9/29/2016

AI:howcanwemanagerobotrisk?|WorldEconomicForum

AI: how can we manage robot risk?

Written by
Bernhard Petermeier, Senior Manager, Technology Pioneers, World Economic Forum
Thursday 15 January 2015

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the discipline that studies how to create software and systems
that behave intelligently. AI scientists build systems that can solve reasoning tasks, learn
from data, make decisions and plans, play games, perceive their environments, move
autonomously, manipulate objects, respond to queries expressed in human languages,
translate between languages, and more.
AI has captured the public imagination for decades, especially in the form of
anthropomorphized robots, and recent advances have pushed AI into popular awareness
and use: IBMs Watson computer beat the best human Jeopardy! players; statistical
approaches have significantly improved Googles automatic translation services and digital
personal assistants such as Apples Siri; semi-autonomous drones monitor and strike
military targets around the world; and Googles self-driving car has driven hundreds of
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thousands of miles on public roads.

This represents substantial progress since the 1950s, and yet the original dream of a
machine that could substitute for arbitrary human labour remains elusive. One important
lesson has been that, as Hans Moravec wrote in the 1980s, It is comparatively easy to
make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers,
and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to
perception and mobility.
These and other challenges to AI progress are by now well known within the field, but a
recent survey shows that the most-cited living AI scientists still expect human-level AI to
be produced in the latter half of this century, if not sooner, followed (in a few years or
decades) by substantially smarter-than-human AI. If they are right, such an advance would
likely transform nearly every sector of human activity.
If this technological transition is handled well, it could lead to enormously higher
productivity and standards of living. On the other hand, if the transition is mishandled, the
consequences could be catastrophic. How might the transition be mishandled?
Contrary to public perception and Hollywood screenplays, it does not seem likely that
advanced AI will suddenly become conscious and malicious. Instead, the core problem is
one of aligning AI goals with human goals. If smarter-than-human AIs are built with goal
specifications that subtly differ from what their inventors intended, it is not clear that it will
be possible to stop those AIs from using all available resources to pursue those goals, any
more than chimpanzees can stop humans from doing what they want.
In the nearer term, however, numerous other social challenges need to be addressed. In
the next few decades, AI is anticipated to partially or fully substitute for human labour in
many occupations, and it is not clear whether human workers can be retrained quickly
enough to maintain high levels of employment.
What is more, while previous waves of technology have also created new kinds of jobs,
this time structural unemployment may be permanent as AI could be better than humans at
performing the new jobs it creates. This may require a complete restructuring of the
economy by raising fundamental questions of the nature of economic transactions and
what it is that humans can do for each other.

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Autonomous vehicles and other cases of human-robot interaction demand legal solutions
fit for the novel combination of automatic decision-making with a capacity for

physical harm. Autonomous vehicles will encounter situations where they must weigh the
risks of injury to passengers against the risks to pedestrians; what will the legal redress be
for parties who believe the vehicle decided wrongly?
Several nations are working towards the development of lethal autonomous weapons
systems that can assess information, choose targets and open fire without human
intervention. Such developments raise new challenges for international law and the

protection of non-combatants. Who will be accountable if they violate international

law? The Geneva Conventions are unclear. It is also not clear when human intervention
occurs: before deployment, during deployment? Humans will be involved in programming
autonomous weapons; the question is whether human control of the weapon ceases at the
moment of deployment.
AI in finance and other domains has introduced risks associated with the fact that AI
programmes can make millions of economically significant decisions before a human can
notice and react, leading for example to a May 2012 trading event that nearly

bankrupted Knight Capital.

In short, proactive and future-oriented work in many fields is needed to counteract what
Richard Posner describes as the tendency of technological advance to outpace the social
control of technology.
Authors: Stuart Russel is Professor of Computer Science and Smith-Zadeh Professor in
Engineering at University of California, Berkeley. Bernhard Petermeier, Senior Community
Manager, Technology Pioneers, World Economic Forum.
Image: Children touch the hands of the humanoid robot Roboy at the exhibition Robots on
Tour in Zurich, March 9, 2013. REUTERS/Michael Buholzer

Written by
Bernhard Petermeier, Senior Manager, Technology Pioneers, World Economic Forum
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/01/artificialintelligencehowcanwemanagetherobotrisk/

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The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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