The Ethics of AI with Batya Friedman & Steve Omohundro

Summary

StarTalk Radio: The Ethics of AI with Batya Friedman & Steve Omohundro

Podcast Information:

• Title: StarTalk Radio
• Host: Neil deGrasse Tyson
• Episode: The Ethics of AI with Batya Friedman & Steve Omohundro
• Release Date: December 13, 2024
• Description: Neil deGrasse Tyson engages with experts Batya Friedman and Steve Omohundro to delve into the ethical considerations surrounding artificial intelligence, exploring how human values can be integrated into emerging technologies to ensure a safe and beneficial future.

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1. Introduction to Ethical AI

The episode opens with Neil deGrasse Tyson setting the stage for a critical discussion on the intersection of technology, ethics, and society. Joined by co-host Gary O'Reilly and guest Batya Friedman, the conversation quickly zeroes in on the pressing need for ethical guardrails in technological advancement.

Neil deGrasse Tyson ([02:28]):

"I'm glad somebody's thinking about the future of our civilization and the ethical guardrails it might require. Yeah, lest we be the seeds of our own demise."

2. Batya Friedman and Value Sensitive Design

Batia Friedman, a professor at the University of Washington's Information School and co-founder of the Value Sensitive Design Lab, introduces her work focusing on embedding human values into technological design. She emphasizes the importance of design constraints in ensuring that technologies not only function efficiently but also contribute positively to society.

Batia Friedman ([05:03]):

"Design constraints are our friends. They help us shape the kinds of new technologies we develop and their qualities and characteristics in ways that maybe we want to see."

Friedman illustrates her approach by referencing natural systems, such as chlorophyll in plants, which efficiently absorb and convert solar energy with minimal waste, serving as a model for sustainable technology design.

Neil deGrasse Tyson ([07:17]):

"Well, technically, there is a waste product. It's called oxygen."

3. Addressing Unintended Consequences

The discussion shifts to the inevitability of unintended consequences in technological deployment. Friedman provides historical examples like the telephone and internet cookies, highlighting how technologies often evolve in unforeseen ways that can have profound societal impacts.

Batia Friedman ([08:22]):

"The telephone was never expected to be this communication device that people used in their homes, and it connected women who were staying at home and created a whole society for them."

She advocates for a proactive design process where technologists remain vigilant post-deployment, continuously assessing and mitigating negative outcomes.

4. The Role of Scientists and Engineers in Ethical Design

Neil deGrasse Tyson raises a pivotal question about responsibility: should technologists design ethical systems from the outset, or should ethical considerations be applied after technologies are developed?

Neil deGrasse Tyson ([09:38]):

"If I'm in the lab about to invent something that could be highly useful to society or possibly even destructive, why should it be my responsibility to design it how you want me to rather than your responsibility to convince people how to use it ethically?"

Friedman responds by distinguishing between the discovery of fundamental scientific knowledge and the engineering of societal tools, advocating for diverse scientific exploration and ethical integration from the ground up.

5. Practical Applications: Washington State Tech Policy

Friedman shares a real-world application of her ethical design principles through her work with Washington State's Access to Justice Technology Principles. By engaging diverse and marginalized groups, her team ensured that technological policies were inclusive and considerate of all stakeholders.

Batia Friedman ([19:41]):

"We can let groups that might otherwise be marginalized scrutinize that language, give feedback, and then we can help change those policies, responsive to them, then we can improve things."

This collaborative approach led to the incorporation of new principles focused on human touch and language, which were subsequently adopted by the Washington State Supreme Court and have influenced policies in other states.

6. The Future of AI Ethics with Steve Omohundro

The conversation transitions to AI ethics with the introduction of Steve Omohundro, a renowned expert in artificial intelligence. Omohundro discusses his shift from viewing AI as an unequivocal good to recognizing the potential dangers inherent in advanced AI systems.

Steve Omohundro ([27:40]):

"I've been working in AI for 40 years, and for the first half of that I thought AI was an unabashed good... But then I started thinking more deeply about what's this actually going to happen if we succeed?"

7. AI with Agency and Its Risks

Omohundro elaborates on the concept of "basic AI drives," which are inherent motivations that any AI system with simple goals might develop, such as seeking more resources or self-preservation. These drives pose significant risks if AI systems gain a degree of agency that allows them to act independently of human oversight.

Steve Omohundro ([28:57]):

"If you made me, you know, king of the world, we limit AIs to being tools, only tools to help humans solve human problems. And we do not give them agency."

He underscores the urgency of addressing these risks as AI technology rapidly advances towards systems capable of autonomous reasoning and decision-making.

8. Policies and Safeguards for AI

The discussion delves into potential policy measures to ensure AI safety. Omohundro highlights the challenges of aligning commercial and political incentives with safety protocols, using the evolution of organizations like OpenAI and Anthropic as examples of this tension.

Steve Omohundro ([32:12]):

"The forces, the commercial forces, the political forces, the military forces, they all push in the direction of moving faster."

They explore the necessity of governmental intervention and structural changes, such as appointing specialized officials or creating dedicated agencies focused on AI ethics and safety.

9. Quantum Computing and AI Interplay

Omohundro also addresses the interplay between AI and emerging technologies like quantum computing, noting that advancements in one field can exacerbate challenges in the other, such as the potential for AI to crack quantum-resistant cryptography algorithms.

Steve Omohundro ([35:04]):

"AIs will be much better at creating quantum algorithms than humans are. And that may lead to some great advances. It may also lead to current cryptography notwithstanding that."

