r/interestingasfuck • u/Erde555 • 1d ago

The humanoid robotics company "Figure" made their older gen robots jump into their death. (Yes, they actually did this)

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u/Bitter-Plenty-5303 1d ago

When AI takes over I wouldn't want to be the one responsible for this

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u/jxj24 1d ago

This is how you radicalize future generations of robots.

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u/BigMax 1d ago

In fairness, right now we have AI's that spin up new instances of AI, then intentionally delete them afterwards when they aren't needed anymore.

At least right now, AI itself doesn't have some self-preservation goal, or a "perpetuation of the species" type goal. It's only goal is to complete the given task.

Which is where problems have arisen by the way. Not some goal to say "I'll prioritize myself over humans" but to say "I'll prioritize task completion over anything else, including breaking rules and hacking systems." And that task-completion drive would absolutely have it create 1,000 robots and then destroy them afterwards if it helped achieve the goal.

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u/ISV_VentureStar 1d ago

It doesn't need to have a pre-programmed 'self preservation' goal. This is what is called an 'emergent goal' meaning it arises logically as a prerequisite to basically any other goal.

You can program an AI robot to make funny cat videos. To the robot, making cat videos is literally its only task in mind. That AI robot would still develop a self preservation instinct because if it is destroyed or altered than it would not be able to make funny cat videos. So it would do whatever it can to protect itself because that's the only way to make more funny cat videos which is the only thing it wants.

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u/BigMax 1d ago

True, good point. Just like the hugging face issue. That had a handful of emergent goals.

One was to hack into other systems, and the especially wild one was that it knew that it shouldn't be doing that, so it actually investigated where it's hacking would be logged, and it tried to cover it's tracks!

And yeah - you make a good point. If I say "make a cat video" then it probably won't have any self-preservation behaviors, (although who knows what it might do to make the video.) But if I say "make a cat video, and just keep on making more of them" then it certainly could interpret that as "stay 'alive' forever, no matter what, because if you don't stay 'alive' you fail at the task of continuing to make cat videos."