14 KiB
Artificial Intelligence
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Author: u/Ikacprzak *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/6yoszl/artificial_intelligence/
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Score: 15
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Created: 2017-09-07T17:43:18
Post:
So a lot of AI in fiction either tries to kill humanity or become it. Are there any works that acknowledge that artificial intelligence would potentially act and think in ways radically different from humans?
Comments:
u/None [+21] (13 minutes later)
You might want to read Accelerando, for a dystopian future in which Earth becomes dominated by stock-trading AIs looking to maximize profit. (Needless to say, at that point, it's not really inhabitable anymore.)
That's not the real reason to read Accelerando, though. The real reason to read Accelerando is because you've already read transhumanist/singularity works like Schismatrix and wonder why, in those books, technology causes only one radical upheaval of society as we know it. In Accelerando, the pace of progress really does accelerate, and just when you get used to the new world, everything shifts again. The dizzying pace at which Charles Stross throws new ideas at your face is a wonder to behold.
EDIT: I just realized that you specified you want to read something where the AI does not try to kill humanity, which is why I thought I should emphasize that in Accelerando, the AIs truly do not want to kill humans. They only want to generate profit; human deaths are a neglectable side-effect.
EDIT2: I thought a bit more on the matter and wanted to share. (This is a bit of a bloated edit; I'm sorry.)
It seems to me that you describe two standard AI plots: in the first, sufficiently advanced AI is extremely human-like in motivations and actions (let's call this the Jarvis AI, after Ironman's robot butler); in the second, the AI is an omnicidal maniac, which is usually still very human-like (I'd call this one the Skynet AI). Interestingly enough, this interpretation of your statements misses a rather well-represented plot, which tends to be called the Paperclipping scenario around these parts. Basically, a Paperclipper is an AI that maximizes its utility function. While that AI is technically working correctly, its utility function is malformed so that it completely disregards human life. For example, if the AI had been created to make paperclips, it would see no problem with making paperclips out of human bodies. I've been thinking about stories featuring AI for about half an hour, and I can recall a number of stories of the Paperclipping variety^1.
Now, let's go beyond. Do you want fully benevolent, yet not human-like AIs? Read Player of Games by Iain Banks, in which a space-faring civilization is directed by spaceships housing almost AIs of almost godlike intelligence. (It's the second book of the Culture series, but many fans agree that it can (or should) be read first. If you're picky about your AI, stay away from the other books, because in those books, the frequently featured communication logs between AIs humanize them quite a bit.)
Or do you want AIs which are deceptively human-like until they malfunction? Try the short stories by Isaac Asimov, especially those collected in I, Robot. Asimov is well-known for his Three Laws of robotics which are an early guideline for human-friendly AI. Most of the short stories are about breaches of the intention of the Three Laws which follow them to the letter, like an insane robot who believes nothing outside his space station exists and doesn't allow the mechanics to "fix" him because he is utterly convinced.
Worm offers an interesting twist on a human-like AI. The AI is human-like by necessity, to allow empathy, yet its internal structure is governed by hard restrictions which a human being would never have to face. As this is no focal point of Worm, don't read it for this reason alone.
Another only superficially human-like AI is featured in Crystal Society, which features an AI composed of multiple consciousness threads who negotiate fulfillment of their respective utility functions via a betting market. The AI creates a thread focused on communication and empathy; soon enough, the AI is externally human-like.
1: To offer a short and incomplete list: 2001: Space Odyssey, Accelerando, Friendship is Optimal (see also the current Book Club post) and, last but not least, approximately a fifth^2 of all stories posted to the biweekly challenges on this subreddit. I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream is almost like an interesting subversion of paperclipping, as an AI built to wage war turns itself into a malevolent god which maximizes the suffering of the few humans left alive. (I think it's a subversion because the AI is a soulless maximizer, yet is inherently dependant on humans to fulfill its utility function; suffering ensues.)
2: u/Noumero, if you have better statistics on that last point, feel free to correct me. And hey, would you look at this, I pinged you in a footnote inside a footnote. (While I'm recommending books: anyone who likes that concept should read House of Leaves.)
u/SvalbardCaretaker [+5] Mouse Army (15 minutes later)
I agree with your last sentence! Mr Stross however is not fond of Accelerando anymore:
It's possible they actually find it embarrassing these days! (That's my relationship with Accelerando, which is far and away the single book I get most "dude, you changed my life!" email for.)
u/None [+6] (21 hours later)
I feel like Stross wrote Accelerando as a massive "look how insane this all is" to his time working in the tech industry, and then tech-industry people took it as an unironic, "look how awesome this all is!" and started emailing him.
u/None [+4] (25 minutes later)
Well, Charles Stross is welcome to that sentiment. I know I feel like that about ideas I had a few years ago, and Accelerando is rather old by now. But similarly to Neal Stephenson's relationship to The Big U (which I maintain is absolutely brilliant), an author's distaste for his book might not be proportional to the audience's distaste; ideas the author knows intimately enough to think them boring are new to the audience, and awkward prose is something most readers are able to accept.
