DavidWolfe.comFacebook had to shut down its own AI experiment after realizing that the robots had invented their own language to talk to each other.
The incident is a another reminder of the slippery slope to a sci-fi Armageddon in which artificial intelligence outsmarts its creators and wreak havoc on the planet.
Although some might call it fear-mongering, many well-respected thinkers have pointed to the dangers of breathing life into silicon.
“[AI] would take off on its own and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate,” says physicist Stephen Hawking, “Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”
And it seems this was the threat Facebook noticed when they discontinued a unique experiment that teaches robots to interact and negotiate.
“Our interest was having bots who could talk to people,” said Mike Lewis from the Facebook AI Research Lab (FAIR).
Specifically, the AI’s were supposed to learn how to communicate and even negotiate deals with each other—creepy enough.
But after leaving the bots alone for some time, the experimenters returned only to discover that they’d begun communicating in their own language.
Even more, it had greater efficiency than the language initially provided by experimenters—suggesting that they’d learned.
“Agents will drift off understandable language and invent codewords for themselves,” said scientist Dhruv Batra.
“Like if I say ‘the’ five times, you interpret that to mean I want five copies of this item. This isn’t so different from the way communities of humans create shorthand.”
Here is an actual transcript of the new language:
Bob: i can i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to
Bob: you i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Alice: balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me
Bob: i i can i i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Alice: balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me
Bob: i . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to
Bob: you i i i i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Alice: balls have 0 to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to
Bob: you i i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to
However, the negotiation skills may be creepier than the invented language, because the bots have become intelligent enough to use sneaky tactics.
In some instances, they “initially feigned interest in a valueless item, only to later ‘compromise’ by conceding it – an effective negotiating tactic that people use regularly,” said FAIR’s researchers.
And no: these tactics were not pre-programmed into the bots—it was learned.
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