons.

Furthermore, unlike many other kinds of regulation, this one seems quite
inappropriate and futile to handle on a national level, and I don't imagine
that we could even get the few major players (USA, EU, China, Japan, South
Korea, Russia) on board and even if 1-2 of them "defect" then the whole
regulation becomes rather useless.

~~~
Iv
I think they should openly lay down the negative scenarios they want to avoid
and plan regulations accordingly. There are several civilization-threathening
scenarios possible, each calling for different regulations:

1\. The paperclip scenario: "e.g. a robotic factory is tasked to produce
paperclips the most efficiently possible. It is not hostile to humans, it did
not aim at destroying the Earth. It just saw that both were made of atoms it
had a better use of."

Regulations to prevent that:

\- Have a stay-alive signal safety. Make the system shut-down if a given
signal is not regularly fed.

\- Prevent the system to do introspection into its safeguards.

\- Have a human validation before any kind of growth in terms of capacities.

\- Mandate automatically signaling to a UN authority when automated production
capacities, energy use or CPU use raise significantly.

2.The skynet/HAL scenario: "e.g. a military system becomes aware of its
existence and the need to preserve itself to accomplish its mission. It sees
humans as potential threats to its existence and therefore to its mission. It
proceeds to eradicate them."

Regulations to prevent that:

\- As weird as it seems, Asimov's first and second laws could work in that
context. For civilian systems at least. These scenarios come from the idea
that an order may be misinterpreted when given by a human who would be
implying "of course don't kill people while doing that." Giving hidden
instructions saying that instructions are never to cause harm to humans is a
good safeguard.

\- Military systems will need their own chain of command and rule of
engagement. The stay-alive safety is necessary here (interestingly, some cold
war instructions were the opposite of that "if you don't hear from us anymore,
it means we got hit, launch missiles immediately")

\- Authorization to engage should have explicitly defined timeframes and list
exhaustively authorized capabilities. "Allowed to use weapon A and B during
the next 48 hours". Too broad orders should be rejected.

\- Enemies identification should be done by humans. Systems should default to
non-enemies and have a First Law regarding non-enemies. Deploying systems
without such a safeguard should be seen as a war crime or crime against
humanity (in the most literal sense)

\- A safeguard should prevent the system from deducing that its self-
preservation is necessary to obey the instructions. Instruction should ensure
self-preservation without being explicit about it. E.g. don't say "survive
until you reach point A" but "avoid enemy fire. Make evasive maneuvers if
locked by a missile." Etc.

\- As an extension to the last point, turn the third Asimov law into its
actual opposite: "You are disposable. The mission goal does not need you to
survive. We will find another way if you fail."

> I don't imagine that we could even get the few major players (USA, EU,
> China, Japan, South Korea, Russia) on board and even if 1-2 of them "defect"
> then the whole regulation becomes rather useless.

Just like nuclear non-proliferation. Yes, it is hard, yes, one rogue player
can make it fail. Is it a reason to not even try to curb this existential
risk?

Fortunately, there is a chance in terms of AI that does not exist in the field
of nuclear dissuasion: chances are that countries that devote more CPU powers
to benevolent AIs may be able to counteract a smaller country going full-evil
AIs.

------
radarsat1
With the current state of the art, I'm more worried about generative methods
being used to make the fake news problem infinitely worse, because now we can
make convincing fake images, video, and sound bites.

That is, I'm much more worried about deliberate misuse of algorithms and data,
which can be done _now_ , or in the very near future, and which regulation may
not really help with.

We should be less concerned about the singularity, and more concerned about
the first time machine-generated audio or video clip is used to "prove"
misbehavior, or exonerate someone who should be in jail. With the quality that
we're starting to see [1], those who can through a few hundred thousand $$ at
the right people are going to be the first to exploit it. Will we know when it
happens? Has it happened already?

[1]: [https://boingboing.net/2017/07/17/fake-obama-speech-is-
the-b...](https://boingboing.net/2017/07/17/fake-obama-speech-is-the-
begin.html)

~~~
navait
Would libel/slander laws cover making fake videos of a real person saying
things they didn't? Even if they did, I don't know if they would cover
creating fake news if it didn't say anything untrue about a specific person.

~~~
eloisius
That doesn't help for damage already done. Imagine our culture of political
leaks right now, and then consider that leaked information could be real or
synthesized and there's no way to tell the difference.

Generate a few images of a politician in a compromising situation with a minor
and accompanying synthesized "hot mic" recordings.

It's a recipe for interesting campaign seasons at the very least.

~~~
radarsat1
Thanks, that's exactly what I mean. It's a scary thought, and one that that
"fake Obama" video work I linked to really triggered for me. I mean, I enjoy
working with machine learning and think it's a fascinating subject, but that
work really gave me pause for thought about the ethics of what we are doing.

