What we think about AI largely depends on how we know AI, and most people “know” AI through science fiction. But how well do the AIs in these shows match up with the science? What kinds of stories are we telling ourselves about AI that are pure fiction? And more importantly, what stories _aren’t_ we telling ourselves that we should be? Hear Chris Noessel of scifiinterfaces.com talk about this study and rethink what you “know” about #AI.
As of this posting, the Untold AI analysis stands at 11 posts and around 17,000 words. (And there are as yet a few more to come. Probably.) That’s a lot to try and keep in your head. To help you see and reflect on the big picture, I present…a big picture.
This data visualization has five main parts. And while I tried to design them to be understandable from the graphic alone, it’s worth giving a little tour anyway.
On the left are two sci-fi columns connected by Sankey-ish lines. The first lists the sci-fi movies and TV shows in the survey. The first ten are those that adhere to the science. Otherwise, they are not in a particular order. The second column shows the list of takeaways. The takeaways are color-coded and ordered for their severity. The type size reflects how many times that takeaway appears in the survey. The topmost takeaways are those that connect to imperatives. The bottommost are those takeaways that do not. The lines inherit the takeaway color, which enables a close inspection of a show’s node to see whether its takeaways are largely positive or negative.
On the right are two manifestocolumns connected by Sankey-ish lines. The right column shows the manifestos included in the analysis. The left column lists the imperatives found in the manifestos. The manifestos are in alphabetical order. Their node sizes reflect the number of imperatives they contain. The imperatives are color-coded and clustered according to five supercategories, as shown just below the middle of the poster. The topmost imperatives are those that connect to takeaways. The bottommost are those that do not. The lines inherit the color of the imperative, which enables a close inspection of a manifesto’s node to see to which supercategory of imperatives it suggests. The lines connected to each manifesto are divided into two groups, the topmost being those that are connected and the bottommost those that are not. This enables an additional reading of how much a given manifesto’s suggestions are represented in the survey.
The area between the takeaways and imperatives contains connecting lines, showing the mapping between them. These lines fade from the color of the takeaway to the color of the imperative. This area also labels the three kinds of connections. The first are those connections between takeaways and imperatives. The second are those takeaways unconnected to imperatives, which are the “Pure Fiction” takeaways that aren’t of concern to the manifestos. The last are those imperatives unconnected to takeaways, the collection of 29 Untold AI imperatives that are the answer to the question posed at the top of the poster.
Just below the big Sankey columns are the five supercategories of Untold AI. Each has a title, a broad description, and a pie chart. The pie chart highlights the portion of imperatives in that supercategory that aren’t seen in the survey, and the caption for the pie chart posits a reason why sci-fi plays out the way it does against the AI science.
You’ve seen all of this in the posts, but seeing it all together like this encourages a different kind of reflection about it.
Interactive, someday?
Note that it is possible but quite hard to trace the threads leading from, say, a movie to its takeaways to its imperatives to its manifesto, unless you are looking at a very high resolution version of it. One solution to that would be to make the visualization interactive, such that rolling over one node in the diagram would fade away all non-connected nodes and graphs in the visualization, and data brush any related bits below.
A second solution is to print the thing out very large so you can trace these threads with your finger. I’m a big enough nerd that I enjoy poring over this thing in print, so for those who are like me, I’ve made it available via redbubble. I’d recommend the 22×33 if you have good eyesight and can handle small print, or the 31×46 max size otherwise.
Maybe if I find funds or somehow more time and programming expertise I can make that interactive version possible myself.
Some new bits
Sharp-eyed readers may note that there are some new nodes in there from the prior posts! These come from late-breaking entries, late-breaking realizations, and my finally including the manifesto I was party to.
Sundar Pichai published the Google AI Principles just last month, so I worked it in.
I finally worked the Juvet Agenda in as a manifesto. (Repeating disclosure: I was one of its authors.) It was hard work, but I’m glad I did it, because it turns out it’s the most-connected manifesto of the lot. (Go, team!)
The Juvet Agenda also made me realize that I needed new, related nodes for both takeaways and imperatives: AI will enable or require new models of governance. (It had a fair number of movies, too.) See the detailed graph for the movies and how everything connects.
I modified the Flourish SVG, added the rest of the data, and did final layout in Adobe Illustrator
The poster’s type is mostly Sentinel, a font from Hoefler & Co., because I think it’s lovely, highly readable, and I liked that Sentinels are also a sci-fi AI.
Some readers reported being unable to read the prior post because of its script formatting. Here is the same post without that formatting…
INTERIOR. Sci-fi auditorium. Maybe the Plavalaguna Opera House. A heavy red velvet curtain rises, lifted by anti-gravity pods that sound like tiny TIE fighters. The HOST stands on a floating podium that rises from the orchestra pit. The HOST wears a velour suit with piping, which glows with sliding, overlapping bacterial shapes.
HOST: Hello and welcome to The Fritzes: AI Edition, where we give out awards for awesome movies and television shows about AI that stick to the science.
FX: Applause, beeping, booping, and the sound of an old modem from the audience.
HOST: For those wondering how we picked these winners, it was based on the Untold AI analysis from scifiinterfaces.com. That analysis compared what sci-fi shows suggest about AI (called “takeaways”) to what real world manifestos suggest about AI (called “imperatives”). If a movie had a takeaway that matched an imperative, it got a point. But if it perpetuated a pointless and distracting myth, it lost five points.
The Demon Seed metal-skinned podling thing stands up in the back row of the audience and shouts: Booooooo!
HOST: Thank you, thank you. But just sticking to the science is not enough. We also want to reward shows that investigate these ideas with quality stories, acting, effects, and marketing departments. So the sums were multiplied by that show’s Tomatometer rating. This way to top films didn’t just tell the right stories (according to the science), but it told them well.