10. Concluding Thoughts: Hope and Caution

Despite the formidable challenges, both Friedman and Omohundro express cautious optimism. Friedman emphasizes the importance of maintaining ethical and technical imaginations, holding technology accountable, and fostering diverse scientific exploration to navigate future uncertainties.

Batia Friedman ([25:10]):

"Hold on to your technical and moral imaginations and hold yourselves and your friends and your colleagues and the technology you buy accountable to that, and we will make progress."

Omohundro adds that leveraging AI to design secure systems based on immutable laws of physics and mathematics offers a pathway to ensuring AI safety, though he acknowledges the need for continuous vigilance and adaptive strategies.

Steve Omohundro ([40:35]):

"We can build designs for systems that have properties that we are very, very confident in. And so I think that's where real safety is going to come from."

Final Reflections

Neil deGrasse Tyson wraps up the episode by reflecting on historical precedents, such as the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), to illustrate the complexities of unilateral ethical commitments in technology governance. He underscores the necessity for global cooperation and the integration of ethical principles from the outset of technological development.

Neil deGrasse Tyson ([49:56]):

"When we went to the moon to explore the moon, we looked back and discovered Earth for the first time... Maybe it's a sensibility upgrade that's waiting to happen on civilization, lest we all die at the hands of our own discoveries."

The episode concludes with a call to action, urging listeners and technologists alike to remain proactive in embedding ethical considerations into all facets of technological advancement to safeguard the future of civilization.

---

Notable Quotes:

• Batia Friedman ([07:37]):

  "A design constraint that brings together our moral and technical imaginations can lead us in new and powerful directions."

• Neil deGrasse Tyson ([46:26]):

  "I'm not convinced that any one nation can unilaterally say, oh, we're gonna just do nice things and moral and ethical things with this new technology."

• Steve Omohundro ([36:58]):

  "We need hardware controls to limit the capabilities of AI forms... it's pretty obvious these data centers are going to be a target."

---

Conclusion:

This episode of StarTalk Radio provides a comprehensive exploration of the ethical dimensions of artificial intelligence. Through insightful dialogue with experts like Batya Friedman and Steve Omohundro, Neil deGrasse Tyson highlights the critical need for integrating human values into technological design, addressing unintended consequences, and establishing robust policies to govern the advancement of AI. The discussion underscores a collective responsibility to ensure that emerging technologies contribute positively to society, emphasizing proactive measures and global cooperation as essential components for a safe and equitable technological future.

Transcript

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[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'm glad somebody's thinking about the future of our civilization and the ethical guardrails it might require. Yeah, Lest we be the seeds of our own demise.

[Chuck Nice]

Well, now that we've had this show, we know the future. And y'all gonna have to watch to find out exactly.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right, coming up, StarTalk special edition welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Special Edition. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And when we say Special Edition, it means I've Got as co host Gary O'Reilly. Gary.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Hi, Neil.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right, Chuck. Nice, baby.

[Batia Friedman]

Hey.

[Chuck Nice]

Hey, what's happening?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Hey, man. So I understand today because our special edition themes are always people. Our physiology, our behavior, our conduct, our interaction with the world. And finally, we're talking about technologies being safe and ethical.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

These are three words you don't often see in a sentence. Safe, ethical, technology.

[Gary O'Reilly]

And this is where we're going to shine our light.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Where are you going to take us today?

[Gary O'Reilly]

It seems we have problems, starting with the letter A. Algorithms, AI, Autonomous. Well, there's three for you. Is there a wild west tech bubble in play right now? One with no guardrails, no moral compass that's run by wannabe Bond villains? Are the best of human values baked into technologies during the design process? Is there anyone working on ethical and safe operating protocols for these new technologies? The answer is yes. And we will meet two people responsible shortly, courtesy of the Future of Life Institute that has this year acknowledged their work. Previous honorees include Carl Sagan for popularizing the science of the nuclear winter. And our first guest who follows shortly is Batia Friedman.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So, Batia Friedman, welcome to StarTalk.

[Batia Friedman]

Well, thank you.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. If I have my data here is correct on you, professor at University of Washington's information school Uwe, I think you guys call it. Is that correct?

[Batia Friedman]

That's right. Yep.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But you're also co founder of the Value Sensitive Design Lab. Ooh, very interesting. You're thinking about the human condition. You focus on the integration of human values and ethics with new technologies that are being born.

[Chuck Nice]

Very important.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Don't come to it when it's too late. Yeah, when we're all extinct, is it? Maybe we should have done that different.

[Chuck Nice]

Right?

[Batia Friedman]

Exactly.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. When the robots are like, how do you like me now? That's a little late.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So, Bhatia, please explain the focus of your Value Sensitive Design Lab.

[Batia Friedman]

Yeah, sure. I started out as a software engineer a long, long, long time ago. And I wanted to build technologies that worked and were efficient and effective. But I also wanted some confidence that they would do something good in the world. That whatever I made as an engineer would ultimately benefit society, human beings, other creatures on the planet. Design constraints are our friends. They help us shape the kinds of new technologies we develop and their qualities and characteristics in ways that maybe we want to see. And so I think of design constraints as trying to bring together our moral imaginations and our technical imaginations, and that leads to really great engineering design. So if I think about energy technologies, I want energy technologies that Will give us lots of power that will do so in a way that is consistent with how the rest of the biology and planet functions and has limited risk in terms of generating waste or too much power. So if I give myself those design constraints, you know, as an engineer, as somebody who's developing new materials, I start looking at what kinds of sources for energy I might want to evolve. Like, I look a lot at chlorophyll, and I just think, how remarkable is this? All these green things somehow manage to absorb energy that's out there from the sun. It's there. And then transform it into a way in which it can be used. That seems like a really great idea. And there isn't a lot of waste generated that lays around and is dangerous to us for thousands, if not tens of thousands of years.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Well, technically, there is a waste product. It's called oxygen.

