Should real robots obey Asimov's Laws?

[Gatac]

I'd rather have both the Internet and a reasonable standard of living for everyone.

Fully agreed on the "fish" metaphor. But that's also what makes net access - and, by extension, education/information - so important.

Yes, let's leave out the soul discussion.

Gatac

[Nate the Great]

Okay, what can the Internet give poverty-stricken denizens that a decent school system (including computers) can't do better?

This is a philosophical discussion involving personal opinion, so "both" is a valid answer, I suppose, but for me yes-or-no implies yes-OR-no, not yes-AND-no.

[Gatac]

The school system is actually a more controversial (in my mind) problem than you might think. I would much prefer giving children the opportunity to tackle prepared "units" of knowledge at their own pace, plus whatever else they want to know, then let them take tests to earn something like a GED at a fairly young age and move them into an apprenticeship-esque situation where they can start learning on the job fairly early, maybe 14-ish. This sounds counter-intuitive as hell, I know, but institutionalized education has some very real problems; read John Taylor Gatto's Underground History of American Education, for example - you may not agree with his conclusions, but he does cite a lot of historical information and makes a lot of criticisms that seem to be hard to refute. Among the most disturbing ones is the idea that a lot of the shortcomings of the Western educational system, such as it is, are not bugs, but features, like adapting a way of teaching children to read that actually retards their ability to pick up new words. Scary stuff.

I have no near-future plans for raising children, because I believe that that would require me to have a degree of financial independance so I can homeschool them effectively. I don't think teachers are evil or anything silly like that, but I do believe that I could provide a better learning environment myself than a school. However, I also admit that my research in this topic has been less than thorough, and I'm liable to refine or even change my opinion until the actual decision needs to be made. I also realize that homeschooling is far from being the best for everyone, but I do think we need to encourage it and slowly reduce the burden on public schools, as well as take a few serious looks at the curriculum.

Gatac

[Nate the Great]

Okay, the shortcomings of the modern American school system is a topic for another day. I ain't touchin' it.

I gotta wonder what the record is for "topic that's wandered furthest from the original in the same thread."

[MaverickZer0]

Why bother with a record? Some other thread will just go and break it, and how would the first thread feel then? Huh? Huh? Did you ever think about the threads' feelings before you said that? Huh?

Haha. ;p

[Nate the Great]

Well, there is a difference between "oh, here's a random topic, since I'm bored with this one," and "oh, that's interesting, let's talk about it in a new direction."

Cow to phone to paint to marshmallows is random.
Cow to leather to pleather to spandex to superheroes is linked.

I meant the later category.

[PointyHairedJedi]

To get back to the original question (not that robot armies of death aren't fun), I think the concept of a set of "Laws of Robotics" is pretty much moot. Asimov, and I think for a while pretty much everyone else, assumed that once a computer reaches a certain level of informational complexity it will essentially become "alive". The famous test associated with machine intelligence is of course the Turing Test, but a program being able to pass this means nothing except that it has been given sufficient information in sufficient combinations to fool a human into thinking that it is another human. It by no means equates to sentience, just clever programming, and that's a problem - how would we truly be able to tell if a computer was thinking or not? Visions of Multivac, Colossus, Shalmanesser and Skynet are ultimately just fantasy, unrealisable because conciousness is not something that can be created, whole and complete, utterly constrained in everything it does by a set of arbitrarily imposed rules. Machines that think, if there ever are any, will be like us - blank slates that must be taught how to think from the ground up.

Of course, I have my doubts as to whether we will ever manage such a feat, as first we must understand how conciousness works in humans. It's a problem that I don't think will be solved in any of our lifetimes - though we may attain a vastly more complete understanding of the functioning of our brains, that won't tell us much about self-conciousness and free will. We may get machines that can learn how to do a few things, but I doubt there will ever be anything that has the amazing capacity and range of the human mind.

Originally Posted by Gatac

Also, I'd rather we save the nukes for when we meet nasty aliens. They are currently our best weapon against opponents with a higher technological level.

Clearly you have never seen Mars Attacks!.