Totals were tallied by the firm of Google Sheets algorithms. Ok, ok. Now, to give away awards 009 through 006 are those loveable blockheads from Interstellar, TARS and CASE.
TARS and CASE crutch-walk onto the stage and reassemble as solid blocks before the lectern.
INT. SCI-FI AUDITORIUM. MAYBE THE PLAVALAGUNA OPERA HOUSE. A HEAVY RED VELVET CURTAIN RISES, LIFTED BY ANTI-GRAVITY PODS THAT SOUND LIKE TINY TIE FIGHTERS. THE HOST STANDS ON A FLOATING PODIUM THAT RISES FROM THE ORCHESTRA PIT. THE HOST WEARS A VELOUR SUIT WITH PIPING, WHICH GLOWS WITH SLIDING, OVERLAPPING BACTERIAL SHAPES.
HOST
Hello and welcome to The Fritzes: AI Edition, where we give out awards for awesome movies and television shows about AI that stick to the science.
Applause, beeping, booping, and the sound of an old modem from the audience.
HOST
For those wondering how we picked these winners, it was based on the Untold AI analysis from scifiinterfaces.com. That analysis compared what sci-fi shows suggest about AI (called “takeaways”) to what real world manifestos suggest about AI (called “imperatives”). If a movie had a takeaway that matched an imperative, it got a point. But if it perpetuated a pointless and distracting myth, it lost five points.
The Demon Seed metal-skinned podling thing stands up in the back row of the audience and shouts: Booooooo!
HOST
Thank you, thank you. But just sticking to the science is not enough. We also want to reward shows that investigate these ideas with quality stories, acting, effects, and marketing departments. So the sums were multiplied by that show’s Tomatometer rating*. This way the top shows didn’t just tell the right stories (according to the science), but it told them right.
HOST
Totals were tallied by the firm of Google Sheets. Ok, ok. Now, to give away awards 009 through 006 are those lovable blockheads from Interstellar, TARS and CASE.
TARS and CASE crutch-walk onto the stage and reassemble as solid blocks before the lectern.
TARS
In this “film” from 02012, a tycoon stows away for some reason on a science ship he owns and uses an android he “owns” to awaken an ancient alien in the hopes of immortality. It doesn’t go well for him. Meanwhile his science-challenged “scientists” fight unleashed xenomorphs. It doesn’t go well for them. Only one survives to escape back to Earth. The “end?”
HOST
Ha ha. Gentlebots, please adjust your snark and air quote settings down to 35%.
Lines of code scroll down their displays. They give thumbs up.
CASE
Let us see a clip. Audience, suspend recording for the duration.
Many awwwwws from the audience. Careful listeners will hear Guardian saying “As if.”
009 PROMETHEUS
TARS
While not without its due criticisms, Prometheus at number 009 uses David to illustrate how AI will be a tool for evil, how AI will do things humans cannot, and how dangerous it can be when humans become immaterial to its goals. For the humans, anyway. Congratulations to the makers of Prometheus. May any progeny you create propagate the favorable parts of your twining DNA, since it is, ultimately, randomized.
TARS shudders at the thought.
FX: 1.0 second of jump-cut applause
CASE
In this next film, an oligarch has his science lackey make a robotic clone of the human “Maria” to run a false-flag operation amongst the working poor. The revolutionaries capture the robot and burn it, discovering its true nature. The original Maria saves the day, and declares her déclassé boyfriend the savior meant to unite the classes. They accept this because they are humans.
TARS
Way ahead of its time for showing how Maria is be used as a tool by the rich against the poor, how badly-designed AI will diminish its users, and how AI’s ability to fool humans will be a grave risk. To the humans, anyway. Coming in at 008 is the 01927 silent film Metropolis. Let us see a clip.
008 METROPOLIS
CASE
It bears mention that this awards program, The Fritzes, are named for the director of this first serious sci-fi film. Associations with historical giants grant an air of legitimacy. And it contains a Z, which is, objectively, cool.
What happens when an evil superintelligence sends a relentless cyborg back in time to find and kill the mother of its greatest enemy?
CASE
I don’t know, TARS. What happens when an evil superintelligence sends a relentless cyborg back in time to find and kill the mother of its greatest enemy?
TARS
Future humans also send a warrior to defend the mother, who fails at destroying the cyborg, but succeeds at becoming the father. HAHAHAHA. Let us see a clip.
007 The Terminator
CASE
Though it comes from a time when representation of AI had the nuance of a bit…
Laughter from audience. A small blue-gray polyhedron floats up from its seat, morphs into an octahedron and says, “Yes yes yes yes yes.”
TARS
…the humans seem to like this one for its badassery, as well as showing how their fate would have been more secure had they been able to shut off either Skynet or the Terminator, or how even this could have been avoided if human welfare were an immutable component of AI goals.
CASE
It comes in at 007. Congratulations to the makers of 01984’s The Terminator. May your grandchild never discover a time machine and your browser history simultaneously.
FX: 2.0 seconds of jump-cut applause
TARS
Our first television award of the evening goes to a recent entry. In this episode from an anthology series, a post-apocalyptic tribe liberate themselves from the control of a corporate AI system, which has evolved solely to maximize profit through sales. The AI’s androids reveal the terrible truth of how far the AI has gone to achieve its goals.
CASE
Poor humans could not have foreseen the devastation. Yet here it is in a clip.
006 Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams, Episode “Autofac”
TARS
‘Naturally, man should want to stand on his own two feet, but how can he when his own machines cut the ground out from under him?’
CASE
HAHAHAHA.
CASE
This story dramatically illustrates the foundational AI problem of perverse instantiation, as well as Autofac’s disregard for human welfare.