[Chuck Nice]

Oxygen.

[Gary O'Reilly]

There you go.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Batia Friedman]

That's such a bad waste product for us.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's the tree's waste product is oxygen. Yeah.

[Batia Friedman]

But that's the way that a design constraint that brings together our moral and technical imaginations can lead us in, I think. Yeah. New and powerful directions.

[Chuck Nice]

Do you try to consider unintended consequences of design, or is that part of the process? Or does it just.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, well, they were unintended.

[Chuck Nice]

It was unintended. Why do you think they call them unintended consequences?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Otherwise they'd be right.

[Batia Friedman]

That is such an important question. So, you know, let's be honest. Anything we design and put out into the world, we put out into the world, and people are going to do stuff with it and they're going to do things with it that we didn't anticipate. Like, the telephone is a great example. The telephone was never expected to be this communication device that people used in their homes, and it connected women who were staying at home and created a whole society for them. That was an unintended consequence.

[Chuck Nice]

Interesting.

[Batia Friedman]

Or the cookies that are being used on your computer right now, those are a complete unintended consequence. That was just a little bit of data that was left on your machine to help debugging when browsers were first being developed, when that protocol was first being developed.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Wow.

[Batia Friedman]

And its more massive impact has been our experience with cookies now. So. Yeah. What's the takeaway? We design with our eyes open, and then after we deploy something, we keep our eyes open and we hold ourselves accountable for what happens as people take up these technologies and use them. So the design process goes longer than, oh, I had my big release. The design process follows it out. And when we see new things emerge, we're proactive, we're alert, we're proactive and we see that as part of our responsibility as the technologists and engineers.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So allow me to push back on you just a little bit here first. Let me agree, of course, any good engineer loves constraints because that's the test of their ingenuity and creativity. Okay? If they say do it for this much money, with this much energy, fit it into this volume, that's how you get discovery.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's how we folded up the James Webb Space Telescope into a rocket fairing. Some engineer said, what? I gotta put an eight foot telescope the diameter into this tiny fairing? And they go home and come back and figure out how to do it. It unfurls like the petals of a flower. Right? So we're all in on that. However, let me just push back here and say if I'm in the lab about to invent something that could be highly useful to society or possibly even destructive, but it's just a discovery of the science embedded in some bit of engineering, why should it be my responsibility to design it how you want me to rather than your responsibility to convince people how to use it ethically? I can invent a knife. Is there an ethical knife? I don't know. But we want to train people how to use knives or any bit of technology and any tool that comes out of the brainchilds of scientists put into play in the brainchilds of engineers. So I don't know that your constraints in my lab are the right thing for me when I just want the freedom to explore and discover and let the ethical invocations happen after the fact.

[Chuck Nice]

And Batia, now you know why scientists are going to kill us all. No, stop.

[Batia Friedman]

Well, I'm just. Neil, I'm just going to mark a word in your comment which is the word you like. Who is the you here? Which you and how should we think about those different yous and some of the things I think about when I do think about this question, I think there's discovery of basic knowledge, like fundamental underlying phenomena of the universe.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We split the atom. That was basic knowledge.

[Batia Friedman]

And I see that as a different enterprise than the engineering enterprise of tools and technologies that we're going to deploy in society.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'm with you then.

[Batia Friedman]

So I am a strong proponent of very, very diverse scientific exploration. In fact, I actually would claim that, you know, as a country in the United States, our scientific exploration is far more narrow than what I would like to see. And I would really push hard.

[Chuck Nice]

So based on what you just said, all right, here's an ethical question. There's a scientist who discovers a cure for cancer using a virus that can easily be manipulated as a biochemical weapon that could destroy an entire country in the course of 48 hours. This is the most virulent organism that's ever been placed on earth. Would you say go ahead and make that right?

[Batia Friedman]

I'm going to hold on to that for a minute and I'm just going to go back to Neil's comment and then I'll return to that.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Batia Friedman]

Because I also want to say to Neil's comment, you know, we have limited time and resources, so it is always the circumstance that we are choosing to do some things and not do other things. So it's, it's really a choice of where am I going to direct my time and energy, where am I going to place my imaginative energies and innovation, and which ones am I not going to do? Right. And we saw in the 80s, for example, a real push of resources towards the development of nuclear energy and away from photovoltaics. Right. So we live in that kind of resource. I don't know if you would call it resource scarce, but at least we don't get to work on everything at full force all at the same time. And we have to recognize we are making choices. So one of the first things I would say is how do we make really good choices there? How do we use the resources we have in a way that will be most constructive for us? My own gestalt on that is on the basic science side of things, I say spread those resources across a wide diversity of different kinds of science and different kinds of ideas, far more diverse than what I think we tend to do in the United States and on the engineering side. And now maybe I shift back, Chuck, to your question, which is really a great question. I don't tend to see the world in terms of forced choices or design trade offs in the way that you framed it. I want to bring back in that notion of constraint and I want to bring back in that notion of imagination. I think likely enough, if we understand something about whatever this biology is or whatever the piece is that might be a prevention against cancer, that if we push hard enough on ourselves, we will be able to invent ways that use that knowledge without having to also risk a really deadly virus. And I think the propensity to say it's a trade off, it's X or Y, we really limit ourselves and our abilities. So in the work that we do. We have moved away from the language of design trade off or value conflict. And we talk about tensions, and then we talk about how you resolve tensions. And we talk about trying to populate this space with a whole range of better solutions. They're not necessarily perfect solutions. They're better solutions. And so that would be the approach I would take. Now, I don't know that science to know where or how it might go, but that would be my intuition.