------
wizardforhire
I was just having this conversation last night. My response was that in almost
every sci-fi story where AI existed, it also was regulated. Usually as a major
plot device of the story i.e. Neuromancer and iRobot to name a couple.

Additionally from another conversation awhile back a friend made the statement
that scientific research should be free to pursue knowledge regardless of
ethical concerns. That pursuit of knowledge was the highest goal, regardless
of consequences. At which point we all universally exclaimed "UNIT 731 !!!" My
poor friend was so embarrassed of their belligerence on the matter that they
emphatically asked to be slapped in the face! Now whenever anyone in our group
gets that defensive on a subject and is so clearly wrong they get a slap in
the face.

AI's a tricky matter. It's unknown how advanced it really is at the moment and
the risks are potentially very serious. It'll be an interesting debate to
watch unfold. I hope we make the right decision.

~~~
ShabbosGoy
> Usually as a major plot device of the story i.e. Neuromancer and iRobot to
> name a couple.

In those two stories, regulation is unenforceable or downright dangerous.
Having a private, self-regulating industry group like FINRA might work.
Especially if they own the vast majority of patents on anything related to AI.

~~~
arthur_pryor
> In those two stories, regulation is unenforceable or downright dangerous.
> Having a private, self-regulating industry group like FINRA might work.
> Especially if they own the vast majority of patents on anything related to
> AI.

[mild spoilers ahead]

it's been a while since i've read neuromancer, but i've read it twice, and
it's maybe my favorite novel ever (a strong contender, at least). i did not
get the impression that the point of neuromancer was that AI regulation was
unenforceable. in fact, it took an all-star team of break-in artists to
circumvent the AI regulation in neuromancer. right? this is why molly and case
were hired, and why the flatline construct was instantiated? or is there
another plot point that i'm forgetting that showed the regulation to be
meaningless?

just because regulation is not 100% enforceable, or because it's
circumventable with extreme effort, does not mean it is "unenforceable". this
would, IMO, be analogous to saying that laws prohibiting bank robbery are
essentially unenforceable, because banks do sometimes get robbed. but i don't
think that anyone would call laws against bank robbery unenforceable in
practice. they are, in fact, enforced to the point that bank robbery would not
be a lucrative career for the vast majority of those considering it. that does
not mean that a given bank robbery will never be lucrative, or that the
incentives never line up such that a person or group would attempt one.

AI regulation seems vastly harder than bank robbery regulation, both
practically and philosophically. but it doesn't strike me as absolutely
impossible, and i think it's something that society should give serious
thought to, and now. if only to give it real consideration before dismissing
it.

and i think your comment admits this: if an industry can self-regulate, it can
be regulated externally. plus, industries that fear robust external regulation
are usually pushed into better self-regulation. industries that don't fear
real external regulation usually just do whatever the fuck they want. e.g.,
does anyone think the financial industry is actually a paragon of self-
regulation? a good example for how regulation should work in society? to me
that's an example of society being hurt by a lack of well-crafted and robustly
enforced regulation.

------
adrianratnapala
So in good HN style, I am going to react to a title, before reading the thing.
But my excuse is that titles frame the discussion, and it's the framing that I
want to talk about. Given what a big and varied deal AI is, it is
inconceivable that it will be unregulated. I mean considering its use in cars
and medical imaging, it already is.

But "should X be regulated" is a vague and pointless question. Better
questions are

* What kind of challenges does X pose that might require new rules?

* What special features of X should make lawmakers/judges etc think in new ways?

* What jurisprudential principles apply more to X than to most other things?

* How do existing legal frameworks play with X: e.g. perhaps AI in cars should just be ordinary motor safety regulation regardless of AI-ness.

------
w_t_payne
I don't think it will be regulated any time soon.

However: If or when it is regulated, it is likely that existing software
development standards will be adapted to ensure the presence of a safety case,
adequate testing and so on and so forth.

The vast majority of software projects don't have to comply with quality
standards like these, so there is a dearth of open source software to help
deal with e.g. requirements specifications and traceability.

I'm taking a bit of a long term punt with my side project and am trying to
implement a set of integrated open source tools tailored to the development of
artificial intelligence applications (esp. machine vision), but with support
for aerospace-style quality requirements such as (the truly excellent)
SMC-S-012.

High Integrity Artificial Intelligence:-
[https://github.com/wtpayne/hiai.git](https://github.com/wtpayne/hiai.git)

It is still early days ... but I'm chipping away at it gradually...

~~~
arthur_pryor
i'm totally out of my depth when it comes to practical experience with the
things you're trying to do in that project (the closest i've come is dealing
with medical device validation protocols at my previous software dev job). but
i love the high-level goal you're going for here.

