[danaris]

Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics were explicitly designed to be a good basis for fiction that shows how Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics break down.

Suggesting they be used as a basis for actual AI ethics is...well, it's not quite to the level of creating the Torment Nexus from acclaimed sci-fi novel "Don't Create the Torment Nexus", but it's pretty darn close.

[jordanb]

It's kinda hilarious that people are explicitly trying to build a future based on (mostly dystopian) scifi, which was the point of the torment nexus thing. But then when scifi argues for constraints on technology the argument is "those are just stories."

[krapp]

The argument isn't "those are just stories" it's that "those stories demonstrate why those constraints won't work."

But people are going to try it anyway. Belief in Asimov's three laws is a matter of religious faith. Just know you've been warned.

[const_cast]

Trying to have constraints and then failing is arguably better than the current idea about AI safety - discarding constraints as a concept.

If Asimov's laws don't work, that doesn't mean we can ignore the idea of them and... Just do nothing.

[krapp]

>If Asimov's laws don't work, that doesn't mean we can ignore the idea of them and... Just do nothing.

I don't think anyone is suggesting to just do nothing because Asimov's laws won't work, so much as suggest that people consider why they wouldn't work, and what that means for the problem of AI alignment in the real world.

It may simply be inevitable that AI (if we're defining AI as something like an LLM) can always be talked into or out of anything, given the right prompts. In which case constraints can only work so far and we need to consider what happens when they inevitably fail.

[Sharlin]

If you think Asimov proposed the three laws as anything like a workable constraint framework of some sort, you're hilariously mistaken and probably haven't read a single Robot book in your life. Asimov came up with them BECAUSE they were a) simple, b) vague, and c) broken. BECAUSE he wanted to write stories about all the specific ways they were broken.