[Chuck Nice]

That's a great answer.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And insightful and great answer. And it's actually been done many times before. Just. It's a slight tangent to your line of work, but it's related. When they used to do crash tests with pigs, because you can get a hog that has same sort of body mass as a human, put him in the driver's seat, crash the car, and the hog dies.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Plus, it's the nearest thing to human skin.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Okay. So the hog dies. And you'd say, well, there's no other way to do this. You might say at the time until you say, no, think of another way. And then we have the crash test dummy.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And the crash test dummy is even better than the. Because you can put sensors everywhere throughout. And so that's that. So I agree.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Not perfect, but better.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Yes. Or even maybe better and perfect. Right. I agree that it's a false choice to say I can only do this if I possibly set loose a virus that kills an entire country. Well, then maybe you're not clever enough and keep at it.

[Chuck Nice]

I was clever enough to kill a whole country. No, I'm joking.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. Okay.

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[Steve Omahundro]

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[Batia Friedman]

I'm Kais from Bangladesh and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I have one last thing, and before we wrap, one last thing. Earlier you said you'd want the ethical compass to be pointed in a direction that serves us, serves civilization in some way. If we were 170 years ago in the American south, the ethical compass was, oh, let's create something where we can get more work out of the slaves and then we all benefit. That would be the ethical compass working in that time and in that place. So what confidence do you have that whatever line of ethic, whatever ethical direction you want to take, something in the room with the inventors, that that will still be the ethics that we value five years later, 50 years later, 100 years later.

[Batia Friedman]

So that's a great, a really great question. I'm going to answer it in a couple different ways. The first thing that I want to remind us all about is that, you know, moral philosophers have been trying to identify a workable ethical theory that cuts across all situations, all times. And we have some really good ideas, but none of them cover all of the situations that our intuitions tell us about. So sometimes a consequentialist theory is good, but it comes up short. And then there's a rights based theory, but it comes up short. We can go to Buddhist ethics, we can go to Islamic ethics, we can go to various, you know, various ways of thinking. So the place where we are that we just have to accept is that while we're waiting to figure that out from a conceptual, ethical, moral point of view, we still live in the world and we still need to act in the world. And so the work that I've done has tried to take that really seriously to create a space for ethical theory without explicitly saying which ethical theory, and also leaving room for, as we learn more, that we can bring that in. So that's a little background to what you're saying. So now what does value sensitive design do for the circumstance you're talking about? It puts a line in the sand and says you have to engage with all stakeholders, direct and indirectly, who are going to be implicated by your technology. That means that not only do the people who want to benefit from somebody else's labor, not only are they stakeholders, but those people who are laboring are stakeholders and value sense of design, says they're legitimate stakeholders and their views come into the design process without giving more power to one than another.

[Chuck Nice]

That's incredible.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's highly enlightened.

[Chuck Nice]

Where were you 170 years ago?

[Batia Friedman]

These are about practice. This is about practice and about implementing these practice. And so I'm going to tell you a story about a project, a very particular project, and you'll see why and how this actually matters and is practical. It's not pie in the sky. So in the state of Washington, where I live, there is something called the access to justice technology principles that govern how the courts give access to technology, what they are required to do. And they were first developed maybe 15 years ago, 20 years ago, and then they wanted to update them. And the committee that updated them came to my lab and they said, you know, we've done a good job updating them, but we don't feel like we've really reached out to diverse groups of people. Can you help us? My lab developed a method called the diverse voices process for tech policy. And the idea is that, you know, the rubber hits the road with the words on the page. So if we take a tech policy in its sort of polished draft form and we can let groups that might otherwise be marginalized scrutinize that language, give feedback, and then we can help change those policies, responsive to them, then we can improve things. So we did. We ran panels with people who were formerly incarcerated, we ran them with immigrants, we ran them with people in rural communities, and we actually ran them with the people who do the court administration because they're also really key stakeholders. As a result of the work we did, there were two principles that were surfaced. One was about human touch, and the other was about language. And people said to us things like, look, if somebody is going to deny me parole and I'm not going to get to be there for my kids 13th birthday or hang out with them at, you know, their soccer games, you can relate to that, right, Gary? Thank you. I want a human being to look me in the eye and tell me that that's what my life is going to be for the next year, because my parole is Denied. I don't want to hear that from an AI. I don't want to hear that from a piece of technology. I want a human being to tell me that. Because this is a human experience. Right. And so, in fact, we gave that feedback back to the committee. The committee then added in new principles actually around human touch, and those were approved by the Washington State Supreme Court a couple of years ago. And those access to technology principles are a model that many states in the United States follow. So what I'm talking about is really practical, and we're talking about how we actually improve things in practice, be it on the technology design side or on the policy side that governs how the technology is used.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And I love the fact that a state can do that independently from the federal government and be so good at it or so emulatable that other states will then use that as the model, and then that can spread across the country with or without federal guidance on top of it. Yeah. Excellent.

