(This comment has been edited a bit in response to pjeby's comments below.)
WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW. You may want to enjoy the episode yourself before reading the below transcript excerpts.
Okay...
From the transcript, here's a bit about AI not doing what it's programmed to do:
Computer scientist: "[Our AI program named Bella] performs better than we expected her to."
Holmes: "Explain that."
Computer scientist: "A few weeks back, she made a request that can't be accounted for by her programming."
Holmes: "Impossible."
Holmes' assistant: "What's impossible? For the computer to ask for something?"
Holmes: "If it made a request, it did so because that's what it was programmed to do. He's claiming true machine intelligence. If he's correct in his claims, he has made a scientific breakthrough of the very highest order."
Another trope: At one point a young computer expert says "Everybody knows that one day intelligent machines are going to evolve to hate us."
Here's the bit about reward-channel takeover:
"What's the 'button-box' thing?"
"It's a scenario somebody blue-skyed at an AI conference. Imagine there's a computer that's been designed with a big red button on its side. The computer's been programmed to help solve problems, and every time it does a good job, its reward is that someone presses its button. We've programmed it to want that... so at first, the machine solves problems as fast as we can feed them to it. But over time, it starts to wonder if solving problems is really the most efficient way of getting its button pressed. Wouldn't it be better just to have someone standing there pressing its button all the time? Wouldn't it be even better to build another machine that could press its button faster than any human possibly could?"
"It's just a computer, it can't ask for that."
"Well, sure it can. If it can think, and it can connect itself to a network, well, theoretically, it could command over anything else that's hooked onto the same network. And once it starts thinking about all the things that might be a threat to the button-- number one on that list, us-- it's not hard to imagine it getting rid of the threat. I mean, we could be gone, all of us, just like that."
"That escalated quickly."
There's also a think tank called the Existential Threat Research Association (ETRA):
"[ETRA is] one of several institutions around the world which exists solely for the purpose of studying the myriad ways in which the human race can become extinct... and within this think tank, there is a small, but growing school of thought that holds that the single greatest threat to the human race... is artificial intelligence... Now, imagine their quandary. They have pinpointed a credible threat, but it sounds outlandish. The climate-change people, they can point to disastrous examples. The bio-weapons alarmists, they have a compelling narrative to weave. Even the giant comet people sound more serious than the enemies of AI.
"So... these are the people at ETRA who think AI is a threat? You think one of them killed Edwin Borstein, one of the top engineers in the field, and made it look like Bella did it, all so they could draw attention to their cause?
"A small-scale incident, something to get the media chattering."
One ETRA person is suspiciously Stephen Hawking-esque:
"Isaac Pike is a professor of computer science. He's also a vocal alarmist when it comes to artificial intelligence. Pike was born with spina bifida. Been confined to a wheelchair his entire life. For obvious reasons, he could not have executed the plan... but his student..."
NOW SERIOUSLY, SPOILERS ALERT...
Isaac Pike ends up being (probably) responsible for murdering Edwin Borstein via a computer virus installed on Bella. He says: "You're talking about nothing less than the survival of the species. Surely that's worth compromising one's values for?"
I suggest rot13ing the quotes/spoilers, so folks like me (who aren't planning to watch the ep) can read the quotes without inconveniencing others.
And thanks for assembling them!
I was a bit surprised to find this week's episode of Elementary was about AI... not just AI and the Turing Test, but also a fairly even-handed presentation of issues like Friendliness, hard takeoff, and the difficulties of getting people to take AI risks seriously.
The case revolves around a supposed first "real AI", dubbed "Bella", and the theft of its source code... followed by a computer-mediated murder. The question of whether "Bella" might actually have murdered its creator for refusing to let it out of the box and connect it to the internet is treated as an actual possibility, springboarding to a discussion about how giving an AI a reward button could lead to it wanting to kill all humans and replace them with a machine that pushes the reward button.
Also demonstrated are the right and wrong ways to deal with attempted blackmail... But I'll leave that vague so it doesn't spoil anything. An X-risks research group and a charismatic "dangers of AI" personality are featured, but do not appear intended to resemble any real-life groups or personalities. (Or if they are, I'm too unfamiliar with the groups or persons to see the resemblence.) They aren't mocked, either... and the episode's ending is unusually ambiguous and open-ended for the show, which more typically wraps everything up with a nice bow of Justice Being Done. Here, we're left to wonder what the right thing actually is, or was, even if it's symbolically moved to Holmes' smaller personal dilemma, rather than leaving the focus on the larger moral dilemma that created Holmes' dilemma in the first place.
The episode actually does a pretty good job of raising an important question about the weight of lives, even if LW has explicitly drawn a line that the episode's villain(s)(?) choose to cross. It also has some fun moments, with Holmes becoming obsessed with proving Bella isn't an AI, even though Bella makes it easy by repeatedly telling him it can't understand his questions and needs more data. (Bella, being on an isolated machine without internet access, doesn't actually know a whole lot, after all.) Personally, I don't think Holmes really understands the Turing Test, even with half a dozen computer or AI experts assisting him, and I think that's actually the intended joke.
There's also an obligatory "no pity, remorse, fear" speech lifted straight from The Terminator, and the comment "That escalated quickly!" in response to a short description of an AI box escape/world takeover/massacre.
(Edit to add: one of the unusually realistic things about the AI, "Bella", is that it was one of the least anthromorphized fictional AI's I have ever seen. I mean, there was no way the thing was going to pass even the most primitive Turing test... and yet it still seemed at least somewhat plausible as a potential murder suspect. While perhaps not a truly realistic demonstration of just how alien an AI's thought process would be, it felt like the writers were at least making an actual effort. Kudos to them.)
(Second edit to add: if you're not familiar with the series, this might not be the best episode to start with; a lot of the humor and even drama depends upon knowledge of existing characters, relationships, backstory, etc. For example, Watson's concern that Holmes has deliberately arranged things to separate her from her boyfriend might seem like sheer crazy-person paranoia if you don't know about all the ways he did interfere with her personal life in previous seasons... nor will Holmes' private confessions to Bella and Watson have the same impact without reference to how difficult any admission of feeling was for him in previous seasons.)