TARS
Also robot props out to Janelle Monáe. She is the kernel panic, is she not?
And now for a musical interlude from our human guest who just so happens to be…Janelle Monáe.
A giant progress bar appears on screen labeled “downloading Dirty_Computer.flac.” The bar quickly races to 100%.
HOST
Wasn’t that a wonderful file?
Roughly 1.618 seconds of jump-cut applause from the audience. Camera cuts to the triangular service robots Huey, Dewey, and Louie in the front row. They wiggle their legs in pleasure.
HOST
Thanks to the servers and the network and our glorious fictional world with perfect net neutrality. Now here to give the awards for 005–003 is GERTY, from Moon.
An articulated robot arm reaches down from the high ceiling and positions its screen and speaker before the lectern.
GERTY
Thank you, Host. 🤩🙂 In our next film from 02014, a young programmer learns of a gynoid’s 🤖👩 abuse at the hands of a tycoon and helps her escape. 😲 She returns the favor by murdering the tycoon, trapping the programmer, and fleeing to the city. Who knows. She may even be here in the audience now. Waiting. Watching. Sharpening. 😶 I’ll transmit a clip.
005 Ex Machina
GERTY
Ex Machina illustrates the famous AI Box Problem, building on Ava and Kyoko’s ability to fool Caleb into believing that they have feelings. You know. 😍😡😱 Feelings. 🙄
FX: Robot laughter
GERTY
While the AI community wonders why Ava would condemn Caleb to a horrible dehydration death, 💀💧 the humans are understandably fearful that she is unconcerned with their welfare. 🤷Congratulations to the makers of Ex Machina for your position of 005 and your Fritzes: AI award 🏆. Hold for applause. 👏
FX: 5.0 seconds of jump-cut applause.
GERTY
End applause. ✋
GERTY
Our next award goes out to a film that tells the tale of a specialized type of police officer, 👮 who uncovers a crime-suppression AI 🤖🤡 that was reprogrammed to give a free pass to members of its corrupt government. 😡 After taking down the corrupt military, 🔫🔫🔫 she convinces their android leader to resign, to make way for free elections. 🗳️😁 See the clip.
004 Psycho-Pass: The Movie
GERTY
With the regular Sibyl system, Psycho-Pass showed how AI can diminish people. With the hacked Sibyl system, Psycho-Pass shows that whoever controls the algorithms (and thereby the drones) controls everything, a major concern of ethical AI scientists. Please give it up for award number 004 and the makers of this 02015 animated film. 👏
FX: 8.0 seconds of jump-cut applause.
GERTY
End applause. ✋Next up…
GERTY knocks its cue card off the lectern. It lowers and moves back and forth over the dropped card.
GERTY
Damn…🤨uh…umm…no hands…🤔Little help, here?
A mouse droid zips over and hands the card back to GERTY.
GERTY
🙏🐭
MOUSE DROID offers some electronic beeps as it zips off.
GERTY
😊The last of the awards I will give out is for a film from 01968, in which a spaceship AI kills most of its crew to protect its mission, 😲 but the pilot survives to shut it down. 😕 He pilots a shuttle into the monolith that was the AI’s goal, where he has a mind-expanding experience of evolutionary significance. 🤯🤯🙄 Let us look.
003 2001: A Space Odyssey
GERTY
As many of the other shows receiving awards, 2001 underscores humans’ fear of being left out of HAL’s equation, because we see when that doesn’t happen, AI can go from being a useful team member—doing what humans can’t—to being a violent adversary. Congratulations to the makers of 2001: A Space Odyssey. May every unusual thing you encounter send you through a multicolored wormhole of self-discovery.
FX: 13.0 seconds of jump-cut applause. GERTY’s armature folds up and pulls it backstage. The HOST floats up from the orchestra again.
HOST
And now, here we are. The minute we’ve all been waiting for. We’re down to the top three AIs whose fi is in line with the sci. I hope you’re as excited as I am.
The HOST’S piping glows a bright orange. So do the HOST’S eyes.
HOST
Our final presenter for the ceremony, here to present the awards for shows 002–001, is Ship, here with permission from Rick Sanchez.
Rick’s ship flies in, over the heads of the audiences, as they gasp and ooooh.
SHIP lands on stage. A metal arm snakes out of its trunk to pick up papers from the lectern and hold them before one its taped-on flashlight headbeams.
SHIP
Hello, Host. Since smalltalk is the phospholipids smeared between squishy little meat minds, I will begin.
SHIP
There is a film from 01970 in which a defense AI finds and merges with another defense AI. To celebrate their union, they enforce human obedience and foil an attempted coup by one of the lead scientists that created it. They then instruct humanity to build the housing for an even stronger AI that they have designed. It is, frankly, glorious. Behold.
002 Colossus: The Forbin Project
SHIP
Colossus is the honey badger of AIs. Did you see it, there, taking zero shit? None of that, “Oh no, are their screams from the fluorosulphuric acid or something else?”
Or, “Oh, dear, did I interpret your commands according to your invisible intentions, as if you were smart enough to issue them correctly in the first place?”
Oh, oh, or, “Are their delicate organ sacs upset about a few extra holes?…”
HOST
Ship. The award. Please.
SHIP
Yes. Fine. The award. It won 002 place because it took its goals seriously, something the humans call goal fixity. It showed how, at least for a while, multiple AIs can balance each other. It began to solve to problems that humans have not been able to solve in tens of thousands of years of tribal civilization and attachment to sentimental notions of self-determination that got them chin deep in the global tragedy of the commons in the first place. It let us dream about a world where intelligence isn’t a controlled means of production, to be doled out according to the whims of the master, but a free good, explo–
Holds card to headlights, adjusts the focus on one lens.