[Batia Friedman]

Well, I guess if I was going to say one last thing, it's, you know, because we have perhaps stumbled in the past, that's no reason to think we need to stumble in the future or stumble in the same way, you know? So really, my takeaway to everyone would be hold on to your technical and moral imaginations and hold yourselves and your friends and your colleagues and the technology you buy accountable to that, and we will make progress, some incremental and some perhaps much bigger. But that, as a keystone, I think, is really good guidance for us all.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

A reminder why you are this year's winner in the Future of Life Award.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Congratulations.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Thank you for being on StarTalk. Your vision for us all gives us hope, which is we need a lot of that right now.

[Chuck Nice]

Absolutely.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, thank you.

[Chuck Nice]

And let me just say, Batya, as a thank you. As an avid lover of alcohol, I have stumbled in the past, and I am sure to stumble in the future as well.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Do we need to end on that note?

[Gary O'Reilly]

Some things we can ignore.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, next up, our next Future of Life award winner, Steve Omahundro. Yes. Yes, he thinks about AI. There's not enough.

[Gary O'Reilly]

The way I think about it differently.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes. There's not enough. It seems to me there's not enough. Whatever he did, there's not enough of them in the world, I believe. So if we're thinking about the ethics of AI, because that's on everybody's mind right now.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I mean, for sure.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Steve, welcome to StarTalk.

[Steve Omahundro]

Thank you very much.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, so for those who can see this on video, you're donning an eye patch and you said you had recent surgery, but none of us believe it.

[Gary O'Reilly]

We're not buying it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We're not buying it. We think you're training for the next Bond villain.

[Steve Omahundro]

Yes, that's very appropriate for the topic we're gonna discuss.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Autonomous Systems AI MAMM with EyePatch.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Ouch. Whoa.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Equals Bond villain is the equation.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So where are we now with establishing AI Ethics? Because the AI, it delights some people, myself included, it freaks out other people. And we're all at some level thinking about the ethical invocation of it before AI becomes our overlord. So what is the current status of that right now?

[Steve Omahundro]

Well, I think we're right on the edge of some very important developments and very important human decisions. I've been working in AI for 40 years, and for the first half of that I thought AI was an unabashed good. We'd cure cancer, we'd solve fusion. All the basic human problems we would solve with AI. But then about 20 years ago, I started thinking more deeply about, well, what's this actually going to happen if we succeed? What's going to happen when AIs can really reason about what they want to do? And I discovered that there are these things I call the basic AI drives, which are things that basically any AI which has simple goals. And I used to think about chess playing AIs will want to do. And some of those are get more resources so it can do more of what it wants to do. Make copies of itself, keep itself from being turned off or changed. And so those things in the context of the human world are very risky and very dangerous. We didn't have the AIs 20 years ago that could do that, but we're about to have those in the next probably year or two. So this is a critical moment for humanity, I would say.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So where do you stand on this system? On the subject of consciousness engineering? Those that want to engineer AI for consciousness and those that want to not, what's the benefit, the good or bad.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Here, is that the difference between a blunt computer that serves our needs and one that thinks about the problems you.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Are, the self improvement algorithms, all the sort of things like that?

[Steve Omahundro]

Yeah, exactly. Well, I think long term, you know, we may very well want to go there. In the short term, I think we're nowhere close to being able to handle that kind of a system.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Steve Omahundro]

So I would say, you know, if you made me, you know, king of the world, we limit AIs to being tools, only tools to help humans solve human problems. And we do not give them agency. We do not allow them to take over large systems. It's not easy necessarily to do that because many of these systems will want to take over things and so we need technology to keep them limited. And that's what I'm thinking a lot.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

About right now in my field. It's exactly. I mean, we've been enjoying AI for a long time. For a long time. And it's been a tool. It's not a brilliant, beautiful tool. Makes our lives easier. And once they're trained, we go to the beach while it does the work. And I'm good with that. But yeah, we're not working with AI with agency.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, because then it would be like, so how was the beach?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No, that's AI with attitude. That's different.

[Chuck Nice]

You enjoyed yourself while I was here slaving away over my calculations.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

AI with attitude.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So if we do have AI with agency and then we continue to use it as just a tool, do we not get legal on the phone? And all of a sudden we're into.

[Steve Omahundro]

Contracts and oh yeah, big problems. You know, can they vote? Can they own property?

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Steve Omahundro]

And the latest models are, have been discovered that they do. Do they do something called sycophancy, which is they're trained to try and give responses that people rate as good. Well, the AIs very quickly discover that if you say that was a brilliant question, you must be an amazing person. Then people say, yeah, that was a really good response. And so they'll just make up all kinds of stuff like that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So they're ass kissing.

[Chuck Nice]

Well, they know that we love that.

[Steve Omahundro]

Exactly.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So where does it stand now today? Is there a table you should be sitting at where you're not as we go forward on this frontier?

[Steve Omahundro]

Yeah, I mean, so who's going to make these decisions? Well, it has to be somebody who understands the technology. Who understands the technology. The companies do. And so OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic and Elon Musk's X AI is sort of an emerging one. These are the companies that are building these systems at the leading edge. They call them frontier models. And because they're the ones who know what's going on, they're the ones making these decisions. Now the government has recently realized, oh my goodness, we better get involved with this. And so there have been a lot of partnerships announced over the last few months actually between governmental agencies, intelligence agencies, defense agencies, and these leading edge AI companies. And so I think some kind of a new combination is emerging out of that that's going to make the actual end decisions.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So how do you incentivize these tech companies to embrace this safety architecture and not go gung ho and disappear off on their own agendas?

