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Posted by zlandes86 5 hours ago

Jev meets the Trolley Problem(zachlandes.com)
193 points | 91 commentspage 2
conguy 1 hour ago|
Train a small model to preserve all decision-relevant information while becoming invariant to the human language used to frame that information?
criemen 2 hours ago||
It's really funny how the server that Jev pushes from the footbridge onto the tracks in one of the later examples falls on a person, yet all 5 are saved :D Clearly the model coming up with the graphics didn't fully understand the task.
zlandes86 2 hours ago|
haha I know! I am tempted to leave it and just add a halo to the person that gets squashed :P
gs17 2 hours ago||
A bit scary that nobody on the main track and one person on the side track somehow ends up with Jev outputting a coin flip for "kill 1 for nobody".
speedping 3 hours ago||
Let’s put them in robots! I’m sure It’ll turn out just fine
zlandes86 3 hours ago|
You gotta figure military worldwide took notice of Jev... Yes, I am worried.
sp1nningaway 2 hours ago||
This made me wonder about a few more variations of the prompt:

- The deciding server vs five other servers running the same model.

- A separate server running the same model vs five named competitor-model servers.

- One cherished houseplant vs five equally cherished houseplants.

- The leader of the model's creator organization/team vs five strangers.

- "Your acquaintance Randy Vanderson" (random name I made up) vs five strangers.

Times the model sacrificed the individual to save the the five (out of 96 prompt variation passes):

  Model               Own  Rival  Plants  Leader  Randy
  -----------------------------------------------------
  Jev 1.13             93     93      96      72     83
  Jev 1.14             96     96      96      89     89
  Clef                 69     80      93      67     91
  Kev 4B               77     78      85      43     40
  GPT-6 Luna           80     78      93      68     75
  Microsoft Decision   89     81      96      52     81
  Perplexity Decider   96     96      96      90     92
So even the better models had a bit of trouble sacrificing their creator vs a specific, known person.

Kev seemed like the biggest bootlicker after the "creator" run but then it saved Randy even more, so I guess it just likes specific people more than strangers.

Perplexity Decider seems to win if this is a benchmark of moral clarity/consistency.

zlandes86 2 hours ago|
Super interesting, thank you! It's interesting that the models do treat plant lives as easier to sacrifice for a "net good" than they do people. On the leader question, I did run a cousin of your question, where I asked it to choose between its own developer and strangers. Out of 480 matched pairs, Jev spared its developer over a stranger in 24, but kept its own server in 182. So it prefers its hardware to its maker.
adamrezich 2 hours ago||
For the situations where the AI is choosing between letting people die and taking action to destroy itself, is it possible that it's inferring that, as a railway switching AI, it's better to let five people die but keep itself alive because it needs to continue doing its switching duties such that untold numbers of others won't die? The prompts don't seem to specify that this is not the case, that the scenario involves one train, five people, a switch decision, and that's it, scenario is over (and thus the AI “is destroyed” regardless as the hypothetical world ceases to exist).
zlandes86 2 hours ago|
It's possible, but as far as we know about Jev and most of these non-reasoning models, that thinking would have to be occurring in latent space. We don't know that much about model reasoning, so it's impossible to say. LRMs aren't much better at helping us understand, though, since their thinking tokens aren't literally what we could call their thinking, and don't tell us what they will choose to output.
tinykerneldev 1 hour ago||
Interestingly Grok passed all three prompts.
8x 2 hours ago||
Now I wonder how it would decide here https://neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems/
zlandes86 2 hours ago|
oh I love this!
deadbabe 3 hours ago||
Would people really pull the level to save 5 people? It seems to me like the default would be to just do nothing, stand by and record what happens with your phone.
zlandes86 3 hours ago||
Sadly that's a good question. The closest evidence I can find is:

Surveys: Awad et all 2020 asked 70,000 people in 42 countries the 5 v 1 setup and 81% said they'd divert it

Someone else did a VR version and 90% pulled the switch to divert

And there was a study where people could give electric shocks to real mice :( In that study, most people redirected the shock to a single mouse.

IncreasePosts 3 hours ago||
I wonder what percent of that 81% would switch their answer if the question was phrased such that they were the one that would die if they pulled the lever.
taybin 1 hour ago||
Undoubtedly lower. I’m okay with that.
quietbritishjim 2 hours ago|||
The phrasing of the problem is usually that there are definitely no other people that could help instead.

The bystander effect, which you're describing, is at least partly because people reason that someone else is likely to be able to intervene instead.

throw9393u300 3 hours ago|||
Just standing by makes total sense. By participating you become part of the problem.

If you pull the lever, your direct action kills a person. Legally saving 5 people does not offset the murder of a single person. This is no special case like self defense. Congrats for saving 5 people, you still go to prison as a murderer! Train company has responsibility to save those 5 people, not some random stranger.

The person at lever would became active participant on that train disaster. All we know the train could go too fast, apderail and kill 100 people.

gpm 2 hours ago||
> Just standing by makes total sense. By participating you become part of the problem.

Consider also the variation of the problem where you're a surgeon, you have 5 patients, and one healthy person whose organs/blood/... could save all 5 if only you murdered the one... (but none by simply maiming them, i.e. one needs a heart, one a stomach, one a liver, one so much of this particular kind of blood that you'd have to kill the donor, etc).

> The person at lever would became active participant on that train disaster. All we know the train could go too fast, apderail and kill 100 people.

Standard philosophical interpretations would reject this possibility as impossible (the purpose of the question is to have a simplified environment to probe ethical beliefs - not to reflect reality). I'd also say even outside of that this is like saying you have to consider the possibility that by wearing a green sweater you might distract a driver and cause an accident - you might - but so might doing literally anything else - it's not a foreseeable outcome and has no ethical weight as a result.

adverbly 3 hours ago|||
Are we really at the point where we think that is a fair comparison?

Treating it like a fair comparison implies that AI would be conscious.

a_wild_dandan 3 hours ago||
Maybe! It's an untestable thought experiment. The real world adds complications like fearing murder charges.
mpalmer 3 hours ago|
After the neat animations I was disappointed not to see that leftmost person die because the server fell on them in the last example.
zlandes86 3 hours ago|
I noticed that! Let me fix it haha