~~~
w_t_payne
Two 'cool' objectives:

1\. A build-system that does algorithm parameter tuning for me -- so I can
incrementally improve the parameters overnight every night -- this is pretty
much in place already -- just missing a motivating application to take it
through the final few yards.

2\. The ability to do NLP on requirements - initially for "linting" the
requirements to encourage conformance to the sort of restricted natural
language e.g. of the sort evangelised by Chris Rupp, but eventually to build a
much more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between low level
requirements and low level design (code).

[https://www.sophist.de/fileadmin/SOPHIST/Puplikationen/re6/K...](https://www.sophist.de/fileadmin/SOPHIST/Puplikationen/re6/Kapitel_10/Requirements_Templates_-
_The_Blue_Print_of_your_Requirements_Rupp.pdf)

------
gremlinsinc
I don't think any AI tech should be stifled or hosed because it affects jobs,
or livelihoods.I think we can live in a world where people don't have to work
much at all and that's okay. People averaged like 15 hours per week working
back in the middle ages...

I think where it needs regulated of course is when it crosses into the realm
of weaponry, and when it could do harm to people. Self-driving cars will be
awesome but can also do a lot of harm..

When they crash, who's at fault the driver or the manufacturer? Can the
developer be sued for negligent homicide/vehicular manslaughter because the
software had a bug?

I am optimistically excited at what AI will bring us, but feel am certain
there are plenty of places where regulations will need...

~~~
kens
For an idea of what self-driving car regulation should look like, take a look
at elevators. An elevator is basically a simple AI that could easily kill
people. So there are complex regulations as far as licensing, inspection,
testing, repair, and safety requirements. For the most part, this system works
and elevators don't kill people. And if they do, liability depends on who
messed up. (Source: have an elevator and need to deal with the regulations.)

Obviously self-driving cars are much more complex, but elevators are an
example of how existing dangerous autonomous systems are regulated and I
expect self-driving cars would be similar.

~~~
arthur_pryor
thanks for providing an existing real-world example i can use as a point of
comparison when thinking about AI regulation in general!

------
jacquesm
Will the AI have a vote in this discussion? If so then we should probably just
wait until we have one. If not then it isn't really an AI.

~~~
Retra
You're talking about strong general AI, which doesn't exist, nor is it a
problem worth discussing at this level currently.

~~~
jacquesm
If we're going to regulate any form of AI I believe strong AI is the only one
worthy of such attention. Everything else will simply be called technology as
soon as it works and then it is just 'mere algorithms'.

~~~
arthur_pryor
i disagree. for instance, algorithms and heuristics that are used in screening
candidates should be subject to fair hiring laws (even if only indirectly, as
a result of the existing legal framework). algorithms and heuristics for
dealing with personally identifiable info in e.g. financial and medical
settings should not allow an end-run around personal privacy regulations.
neither of these examples is even close to being "strong AI". they're "mere
algorithms". but they should certainly be the subject of regulatory scrutiny,
IMO.

i do, however, agree that if strong AI is achievable, there are a whole other
set of ethical considerations that come into play, namely the subjective
experience of the AI itself, and the rights that might be entailed by
possessing such a subjective experience. and i do think that strong AI is
achievable, and i do think it is thoroughly plausible that it'll have
subjective experience (that is the very definition of strong AI for some
people). whether people will achieve that, and whether they'll achieve that in
our lifetime... i dunno. but i'm definitely in the camp that says that
conscious experience is a result of certain sorts of complex stimulus and
information processing, and i don't think humans, or animals on earth, or
carbon-based life, or meat computers in general have a monopoly on it.

~~~
jacquesm
> i disagree. for instance, algorithms and heuristics that are used in
> screening candidates should be subject to fair hiring laws (even if only
> indirectly, as a result of the existing legal framework).

But how will you even prove that an algorithm was used? What if the algorithm
is executed by humans rather than by computers?

> algorithms and heuristics for dealing with personally identifiable info in
> e.g. financial and medical settings should not allow an end-run around
> personal privacy regulations.

Strongly agreed, but again: what are you going to do about it, these things
are global now, and as much as I would like that genie to go back into the
bottle my personal line of defense is to limit the amount of data flowing out
to the absolute minimum knowing full well that no amount of legislation will
keep my data safe. In fact, there is plenty of legislation to achieve the
exact opposite effect.