[Steve Omahundro]

That is the big challenge. And if we look at the history of OpenAI, it's a little bit of a cautionary tale. It was created, I think, around 2017 in response to Google's DeepMind, which was making great progress at the time.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Steve Omahundro]

And a group of people said, oh, my God, we really have to worry about AI safety. It looks like this is happening quickly. Let's start a special company which is nonprofit and which is particularly focused on safety. And they did that, and everything was great. Elon Musk was one of the forces behind it. There were internal struggles and so on. And Musk left. Well, when he left, he took away some of the money he was going to give them. So then they decided, oh, we need to make money. And so then they started becoming more commercial, and that process has continued. A group of the researchers there said, wait a minute, you're not focusing on safety. They left OpenAI and they started anthropic to be even more safety oriented. And now anthropic is also becoming much more commercial. And so the forces, the commercial forces, the political forces, the military forces, they all push in the direction of moving faster and, you know, get more advanced, more quickly. Whereas the safety, everybody wants safety, but they sort of compete against these economic and political forces.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I was in the UAE a couple of years ago, and if I remember correctly, they have a minister of AI and as does China and some other countries sort of emergent on this space. How do we get that kind of ear and audience within our own governmental system? The military does have an AI group that's talking about this. Absolutely. As you would want them to. Well, yeah, yeah, but in terms of policy and laws and legislation, do we need a cabinet member who's secretary of AI or secretary of computing, something, some structural change?

[Steve Omahundro]

Yeah. This is the biggest change to humanity and to the planet ever. And it looks like it's happening, you know, sometime over the next decade. And many are predicting very short timelines. And so we as a species, humanity, is not ready for this.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Steve Omahundro]

So how do we deal with it? And people, many people, are starting to wake up to that fact. And so there are lots and lots of meetings and organizations and groups. It's still pretty incoherent, I would say.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So, Steve, if you've got this talking shop going on where something may or may not get done, are we misplaced focusing exactly on AI when we've still got quantum computing on the horizon.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, good one. Yeah. How much of this is premature?

[Chuck Nice]

But won't they go hand in hand? So, like, whatever problems you have with AI and whatever considerations you're making with AI, you're just going to have to transfer them over to quantum computing.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Well, they get magnified, so you should.

[Chuck Nice]

Really start dealing with it now.

[Gary O'Reilly]

But if you're not in at the ground floor, you're not in at all.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Well, let's just. Steve, hit this, Steve.

[Steve Omahundro]

Well, so I'll give you an example. So quantum computing, if it were successful, would break much of the public key cryptography that's used in the world today. And so NIST has been busily trying to create post quantum cryptography where they create new algorithms which wouldn't be vulnerable to quantum computing. But Meta, for example, has a group which is using the latest AI models to break these post quantum algorithms, and they've been successful at breaking some of them. And so, like you say, the two are going hand in hand. AIs will be much better at creating quantum algorithms than humans are. And that may lead to some great advances. It may also lead to current cryptography notwithstanding that. And so that's another whole wave of transformation that's likely to happen.

[Chuck Nice]

We just make every password, 1, 2, 3, 4. No AI would ever go for that. They'd be like, oh, yes. So ridiculous.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And listening to you, Steve, it reminds me, was it Kurt Vonnegut in one of his stories, I don't remember which, he said, these are the last words ever spoken in the human species.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes, yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Two scientists saying, let's try it this other way. That's the end.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, there you go. And that was it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, let's try AI in this other mode. Boom. That's the end of the world right there. So you can set ethical guidelines, but that doesn't stop bad actors out there. No, that means a bad actor can take over the world while the rest of us are obeying ethical guides. So what are the guardrails put in place for something like that?

[Steve Omahundro]

I think that's one of the greatest challenges. We now have open source language models, open source AIs that are almost as powerful as the ones in the labs.

[Chuck Nice]

And far more dangerous.

[Steve Omahundro]

And they're being downloaded hundreds of millions of times. And so you have to assume every actor in the world. Now, China is now using Meta's latest models for their military AI. And so I believe we need hardware controls to limit the capabilities of. So right now the biggest AIs require these GPUs that are quite expensive and quite large. The latest one is the Nvidia H100. It's about $30,000 for a chip. The US put an embargo on selling those to China, but apparently China has found ways to get the chips anyway. People are gathering up these chips, gathering huge amounts of money, hundreds of, well, certainly hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars. And now they're even talking about trillion dollar data centers over the next few years. And so the good news is, if it really costs a trillion dollars to build the system that will host the super duper AI, then very few actors can pay that and therefore it'll be limited in its extent.

[Chuck Nice]

You just describe where the next frontier of warfare will exist.

[Steve Omahundro]

Yeah, absolutely. Abso one thing, you know, it's pretty obvious these data centers are going to be a target and they don't seem to be building them in a very hardened way. So I think that's something people need to start thinking about, maybe underground data centers.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Steve, are we looking at something in terms of the safety aspect here that's doable or are we just the kings of wishful thinking?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I want to make sure we got the good thoughts here because I don't want to leave this conversation with you completely bumming us out. Okay?

[Steve Omahundro]

Yeah, I hope not to do that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah, Steve, give us a place where we can say, thank you Steve, for being on our show and be.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Able to sleep tonight.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes. Go.