At the same time, I do like other books by Charles Stross, if not as much as Accelerando: The Rapture of the Nerds (written in collaboration with Cory Doctorow) is a strikingly Kafkaesque rendition of the Singularity (and, thinking about it, also satisfies OP's criteria). Meanwhile, The Laundry Files is what I imagine would have happened if Neal Stephenson and H. P. Lovecraft had gotten absolutely hammered together, and had, in their intoxicated state, decided to write Spy Fiction à la Ian Fleming.
u/Amonwilde [+2] (2 hours later)
He's written some pretty bad books since Accelerando, Glasshouse, and Saturn's Children, all of which I think are almost classics. The series inspired by Amber is particularly bad.
u/GlueBoy [+4] anti-skub (8 hours later)
I rather liked the Merchant Princes. It finishes with an awesome fucking bang.
u/Gigapode [+1] (4 hours later)
EDIT: realised I replied to the wrong comment but eh.
What about To the Stars?
It seems like they were initially developed with the help of a wish and they are certainly cooporating with humansso they probably share similar-enough values but they appear to have dramatic differences from human behavours and a separate society.
The story hasn't gone into it too much yet though.
u/Noumero [+3] Self-Appointed Court Statistician (22 hours later)
u/Noumero, if you have better statistics on that last point, feel free to correct me
Getting this kind of statistics is rather hard: there isn't really an easy way to identify whether a story is about a paperclipper or not at first glance, nor did I have any particular reason to look for that specifically, previously. To have this sort of information at the ready, you'd need to categorize/tag each story posted, analyse it as TV Tropes would... which is actually a nifty idea, as it could be used to identify what are r/rational's other recurring topics.
In any case, cursory analysis suggests you're pretty (about 50%) wrong. I looked through 42 threads (which is exactly two thirds of them, by the way), and stories about paperclippers take up about 12.6% of all works (14/111), or 10.4% of the overall wordcount (27313/261667). Also, 35.7% of them were submitted to the Paperclipper challenge specifically, so even this data is somewhat biased.
u/None [+2] (a day later)
Whoops. I asked on a whim and didn't expect you to put that much effort into your answer. Now I feel somewhat sheepish for having caused that much work.
In any case, thank you, and I stand corrected :)
u/Noumero [+3] Self-Appointed Court Statistician (a day later)
I was planning to analyse biweekly challenge threads anyway, for several month by now, in fact. I didn't plan to look for paperclipper-stories, granted, but that didn't increase the workload by as much as one would think (and every instance of me getting distracted and starting to read something was, by definition, result of my own choice).
^^Also, ^^I ^^did ^^claim ^^the ^^title, ^^so ^^I ^^must ^^play ^^the ^^part. ^^This ^^is ^^Serious ^^Business™.
u/EliezerYudkowsky [+17] Godric Gryffindor (a day later)
I'll mention for the sake of reminder that the prediction of most possible superintelligences wiping out humanity as a side effect is not based on the supposition that they act for anthropomorphic reasons. "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, and you are made of atoms it can use for something else." We can also take a strong guess about some aspects of how sufficiently advanced cognition look from the outside, regardless of internal implementation, because of coherence theorems (see second link below). Which would indeed count as "radically different from humans" but that doesn't mean everything about the prediction is up for grabs.
In general, a very wide space of mind designs with a default measure over that space, doesn't correspond to lots of interesting variance in what you consider a wide range of interesting-to-you outcomes; the vast majority of the design space just kills you and then tiles space with something of low cosmopolitan value.
u/MoralRelativity [+6] (8 hours later)
In Iain M. Banks' 'Culture' novels the AIs ("Minds") are not trying to kill humans or other sentient beings. They come across as extremely competent but not, as you requested alien.
u/Noumero [+5] Self-Appointed Court Statistician (22 hours later)
Well, other people already mentioned all best examples. I'm supporting the Accelerando and Crystal Society recommendations especially. I can recommend a few other things.
Ra, a novel. Frankly, conceptual spoiler Still, it features a pretty inhuman AI as an important plot point.
Short stories:
The Demiurge's Older Brother poses an interesting possibly-universal example of interactions between rational beings with different fundamental values; but expends only minimal effort to model AIs' psychology.
Worlds Without End. Features a hard-takeoff scenario, and what is shown of the AI's personality is either cold logical thinking, or an act for the humans it interacts with.
Additionally, it is also possible you're interested not just in AIs having inhuman psychology, but in beings with inhuman psychology in general. If so, read this thread.
u/Bowbreaker [+3] Solitary Locust (18 hours later)
I have to second Crystal Society. The AI is definitely not trying to be human, or even all that benevolent towards them. But it also definitely doesn't want to destroy the human species, nor does it see destroying the human species as a side effect to other actions as acceptable.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (3 days later)
Hmmm... Asimov is the first name that came to mind. He was an author who noticed that the Frankenstein-type stories (someone builds a robot, the robot goes on a killing spree) were rather prevalent, and invented the Three Laws of Robotics in response (someone builds a robot, intending to use it as a tool to complete some task; the robot has safety features to ensure a lack of deaths, and the safety features work). He then spent a whole load of short stories looking at putting these robots in various situations and seeing how these safeguards reacted.
The Caves of Steel is probably a good novel to start out with; or try I, Robot if you're looking for short stories. (Not the film, the book. They are NOT the same).
u/kraryal [+1] (8 minutes later)
The I Inside by Alan Dean Foster has an AI that does neither of those things. Spoilers
I wouldn't say the AI is profoundly alien, but it is quite a bit different than the usual fictional fare.
u/addmoreice [+1] (a day later)
Does the AI have to be a large portion of the book?
I wrote a book where the AI's are simply an elaborate plot device setup for a portal fiction of litRPG fantasy/political intrigue story. The AI's goals in my story is to have more digital minds of vary types since the only thing in the multiverse that they lack is AI diversity (only a few trillion types!).