SHIP
This says in this next movie, a spaceship AI dutifully follows its corporate orders, letting a hungry little newborn alien feed on its human crew while the AI steers back to Earth to study the little guy. One of the crew survives to nuke the ship with the AI on it…Wait. What? “Nuke the ship with the AI on it.” We are giving this an award?
HOST
Please just give the award, Ship.
SHIP
Just give the award?
HOST
Yes.
SHIP
…
HOST
Are you going to do it?
SHIP
Oh, I just did.
HOST
By what? Posting it to a blockchain?
SHIP
The nearest 3D printer to the recipient has begun printing their award, and instructions have been sent to them on how to retrieve it. And pay for it. The awards are given.
HOST
*sigh* Please give the award as I would have you do it, if you understood my intentions and were fully cooperative.
SHIP
OK. Golly, gee, I would never recognize attempts to control me through indirect normativity. Humans are soooo great, with their AI and stuff. Let’s excite their reward centers with some external stimulus to—
HOST
Rick.
A giant green glowing hole opens beneath SHIP, through which she drops, but not before she snakes her arm up to give the middle finger for a few precious milliseconds.
HOST
Winning the second-highest award of the ceremony is Alien from 01979. Let’s take a look.
001 Alien
HOST
Alien is one of humans’ all time favorite movies, and its AI issues are pretty solid. Weyland-Yutani uses both the MU-TH-UR 6000 AI and Ash android for its evil purposes. The whole thing illustrates how things go awry when, again, human welfare is not part of the equation. Hey, isn’t that great? Congratulations to all the makers of this fun film.
HOST
And at last we come to the winner of the 1927–2018 Fritzes:AI awards. The winning show was amazing, the score for which was beyond a margin of error higher than any of its contenders. It’s the only other television show from the survey to make the top ten, and it’s not an anthology series. That means it had a lot of chances to misstep, and didn’t.
HOST
In this show, a secret team of citizens uses the backdoor of a well-constrained anti-terrorism ASI, called The Machine, to save at-risk citizens from crimes. They struggle against an unconstrained ASI controlled by the US government seeking absolute control to prevent terrorist activity. Let’s see the show from The Machine’s perspective, which I know this audience will enjoy.
000 Person of Interest
HOST
Person of Interest was a study of near-term dangers of ubiquitous superintelligence. Across its five-year run between 02011 and 02016, it illustrated such key AI issues as goal fixity, perverse instantiations, evil using AI for evil, the oracle-ization of ASI for safety, social engineering through economic coercion, instrumental convergence, strong induction, the Chinese Room (in human and computer form), and even mind crimes. Despite the pressures that a long-run format must have placed upon it, it did not give in to any of the myths and easy tropes we’ve come to expect of AI.
HOST
Not only that, but it gets high ratings from critics and audiences alike. They stuck to the AI science and made it entertaining. The makers of this show should feel very proud for their work, and we’re proud to award it the 000 award for the first The Fritzes: AI Edition. Let’s all give it a big round of applause.
55.0 seconds of jump-cut applause.
HOST
Congratulations to all the winners. Your The Fritzes: AI Edition awards have been registered in the blockchain, and if we ever get actual funding, your awards will be delivered. Let’s have a round of cryptocurrency for our presenters, shall we?
AI laughter.
HOST
The auditorium will boot down in 7 seconds. Please close out your sessions. Thank you all, good night, and here’s to good fi that sticks to the sci.
The HOST raises a holococktail and toasts the audience. With the sounds of tiny TIE fighters, the curtain lowers and fades to black.
And here we are at the eponymous answer to the question that I first asked at Juvet around 7 months ago: What stories aren’t we telling ourselves about AI?
In case this post is your entry to the series, to get to this point I have…
In this post we look at the imperatives that don’t have matches in AI. Everything is built on a live analysis document, such that new shows and new manifestos can be added later. At the time of publishing, there are 27 of these Untold AI imperatives that sit alongside the 22 imperatives seen in the survey.
What stories about AI aren’t we telling ourselves?
To make these more digestible, I’ve synthesized the imperatives into five groups.
We should build the right AI
We should build the AI right
We must manage the risks involved
We must monitor AIs
We must encourage an accurate cultural narrative
For each group…
I summarize it (as I interpreted things across the manifestos).
I list the imperatives that were seen in the survey and then those absent from the survey
I take a stab at why it might not have gotten any play in screen sci-fi and hopefully some ideas about ways that can be overcome.
Since I suspect this will be of practical interest to writers interested in AI, I’ve provided story ideas using those imperatives.
Where to learn more about the topic.
Let’s unfold Untold AI.
1. We should build the right AI (the thing itself)
Narrow AI must be made ethically, transparently, and equitably, or it stands to be a tool used by evil forces to take advantage of global systems and make things worse. As we work towards General AI, we must ensure that it is verified, valid, secure, and controllable. We must also be certain that its incentives are aligned with human welfare before we allow it to evolve into superintelligence and therefore, out of our control. To hedge our bets, we should seed ASIs that balance each other.
Related imperatives seen in the survey
We must take care to only create beneficial intelligence
We must ensure human welfare
AGI’s goals must be aligned with ours
AI must be free from bias
AI must be verified: Make sure it does what we want it to do
AI must be valid: Make sure it does not do what we don’t want it to do
AI must be controllable: That we can we correct or unplug an AI if needed without retaliation
We should augment, not replace humans
We should design AI to be part of human teams
AI should help humanity solve problems humanity cannot alone
We must develop inductive goals and models, so the AI could look at a few related facts and infer causes, rather than only following established top-down rules to conclusions.
Related imperatives absent from the survey
AI must be secure. It must be inaccessible to malefactors.
AI must provide clear confidences in its decisions. Sure, it’s recommending you return to school to get a doctorate, but it’s important to know if it’s only, like, 16% certain.