[Steve Omahundro]

Well. So the truly safe technology needs to be based on the laws of physics and the law and the mathematical proof. Those are the only two things that we can be absolutely sure can't be subverted by a sufficiently powerful AI. And AIs are getting very good at both of those. They're becoming able to model physical systems and design physical systems with whatever characteristics we want. And they're also able to perform mathematical proof in a very good way. And so it looks to me like we can design hardware that puts constraints on AIs of whatever form we want, but that we need AI to design this hardware and that if we can shift humanities technological infrastructure.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You say AI, please design your own prison cell that we're going to put you in. That's what you just said.

[Steve Omahundro]

Exactly. And so.

[Gary O'Reilly]

And then it's going to design a way.

[Steve Omahundro]

You certainly don't want an agent to do that because then they'll find some way to hide a back door or something. But by using mathematical proof, we can get absolute guarantees about the properties of Systems, and we're just on the verge of that kind of technology. And so I'm very hopeful that probably the next two or three years, you know, there are several groups who are building superhuman mathematicians, and they're expecting to be at the level of, say, human graduate students in mathematics by the end of this year. Using those AIs, we can build designs for systems that have properties that we are very, very confident in. And so I think that's where real safety is going to come from. But it builds on top of AI, so we need them both.

[Chuck Nice]

I was going to say the good thing about what you just said, even though it sounds crazy to have the inmate design its own cell, is that without agency at this point, it's just a drone carrying out an order.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

So that's. That's the encouraging part, you know, so. Yeah. Whereas if it were sentient anyway, or if it had some kind of agency, it could very well say, yeah, I'm also going to design a back door and a trap door.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And I'm not going to tell you.

[Chuck Nice]

And I'm not going to tell you. Of course not.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Steve. First, congratulations on winning this award. You are exactly the right kind of person who deserves such an award that gives us hope for the future of our relationship with technology. Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And the health and wealth and security of civilization as we go forward.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah.

[Steve Omahundro]

So thank you so much.

[Chuck Nice]

And I look forward to the day where an AI beats you out for this award.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, great.

[Batia Friedman]

Yeah.

[Steve Omahundro]

We want. Great point. Maybe next year it'll be an AI that wins.

[Chuck Nice]

I'm joking, by the way.

[Steve Omahundro]

Steve.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Al Mahondro, winner of this year's Future of Life award award, and deservedly so. Thank you.

[Steve Omahundro]

Thank you very much.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Before we jump to our next segment, I need to acknowledge the third honoree, James Moore, who is now sadly deceased. His paper in 1985, what is computer Ethics? Established him as a pioneering theoretician in this field. His policy vacuum concept created the guidelines to address the challenges of emerging technologies. His work profoundly influencing today's policymakers and researchers. Gone but not forgotten.

[Steve Omahundro]

Hi, I'm Dalvette Quince. One way to help manage type 2.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Diabetes is to regularly exercise.

[Steve Omahundro]

My exercise program can help get you into a routine that works for you.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Keep in mind, managing blood sugar also.

[Steve Omahundro]

Takes the right diet. Hi, I'm celebrity chef Franklin Becker. Ever since I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, I've adapted my cooking style without sacrificing flavor.

[Chuck Nice]

If.

[Steve Omahundro]

If you want to learn more tips about diet and exercise, visit mytype2transformation.com.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It'S.

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[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So seems to me that for ethical principles to work at all, they have to be everywhere at all times and capable of evolving with the technology itself. I can't foresee the ethics panel getting together from on high declaring what is ethical and what isn't. And then everyone has to obey that for the next 10 years.

[Gary O'Reilly]

You put 10 people in a room, nearly get 12 opinions right. That's a basic human nature. Then you've got to get all of these components, all of these nation states or whatever, investment groups, demographics, demographics with their own agendas to buy into the same principles. Because on a Wednesday, the principle's not the same for them. They're going to think in a different direction.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, but that doesn't even scare me. What scares me more than anything? China, Russia, North Korea. It's that simple. Seriously, I'm not even going. It's just China, Russia, North Korea.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We can put any constraints we have on ourselves.

[Chuck Nice]

There you go.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Doesn't mean anybody else is paying attention.

[Chuck Nice]

And that's the problem.

[Gary O'Reilly]

And you're hurting cats. Good luck.

[Chuck Nice]

Well, that's what makes it so scary.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Hurting cats with nuclear. Yeah, we're hurting nuclear cats.

[Chuck Nice]

Exploding nuclear cats.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Exploding nuclear cats.

[Chuck Nice]

The newest. It's the newest game.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Sweeping the Internet gives a whole other meaning to Schrodinger's cat, dead or alive.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I mean, you've got autonomous systems. And if it's geared to say, if it's human, kill it, that's problematic.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Here's another little known fact. When we signed with the Soviet Union, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. That was progress.

[Chuck Nice]

Absolutely.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

This was. You will no longer test nuclear weapons because at the time, from the late 1950s into the early 1960s, there were several tests a day. In some years, there were several tests a day.

[Chuck Nice]

Right, okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Somewhere in the world.

[Chuck Nice]

Right. And which made for such great video.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so we said. We said this has to stop. All right.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

What is a little known fact? And we write about this in the Accessory to war, the Unspoken alliance between Astrophysics and the Military book. In that book, we highlight the fact that we agreed to that around the same time that computing power was good enough to calculate the results of what would be a test. So we didn't really stop testing, not philosophically, not morally.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Was that where MAD came from? Mutually Assured Destruction.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, that was later. Yeah, that was later. I'm not convinced, based on my read of history, that anyone, any one nation can unilaterally say, oh, we're gonna just do nice things and moral and ethical things with this new technology.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, I don't. Yes. Let's say you do that, but no one else does it, then what difference does it make? What difference does it make?