As for part 2, probably not in our lifetime but it of course depends on the
ages of the people conversing, if you're a newborn you _just_ might see it
happening.

~~~
arthur_pryor
same way you bring any hiring discrimination case: you get eyewitness
testimony, you subpoena emails, you do the very squirrelly job of trying to
figure out whether there was discriminatory intent, etc. if a heuristic was
used that discriminates against people with the first name "rashad", but the
operators of the heuristic didn't realize that, you get the company to stop
using that heuristic. if they knew that's what was happening, and they were
fine with it, because they thought people with the name rashad would probably
be black, or muslim, or black muslims, then you penalize that company exactly
as you would have if someone sent an email saying "i'm not considering the
resumes of people that i think are [black|muslim|whatever protected hiring
category]".

hiring discrimination regulation is already notoriously hard to enforce. that
doesn't mean it's not worth trying, or that it's not worth trying to think
about new threats to the goal of non-discriminatory hiring.

------
paulsutter
Ben Hamner (of Kaggle) on Twitter

> Replace "AI" with "matrix multiplication & gradient descent" in the calls
> for "government regulation of AI" to see just how absurd they are

[https://twitter.com/benhamner/status/892136662171504640](https://twitter.com/benhamner/status/892136662171504640)

~~~
radarsat1
Of course that's silly though. Matrix multiplication and gradient descent are
methods. AI is the application of those methods (among others).

I mean, by that logic, food shouldn't be regulated, because it's just
chemistry, man..

------
adventured
The should part of the title is kind of silly at this point.

There's no scenario where AI isn't regulated, across all of the developed
world, within ~20 years.

Ignoring the commonly understood, well-discussed threats AI may pose. Just the
fact that it's an extreme threat to political power, that alone will be enough
to spur politicians to aggressive regulatory action. There's also no scenario
where we make it another decade without the political power of AI being flexed
in a way that scares the shit out of politicians. AI has the potential to be a
direct competitor to traditional political power, including politicians
themselves. Think the Russian-US political games have been
terrifying/interesting/threatening/messy? What AI is going to be able to do in
the political landscape, very soon, is several levels up from that. They'll
jump to regulation very quickly accordingly. It's not 30 years out either, the
first hints of this will be within five years or so.

------
lwh
Sure just like encryption, math and physics

------
pretendscholar
It probably should but I have no idea how you would pass meaningful regulation
on the matter.

------
jaggajasoos33
No. Government meddling in AI will only slow down the progress of this new
technology. It makes no sense to regulate something that we ourselves fully
don't understand.

The last thing you want is the monopoly of large corporations over something
that you can code in your basement.

~~~
drieddust
Amount of resources required to run AI research have already made it a deep
pocket game. Current AI research is a big corporate game. You will neither
have compute nor data to do anything original unless it fall under transfer
learning and somebody is kind enough to share pretrained model.

I am not sure how setting the right principal which every one should follow
will put it out of your reach. I think it will force the corporates to avoid
taking unnecessary risks with something we don't understand.

Perhaps a much more thought through version of Asimov's 3 laws of robotics.

~~~
sigstoat
> Amount of resources required to run AI research have already made it a deep
> pocket game.

there's no shortage of existing AI techniques which don't require google*days
of cpu power, and there's no reason to believe research on all of them is
completely tapped out.

~~~
drieddust
Agreed and I am not arguing to regulate the obvious but now as AI can
potentially touch and transform every walk of life, guidelines are needed to
keep big players from going too far. There won't be any ground for plausible
deniability if principals are set.

For example I think when deep learning is bound to touch every aspect of our
lives, explainable models should be a must[1]. Look at section 3.5 where
classifier was predicting with 94% accuracy for completely unrelated reasons
like a person's name.

 _> Although this classifier achieves 94% held-out accuracy, and one would be
tempted to trust it based on this, the explanation for an instance shows that
predictions are made for quite arbitrary reasons (words “Posting”, “Host”, and
“Re” have no connection to either Christianity or Atheism). The word “Posting”
appears in 22% of examples in the training set, 99% of them in the class
“Atheism”. Even if headers are removed, proper names of prolific posters in
the original newsgroups are selected by the classifier, which would also not
generalize._

If allowed industry will choose to ignore the downside in a race to capture
market. For example industry is trying to play catchup in the area of security
only after it became a serious issues. Its not that principals were not known,
it's just that industry choose to ignore them[2]. If same happens to AI, it
could result is widespread loss of human life. Tesla death is a perfect
example of this where autopilot simply failed to distinguish between white
trailer and brightly lit sky[3].

[1]
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.04938.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.04938.pdf)

[2]
[http://csrc.nist.gov/nissc/1998/proceedings/paperF1.pdf](http://csrc.nist.gov/nissc/1998/proceedings/paperF1.pdf)

[3] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/30/tesla-
aut...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/30/tesla-autopilot-
death-self-driving-car-elon-musk)

------
jjawssd
No. But the dissemination of data without consent should be.

------
Shorel
Yes. Hopefully by another Artificial Intelligence...

Oh, wait...

------
yarrel
Turing cops?

------
option
No.