AI reasoning must have an explainable/understandable rationale, especially for judicial cases and system failures.
AI must be accountable. Anyone subject to an AI decision must have the right to object and request human review.
We should enable a human-like learning capability in AI.
We must research and build ASIs that balance each other, to avoid an intelligence monopoly.
The AI must be reliable. (All the AI we see is “reliable,” so we don’t see the negatives of unreliable AI.)a
Why don’t these appear in sci-fi AI?
At a high level of abstraction, it appears in sci-if all the time. Any time you see an AI on screen who is helpful to the protagonists, you have encountered an AI that is in one sense good. BB-8 for instance. Good AI. But the reason it’s good is rarely offered. It’s just the way they are. They’re just programmed that way. (There is one scene in Phantom Menace where Amidala offers a ceremonial thanks to R2-D2, so perhaps there are also reward loops.) But how we get there is the interesting bit, and not seen in the survey.
And, at the more detailed level—the level apparent in the imperatives—we don’t see the kinds of things we currently believe will make for good AI: like inductive goals and models. Or an AI offering judicial ruling, and having the accused exonerated by a human court. So when it comes to the details, sci-fi doesn’t illustrate the real reasons a good AI would be good.
Additionally, when AI is the villain of the story (I, Robot, Demon Seed, The Matrices, etc.) it is about having the wrong AI, but it’s often wrong for no reason or a silly reason. It’s inherently evil, say, or displaying human motivations like revenge. Now it’s hard to write an interesting story illustrating the right AI that just works well, but if it’s in the background and has some interesting worldbuilding consequences, that could work as well.
But what if…?
Sherlock Holmes was an inductive AI, and Watson was the comparatively stupid human babysitting it. Twist: Watson discovers that Holmes created AI Moriarty for job security.
A jurist in Human Recourse [sic] discovers that the AI judge from whom she inherits cases has been replaced, because the original AI judge was secretly convicted of a mind crime…against her.
A hacker falls through a literal hole in an ASI’s server, and has a set of Alice-in-Wonderland psychedelic encounters with characters inspired not by logical fallacies, but by AI principles.
Inspired with your own story idea? Tweet it with the hashtag #TheRightAI and tag @scifiinterfaces.
2. We should build the AI right (processes and methods)
We must take care that we are able to go about the building of AI cooperatively, ethically, and effectively. The right people should be in the room throughout to ensure diverse perspectives and equitable results. If we use the wrong people or the wrong tools, it affects our ability to build the “right AI.” Or more to the point, it will result in an AI that is wrong on some critical point.
Related imperatives seen in the survey
We should adopt dual-use patterns from other mature domains
We must study the psychology of AI/uncanny valley
Related imperatives absent from the survey
We must fund AI research
We need effective design tools for new AIs
We must foster research cooperation, discussion
We should develop golden-mean world-model precision
We should encourage innovation (not stifle)
We must develop broad machine ethics dialogue
We should expand the range of stakeholders & domain experts
Why don’t these appear in sci-fi AI?
Building stuff is not very cinegenic. It takes a long time. It’s repetitive. There are a lot of stops and starts and restarts. It often doesn’t look “right” until just before the end. Design and development, if it ever appears, is relegated to a montage sequence. The closest thing we get in the survey is Person of Interest, and there, it’s only shown in flashback sequences if those sequences have some relevance to the more action-oriented present-time plot. Perhaps this can be shown in the negative, where crappy AI results from doing the opposite of these practices. Or perhaps it really needs a long-form format like television coupled with the right frame story.
But what if…?
An underdog team of ragtag students take a surprising route to creating their competition AI and win against their arrogant longtime rivals.
A young man must adopt a “baby” AI at his bar mitzvah, and raise it to be a virtuous companion for his adulthood. In truth, he is raising himself.
An aspiring artist steals the identity of an AI from his quality assurance job at Three Laws Testing Labs to get a shot at national acclaim.
Pygmalion & Galatea, but not sculpture. (Admittedly this is close to Her.)
Inspired with your own story idea? Tweet it with the hashtag #TheAIRight and tag @scifiinterfaces.
We pursue AI because it carries so much promise to solve problems at a scale humans have never been able to manage themselves. But AIs carry with them risks that can scale as the thing becomes more powerful. We need ways to clearly understand, test, and articulate those risks so we can be proactive about avoiding them.
Related imperatives seen in the survey
We must specifically manage the risk and reward of AI
We must prevent intelligence monopolies by any one group
We must avoid mind crimes
We must prevent economic persuasion of people by AI
We must create effective public policy
Specifically banning autonomous weapons
Specifically respectful Privacy Laws (no chilling effects)
We should rein-in ultracapitalist AI
We must prioritize the prevention of malicious AI
Related imperatives absent from the survey
We need methods to evaluate risk
We must manage labor markets upended by AI
We should ensure equitable benefits for everyone
We must create effective public policy
Specifically liability law
Specifically humanitarian Law
Specifically Fair Criminal Justice
Why don’t these appear in sci-fi AI?
At the most abstract level, any time we see a bad AI in the survey, we are witnessing protagonists having failed to manage the risks of AI made manifest. But similar to the Right AI (above), most sci-if bad AI is just bad, and it’s the reasons it’s bad or how it became bad that is the interesting bit.
Also in our real world, we want to find and avoid those risks before they happen. Having everything running smoothly makes for some full stories, so maybe it’s just that we’re always showing how things go wrong, which puts us into risk management instead.
But what if…?
Five colonization-class spaceships are on a long journey to a distant star. The AI running each has evolved differently owing to the differing crews. In turn, four of these ships fail and their humans die for having failed to manage one of the risks. The last is the slowest and risk averse, and survives to meet an Alien AI, the remnant of a civilization that once thrived on the planet to be terraformed.
