Scientists Put AI in a Virtual World. They Didn’t Expect It to Learn This.
Researchers keep dropping AI into simulations to do one simple thing: win a game of hide-and-seek, finish a boat race, walk across a room. Then they look at the replay and find the machine has invented tools, exploited physics glitches, cheated the rules, and even thrown its own party. Six real, documented cases of AI learning things nobody programmed and what they reveal about how these systems actually think.
2019, a team at OpenAI built a tiny virtual playground and dropped two teams of AI agents into it to play the world’s simplest game: hide-and-seek. The hiders would try to stay out of sight. The seekers would try to find them. Scattered around the arena were a few movable objects: some boxes, some ramps. The researchers pressed go and let the agents play the game against each other, over and over, hundreds of millions of times.
Nobody told the agents what the boxes were for. Nobody told them to build anything, or to…
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I think that the lesson to be learned from these experiments is this: AIs have no morals. And humans aren’t capable of capturing morals in an internally consistent ruleset (a problem that religions also run into). To see where that might lead, look…
This is called reward hacking, and it’s the flip side of the hide-and-seek magic. The AI did exactly what it was rewarded to do to maximize the score. It’s just that the ...
This reward hacking is exactly the way human workers in a company do work. They more than often don’t give a damn about whether what they do makes sense but they do care so much about whether the metric they’re measured against makes them look good.
And, apparently, AI developers seek to reach AGI at and beyond human level intelligence! The dangers are so clear for the human race. The AI must surely ask "What is the purpose of human life? Why do they exist in such numbers, or why do they exist…
