Why Not Just: Raise AI Like Kids?

Key Takeaways

hi I sometimes hear people saying if you want to create an artificial general intelligence that's safe and has human values why not just raise it like a human child I might do a series of these why not just videos you know why not just use the Three Laws uh why not just turn it off but yeah why not raise an AGI like a child seems reasonable enough at first glance right humans are General intelligences and we seem to know how to raise them to behave morally a young AGI would be a lot like a young human remember a long while back on computer file I was talking about this thought experiment of a stamp collecting a I use that because it's a good way of getting away from anthropomorphizing the system you're not just imagining a human mind the system has these clearly laid out Rules by which it operates it has an internet connection and a detailed internal model it can use to make predictions about the world it evaluates every possible sequence of packets it can send through its internet connection and it selects the one which it thinks will result in the most stamps collected after a year what happens if you try to raise the stamp collector like a human child is it going to learn human ethics from your good example no it's going to kill everyone values are not learned by osmosis the stamp collector doesn't have any part of its code that involves learning and adopting the values of humans around it so it doesn't do that now some of you may be saying how do you know agis won't be like humans um what if we make them by copying the human brain and it's true there is one kind of AGI like thing that's enough like a human that raising it like a human might kind of work a whole brain emulation but I'd be very surprised if the first agis are exact replicas of brains the first planes were not like birds the first submarines were not like fish making an exact replica of a bird or a fish requires way more understanding than just making a thing that flies or a thing that swims and I'd expect making an exact replica a brain to require a lot more understanding than just making something that thinks by the time we understand the operation of the brain well enough to make working whole brain emulations I expect we'll already know enough to make things that are less human but that function as agis so I don't know what the first agis will be like and they'll probably be more humanlike than the stamp collector but unless they're close copies of human brains they won't be similar enough to humans for raising them like children to automatically work blindly copying the brain probably isn't going to help us we're going to have to really understand how humans learn their values without a good system for that you may as well try raising a crocodile like it's a human child human value learning is a specific complex mechanism that evolved in humans and won't be in agis by default we look at the way children learn things so quickly we say they're like information sponges right they're just empty so they suck up whatever's around them but they don't suck up everything they only learn specific kinds of things raise a child around people speaking English it will learn English in another environment it might learn French but it's not going to reproduce the sound of the vacuum cleaner it's not going to learn the binary language of moisture vaporators or whatever the brain isn't learning and copying everything it's specifically looking for something that looks like a human natural language because there's this big complex existing structure put in place by Evolution and the brain is just looking for the final pieces I think values are similar you can think of the brains of young humans as having a little slot in them just waiting to accept a set of human social norms and rules of ethical Behavior there's this whole giant complicated machine of emotions and empathy and theory of other minds and so on built up over millions of years of evolution and the young brain is just waiting to fill in the few remaining blanks based on what the child observes when they're growing up when you raise a child you're not writing the child's source code at best you're writing the configuration file a child's upbringing is like a control panel on a machine you can press some of the buttons and turn some of the the dials but the Machinery has already been built by Evolution you're just changing some of the settings so if you try to raise an unsafe AGI as though it were a human child you can provide all the right inputs which in a human would produce a good moral adult but it won't work because you're pressing buttons and turning dials on a control panel that isn't hooked up to anything unless your AGI has all of this complicated stuff that's designed to learn and adopt values from the humans around it it isn't going to do that okay but can't we just program that in yeah hopefully we can but there's no just about it this is called value learning and it's an important part of AI Safety Research it may be that an AGI will need to have a period early on where it's learning about human values by interacting with humans and that might look a bit like raising a child if you squint but making a system that's able to undergo that learning process successfully and safely is hard it's something we don't know how to do yet and figuring it out is a big part of AI Safety Research so just raise the AGI like a child is not a solution it's at best a possible rephrasing of the [Music] problem I want to say a quick thank you to all of my amazing patreon supporters all of these these people and in this video I especially want to thank Sara cheda who also happens to be one of the people I'm sending the diagram that I drew in the previous video I'm going to send that out today or tomorrow I think that's kind of a fun thing to do so yeah from now on any video that has drawn Graphics in it uh just let me know in the patreon comments if you want me to send it to you and I can do that thanks again for your support and I'll see you next time