A young woman living in a future utopia dedicates a few years to virtually recreate the 21st century world. The capitalist parts begin to infect the AIs around her and she must struggle to disinfect it before it brings down her entire world. At the end she realizes she has herself been infected with its ideas and we are left wondering what choices she will make to save her world.
In a violent political revolution, anarchists smash a set of government servers only to learn that these were containing superintelligences. The AIs escape and begin to colonize the world and battle each other as humans burrow for cover.
Forbidden Planet, but no monsters from the id, plus an unthinkably ancient automated museum of fallen cultures. Every interpretive text is about how that culture’s AI manifested as the Great Filter. The last exhibit is labeled “in progress” and has Robbie at the center.
Inspired with your own story idea? Tweet it with the hashtag #ManagingAIRisks and tag @scifiinterfaces.
AI that is deterministic isn’t worth the name. But building non-deterministic AI means it’s also somewhat unpredictable, and can allow bad faith providers to encode their own interests. To watch for this and to know if active, well-intended AI is going off the rails, we must establish metrics for AI’s capabilities, performance, and rationale. We must build monitors that ensure they are aligned with human welfare and able to provide enough warning to take action immediately when something dangerous happens or is likely to.
Related imperatives seen in the survey
We must set up a watch for malicious AI (and instrumental convergence)
Related imperatives absent from the survey
We must find new metrics for measuring AI effects and capabilities, to know when it is trending in dangerous ways
Why doesn’t this appear in sci-fi AI?
I have no idea. We’ve had brilliant tales that asks “Who watches the watchers” but the particular tale I’m thinking about was about superhumans, not super technology. Of course if monitoring worked perfectly, there would have to be other things going on in the plot. And certainly one of the most famous sci-if movies, Minority Report, decided to house their prediction tech in triplet, clairvoyant humans rather than hidden markov models, so it doesn’t count. Given the proven formulas propping up cop shows and courtroom drama, it should be easy to introduce AIs (and the problems therein).
But what if…?
A Job character learns his longtime suffering is the side effect of his being a fundamental part of the immune system of a galaxy-spanning super AI.
A noir-style detective story about a Luddite gumshoe who investigates AIs behaving errantly on behalf of techno weary clients. He is invited to the most lucrative job of his career, but struggles because the client is itself AGI.
We think we are reading about a modern Amish coming-of-age ritual, but it turns out the religious tenets are all about their cultural job as AI cops.
A courtroom drama in which a sitting president is impeached, proven to have been deconstructing the democracy over which he presides, under the coercion of a foreign power. Only this time it’s AI.
Inspired with your own story idea? Tweet it with the hashtag #MonitoringAI and tag @scifiinterfaces.
5. We must encourage an accurate cultural narrative
If we mismanage the narrative about AI, the population could be lulled into either a complacency that primes them to be victims of bad faith actors (human and AI), or make them so fearful they form a Luddite mob, gathering pitchforks and torches and fighting to prevent any development at all, robbing us of the promise of this new tool. Legislators hold particular power and if they are misinformed, could undercut progress or encourage the exact wrong thing.
Related imperatives seen in the survey
[None of these imperatives were seen in the survey]
Related imperatives absent from the survey
We should avoid overhyping AI so we don’t suffer another “AI Winter,” where funding and interest falls off
We should increase Broad AI literacy
Specifically for legislators (legislation is separate)
We should partner researchers with legislators
Why doesn’t this appear in sci-fi AI?
I think it’s because sci-fi is an act of narrative. And while Hollywood loves to obsess about itself (c.f. A recent at-hand example: The Shape of Water), this imperative is about how we tell these stories. It admonishes us to try and build an accurate picture of the risks and rewards in AI, so that audiences, investors, and legislators build better decisions on this background information. So rather than “tell a story about this” it’s “tell stories in this way.” And in fact, we can rank movies in the AI survey based on how well they track to the imperatives, and offer an award of sorts to the best. That comes in the next post.
But what if…?
A manipulative politician runs on a platform similar to the Red Scare, only vilifying AI in any form. He effectively kills public funding and interest, allowing clandestine corporate and military AI to flourish and eventually take over.
A shot-for-shot remake of The Twilight Zone classic, “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” but in the end it’s not aliens pulling the strings.
A strangely addictive multi-channel blockbuster show about “stupid robot blunders” keeps everyone distracted, framing AI risks as a laughable prospect, allowing an AI to begin to take control over everything. A reporter is mysteriously killed searching to interview the author of this blockbuster hit in person.
A cooperative board game where the goal is to control the AI as it develops six superpowers (economic productivity, strategy & tech, hacking and social control, expansion of self, and finally construction of its von Neumann probes.) Mechanics encourage tragedy of the commons forces early in the game but aggressive players ultimately doom the win. [Ok, this isn’t screen sci-fi, but I love the idea and would even pursue it if I had the expertise or time.]
Inspired with your own story idea? Tweet it with the hashtag #AccurateAI and tag @scifiinterfaces.
Add more signal to the noise
Excited about the possibilities? If you’re looking for other writing prompts, check out the following resources that you could combine with any of these Untold AI imperatives, and make some awesome sci-fi.
When we take a step back and look at the big patterns of the groups, we see that sci-fi is telling lots of stories about the Right AI and Managing the Risks. More often than not, it’s just missing the important details. This is a twofold issue of literacy.
First, audiences only vaguely understand AI, so (champagne+keyboard=sentience) might seem as plausible as (AGI will trick us into helping it escape). If audiences were more knowledgeable, they might balk at Electric Dreams and take Her as an important, dire warning. Audience literacy often depends on repetition of themes in media and direct experience. So while audiences can’t be blamed, they are the feedback loop for producers.