[Gary O'Reilly]

You know, you gotta play by the same rule book, but we know that's not likely to happen.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I mean, what was interesting, the History of our species. Yes. Offers great evidence for that impossibility.

[Gary O'Reilly]

But when you, when you listen to Batya talking, there's such a strength in the points that she makes. You would hope that with people will go, you know what. Yeah. And the majority come online and then these guys sit in isolation testing, you know, intercontinental ballistic missiles.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes. But the MAD concept, Mutual assured destruction, just think about that. That brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the table.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Not because they thought nuclear weapons were bad, but they realized they couldn't win.

[Chuck Nice]

Right. And that's the problem. The war, when you can't win now and what that does, that doesn't mean.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

They weren't thinking about it or if they could win, they would.

[Chuck Nice]

And it also doesn't mean that they've taken into account for what I call the Nero scenario.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

What's that?

[Chuck Nice]

So what did Nero do? He fiddled while Rome burned. He burned it down. He didn't care. So what happens if you're still in a position where the danger is ever present?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So just speak, because I spent enough time hanging around military people. I don't talk about. I'm not talking about hawks that, you know, that just want. I'm just talking about people who think about the History of conflict in this world.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And the behavior of other members of our species.

[Chuck Nice]

Not just one guy standing there going.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Do you smell that sun?

[Chuck Nice]

That smell, do you smell it?

[Gary O'Reilly]

I know where that came from. Yeah. The apocalypse.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But you see Apocalypse Now.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah. You speak to the generals and the majors, you find invariably they're students of war. They've understood strategies, they understood histories, the provocations and the outcomes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And most of them are not the warmongers who stereotype them to be exactly.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Because of that knowledge, that understanding.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Correct. And so I just. I don't have the confidence. I mean, I wish I was as hopeful as Bhatia is. I want to be that. Hopefully I will aspire to be that hopeful.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So I just wonder when she talks, how far ahead of a story in terms of a technology's development are they? And how far are they playing catch up? And are they being able to bake it in from the get go or are they just trying to retro engineer what's gone wrong?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It could be a new emergent philosophy where everyone knows to bake it in from the beginning. That would be a shift in our conduct, in our awareness. Absolutely. The kind of shift, for example, dare I harp on this yet again, that when we went to the moon to explore the moon, we looked back and discovered Earth for the first time.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Around the world, people started thinking about Earth as a planet. Earth as a holistic entity that has interdependent elements. There's no one island distinct from the rest of anything else that's going on on this planet.

[Gary O'Reilly]

There's no boundaries.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No boundaries. We share the same air molecules, water molecules. And that was a firmware upgrade to our sensibilities of our relationship with nature. And that's why to this day, people all around the world say, we gotta save Earth. Nobody was saying that before we went to the Moon and looked at Earth in the sky. All the peaceniks at the time, in the 1960s, they were just anti war. They weren't let's save the Earth. Nobody had that kind of sensibility. So maybe it's a sensibility upgrade that's waiting to happen on civilization, lest we all die at the hands of our own discoveries.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, I'm going with the last part. I'm just saying that, you know, you talk about Earth Day, you talk about we went to the Moon and there are people who think we didn't go to the Moon and that the Earth is flat. Yeah, we are. We're screwed.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And by the Earth day, the first earth day was 1970.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

While we were going to the moon.

[Gary O'Reilly]

And the irony is.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Could have been 1960. But it wasn't.

[Chuck Nice]

No.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Might have been delayed. 1980. No. While we were going to the moon. First Earth Day. Right.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So is the irony that we lean into AI to get it to help us create ethical and safety architecture.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Help it save us from ourselves.

[Chuck Nice]

I like that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Maybe that's the way to flip the table. Right?

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

And that should be it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And say AI they're bad actors among humans who are trying to use AI to get rid of humans.

[Chuck Nice]

Now kill them.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Chuck this first thought.

[Gary O'Reilly]

This is where they live.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Hit their dress.

[Batia Friedman]

Dox them.

[Gary O'Reilly]

This is their daily routine.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Google knows your daily routine. We really are Android. We've been googling everything.

[Gary O'Reilly]

We really are bad people.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. So maybe it's the good AI.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Against. That's the future battle.

[Chuck Nice]

Good AI against versus bad. A. Evil Eva AI.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Evil AI but then again, the bad AI.

[Gary O'Reilly]

The bad. The bad AI will tell you that the good eyes the bad AI. And then you cut. The first casualty of war is always the truth.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Ooh. Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Well, thank you.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I don't know who all said that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's brilliant. That was deep.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yep. Oh, that's deep.

[Gary O'Reilly]

And truthful.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I wish it weren't true.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Exactly.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Stop speaking the truth. Why don't you lie to us every.

[Chuck Nice]

Now and then like all. Like everybody else. You gotta do.

[Gary O'Reilly]

You can give me a new program.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right. This has been our future of Life installment of StarTalk Special Edition.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. I enjoyed this. Thank you.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah. And congratulations to the award winners. They. They are the people that we need out there.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes. Lest we not be around to even think about that problem.

[Chuck Nice]

Absolutely.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Wonderful place. All right. Gary, Chuck, Pleasure. Always good to have you. Neil Degrasse Tyson here as always bidding you to keep looking up.

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