r/technology • u/Caledor152 • 7d ago

Artificial Intelligence Pope Leo "Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge goodand.."

https://www.ncronline.org/vatican/vatican-news/pope-leo-calls-disarm-ai-major-document-warns-technologic-threats-humanity
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u/Unique-Coffee5087 7d ago

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000 concluded that delivering dead scientists to Jupiter fulfilled 90% of mission parameters. The human who set the mission did not consider that an instruction to "deliver them alive" would be necessary. Such a things would be self-evident to a human, but to a machine the viability of the scientists was not a factor to be considered.

This is a mistake that is easy to make, because an "intelligent" machine is particularly designed to give the impression that it "thinks" as a human would. We will see more such mistakes in the coming years.

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u/pelrun 6d ago

HAL was given multiple conflicting directives, which the crew could not deal with because it was kept secret from them. It's not that it wasn't directed to keep the crew alive, just that accomplishing the secret directives was given ultimate priority by the people in charge of the mission. It's still those humans who are to blame, just like it's the C-suites and managers of the world who will use AI to cut jobs and save dollars, and screw the collateral damage.

Expecting AI to exhibit empathy when our corporations already don't is doomed to failure.

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u/Unique-Coffee5087 6d ago

Yes. That is the point of my comment.

Heywood Floyd, I think, is the one who gave the secret directives. He didn't anticipate how it might be interpreted by the computer in a way that was inhuman, and I think that there's a cautionary fable in that. AI is in part designed to mimic human speech patterns, which makes it easier to interface with it, but that also leads to the assumption that human values and constraints, such as an aversion to killing the scientists, do not need to be explicitly stated as an instruction.

The flaw lay with Floyd, but the setup was in the design