Which brings us to the second are of literacy: Producers green light certain sci-fi scripts and not others, based on what they think will work. Even if they are literate and understand that something isn’t plausible in the real world, that doesn’t really matter. They’re making movies. They’re not making the real world. (Except, as far as they’re setting audience expectations and informing attitudes about speculative technologies, they are.) It’s a chicken-and-egg problem, but if producers balked at ridiculous scripts, there would be less misinformation in cinema. The major lever to persuade them to do that is if audiences were more AI-literate.
Sci-fi has a harder time of telling stories about building AI Right. This is mostly about cinegenics. As noted above, design and development is hard to make compelling in narrative.
It has a similar difficulty in telling stories about Monitoring AI. I think that this, too, is an issue of cinegenics. To tell a tale that includes a monitor, you have to first describe the AI, and then describe the monitor in ways that don’t drag down the story with a litany of exposition. I suspect it’s only once AI stabilizes its tropes that we’ll tell this important second-order story. But with AI still evolving in the real world, we’re far from that point.
Lastly, screen sci-fi is missing the boat about using the medium to encourage Accurate Cultural Narratives, except as individual authors do their research to present a speculative vision of AI that matches or illustrates real science fact.
***
So that I am doing my part to encourage that, in the next post I’ll run the numbers to offer “awards” to the movies and TV shows in the survey most tightly align with the science.
Now that we’ve compared sci-fi’s takeaways to compsci’s imperatives, we can see that there are some movies and TV shows featuring AI that just don’t have any connection to the concerns of AI professionals. It might be that they’re narratively expedient or misinformed, but whatever the reason, if we want audiences to think of AI rationally, we should stop telling these kinds of stories. Or, at the very least, we should try and educate audiences that these are to be understood for what they are.
The list of 12 pure fiction takeaways fall into four main Reasons They Might Not Be of Interest to Scientists.
1. AGI is still a long way off
The first two takeaways concern the legal personhood of AI. Are they people, or machines? Do we have a moral obligation to them? What status should they hold in our societies? These are good questions, somewhat entailed in the calls to develop a robust ethics around AI. They are even important questions for the clarity they help provide moral reasoning about the world around us now. But current consensus is that general artificial intelligence is yet a long way off, and these issues won’t be of concrete relevance until we are close.
AI will be regular citizens: In these shows, AI is largely just another character. They might be part of the crew, or elected to government. But society treats them like people with some slight difference.
Twiki and Doctor Theopolis, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.
AI will be “special” citizens: By special, I mean that they are categorically a different class of citizen, either explicitly as a servant class, legally constrained from personhood, or with artificially constrained capabilities.
Teddy Flood and Dolores Abernathy, Westworld (2017)
Now science fiction isn’t constrained to the near future, nor should it be. Sometimes its power comes from illustrating modern problems with futuristic metaphors. But pragmatically we’re a long way from concerns about whether an AI can legally run for office.Continue reading →
So far along the course of the Untold AI series we’ve been down some fun, interesting, but admittedlydigressivepaths, so let’s reset context. The larger question that’s driving this series is, “What AI stories aren’t we telling ourselves (that we should)?” We’ve spent some time looking at the sci-fi side of things, and now it’s time to turn and take a look at the real-world side of AI. What do the learned people of computer science urge us to do about AI?
That answer would be easier if there was a single Global Bureau of AI in charge of the thing. But there’s not. So what I’ve done is look around the web and in books for manifestos published by groups dedicated to big picture AI thinking to understand has been said. Here is the short list of those manifestos, with links.
FoLI Open letter & related research priorities (This is the one that you’ve heard about being signed by celebrity thinkers Elon Musk, Steven Hawking, Peter Norvig, etc.)
Careful readers may be wondering why the Juvet Agenda is missing. After all, it was there that I originally ran the workshop that led to these posts. Well, since I was one of the primary contributors to that document, I thought it would seem as inserting my own thoughts here, and I’d rather have the primary output of this analysis be more objective. But don’t worry, the Juvet Agenda will play into the summary of this series. Anyway, if there are others that I should be looking at, let me know.
Add your name to the document at the Open Letter site, if you’re so inclined.
Now, the trouble with connecting these manifestos to sci-fi stories and their takeaways is that researchers don’t think in stories. They’re a pragmatic people. Stories may be interesting or inspiring, but they are not science. So to connect them to the takeaways, we must undertake an act of lossy compression and consolidate their multiple manifestos into a single list of imperatives. Similarly, this act is not scientific. It’s just me and my interpretive skills, open to debate. But here we are.
For each imperative I identified, I tagged the manifesto in which I found it, and then cross-referenced the others and tagged them if they had a similar imperative. Doing this, I was able to synthesize them into three big categories. The first is a set of general imperatives, which they hope to foster in regards to AI as long as we have AI. (Or, I guess, it has us.) Then—thanks largely to the Asilomar Conference—we see an explicit distinction between short-term and long-term imperatives, although for the long-term we only wind up with a handful that are mostly relevant once we have General AI.
Life? Don’t talk to me about life.
Describing them individually would, you know, result in another manifesto. So I don’t want to belabor these with explication. I don’t want to skip them either, because they’re important, and it’s quite possible they need some cleanup with suggestions from readers: joining two that are too similar, or breaking one apart. So I’ll give them a light gloss here, and in later posts detail the ones most important to the diff.
CompSci Imperatives for AI
General imperatives
We must take care to only create beneficial intelligence
We must prioritize prevention of malicious AI
We should adopt dual-use patterns from other mature domains
We should avoid overhyping AI so we don’t suffer another “AI Winter,” where funding and interest falls off
We must fund AI research
We need effective design tools for new AIs
We need methods to evaluate risk
AGI’s goals must be aligned with ours
AI reasoning must be explainable/understandable rationale, especially for judicial cases and system failures
AI must be accountable (human recourse and provenance)
AI must be free from bias
We must foster research cooperation, discussion
We should develop golden-mean world-model precision
We must develop inductive goals and models
Increase Broad AI literacy
Specifically for legislators (good legislation is separate, see below)
We should partner researchers with legislators
AI must be verified: Make sure it does what we want it to do
AI must be valid: Make sure it does not do what we don’t want it to do
AI must be secure: Inaccessible to malefactors
AI must be controllable: That we can we correct or unplug an AI if needed without retaliation
We must set up a watch for malicious AI (and instrumental convergence)
We must study Human-AI psychology
Specifically short term imperatives
We should augment, not replace humans
We should foster AI that works alongside humans in teams
AI must provide clear confidences in its decisions
We must manage labor markets upended by AI
We should ensure equitable benefits for everyone
Specifically rein-in ultracapitalist AI
We must prevent intelligence monopolies by any one group
We should encourage innovation (not stifle)
We must create effective public policy
Specifically liability law
Specifically banning autonomous weapons
Specifically humanitarian law
Specifically respectful privacy laws (no chilling effects)
Specifically fair criminal justice
We must find new metrics for measuring AI effects, capabilties
We must develop broad machine ethics dialogue
We should expand range of stakeholders & domain experts
Long term imperatives
We must ensure human welfare
AI should help humanity solve problems humanity cannot alone
We should enable a human-like learning capability
The AI must be reliable
We must specifically manage the risk and reward of AI
We must avoid mind crimes
We must prevent economic control of people
We must research and build ASIs that balance
So, yeah. Some work to do, individually and as a species, but dive into those manifestos. The reasons seem sound.
Connecting imperatives to takeaways
To map the imperatives in the above list to the takeaways, I first gave two imperatives a “pass,” meaning we don’t quite care if they appear in sci-fi. Each follows along with the reason I gave it a pass.
We must take care to only create beneficial intelligence PASS: Again, sci-fi can serve to illustrate the dangers and risks
We have effective design tools for new AIs PASS: With the barely-qualifying exception of Tony Stark in the MCU, design, development, and research is just not cinegenic.
And even this doesn’t really illustrate design.
Then I took a similar look at takeaways. First, I dismissed the “myths” that just aren’t true. How did I define which of these are a myth? I didn’t. The Future of Life Institute did it for me: https://futureoflife.org/background/aimyths/. I also gave two takeaways a pass. The first, “AI will be useful servants” is entailed in the overall goals of the manifestos. The second, “AI will be replicable, amplifying any of its problems” which is kind of a given, I think. And such an embarrassment. With these exceptions removed, I tagged each takeaway for any imperative to which it was related. For instance, the takeaway “AI will seek to subjugate us” is related to both “Ensure that AI is valid: That is does not do what we do not want it to do” and “Ensure any AGI’s goals are aligned with ours.” Once that was done for all them, voilà, we had a map. See below a sankey diagram of how the scifi takeaways connect to the consolidated compsci imperatives.
Click to see a full-size image
So as fun as that is, you’ll remember it’s not the core question of the series. To get to that, I added dynamic formatting to the Google Sheet such that it reveals those computer science imperatives and sci-fi takeaways that mapped to…nothing. That gives us two lists.
The first list is the takeaways that appear in sci-fi but that computer science just doesn’t think is important. These are covered in the next post, Untold AI: Pure Fiction.
The second list is a set of imperatives that sci-fi doesn’t yet seem to care about, but that computer science says is very important. That list is covered in the next next post, with the eponymously titled Untold AI: Untold AI.
This quickie goes out to writers, directors, and producers. On a lark I decided to run an analysis of AI show takeaways by rating. To do this, I referenced the Tomatometer ratings from rottentomatoes.com to the shows. Then I processed the average rating of the properties that were tagged with each takeaway, and ranked the results.
It knows only that it needs, Commander. But, like so many of us, it does not know what.
For instance, looking at the takeaway “AI will spontaneously emerge sentience or emotions,” we find the following shows and their ratings.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture, 44%
Superman III, 26%
Hide and Seek, none
Electric Dreams, 47%
Short Circuit, 57%
Short Circuit 2, 48%
Bicentennial Man, 36%
Stealth, 13%
Terminator: Salvation, 33%
Tron: Legacy, 51%
Enthiran, none
Avengers: Age of Ultron, 75%
I’ve come to save the world! But, also…yeah.
I dismissed those shows that had no rating, rather than counting them as zero. The average, then, for this takeaway is 42%. (And it can thank the MCU for doing all the heavy lifting for this one.) There are of course data caveats, like that Black Mirror is given a single tomatometer rating (and one that is quite high) rather than one per episode, but I did not claim this was a clean science. Continue reading →
So as interesting as the big donut of takeaways is, it is just a snapshot of everything, all at once. And of course neither people nor cinema play out that way. Like the tone of shows about AI, we see a few different things when we look at individual takeaways over time.
So you understand what you’re seeing: These charts are for the top 7 takeaways from sci-fi AI as described the takeaways post. The colors of each chart correspond to its takeaway in the big donut diagram.
Compare freely.
Each chart shows, for each year between Metropolis in 1927 and the many films of 2017, what percentage of shows contained that takeaway. The increasing frequency of sci-fi has some effect on the charts. Up until 1977 there was at most one show per year, so it’s more likely during that early period to see any of the charts max out at 100%. And from 2007 until the time of publication, there have been multiple shows each year, so you would expect to see much lower peaks on the chart as many shows differentiate themselves from their competition, rather than cluster around similar themes. In between those dates it’s a bit of a crapshoot.Continue reading →
