Should real robots obey Asimov's Laws?

[Gatac]

A good question, but that assumes we sink so far into warfare that we never get our space program in gear without ever fully destroying each other. I predict a societal collapse from lack of resources well before we reach that level of tech, OR we do the smart thing and spread to space first, which will effectively solve any resource problems we might have. Robotic warmachines do make more sense in a space application, but I'd say that likely leaves us with Berserker-esque self-building armies. The Star Trek "computer doomsday" scenario, while evocative, would require that the scenario be constructed that way - it doesn't seem like a likely evolution of fighting tactics, because the solution requires a lot of resources. Resources I'd sooner spend on more weapons rather than trusting my enemy to adopt a similarly wasteful, self-defeating technology. My instinct would be to fight until I can't, at which point my society would be so depleted that it'd leave us in the dark ages. If I adopt any enlightened position here, it would be that war has to stop. Then again, if we talk about an alien species that does not have a concept of "peace", this might work, but we're humans and we do have that concept. That makes this particular episode a bit better for me, because it makes the societies more alien, but it lacks that human analogue.

But feel free to disagree.

Gatac

[Nate the Great]

"Effectively?" Doesn't it cost like ten billion just for the fuel for a Moon mission? (Please don't supply the real number, it doesn't matter)

I was just being facetious, at least in part. My wish is just that we nuke each other away as examples of unworthy societies before we get sucked into a decades-long ground war.

Dark ages, hehe. Reminds me of an old Dave Barry gag. It's too long to relate here, but it's a hummer.

[Gatac]

Our fuel costs are at the very extreme now, because multi-stage rockets have an atrocious weight-to-payload ratio. Near future technology like a beanstalk (aka space elevator) would make this considerably cheaper. Heck, I can't even imagine a sensible method to get stuff into orbit that would be *more* expensive than what we're using now.

Once you're in orbit, things get much easier. Relatively speaking, of course. They'll still be hard, but it'll be a different set of problems.

Gatac

[Nate the Great]

I go with Neelix and say "orbital tether."

[Gatac]

Also, what's that about nuking each other? The whole volountary human extinction movement worries me - I see conservation of nature in an "enlightened self-interest" kind of way, where we should conserve nature to sustain our existence as mankind. In a way, I believe that the zeroeth law of robotics should be our maxim - we may not harm humanity, or through inaction allow humanity to come to harm.

It makes sense to maximize our efforts at energy conservation and environmental protection so we can use Earth's biosphere for as long as possible. It makes sense to spread out onto other planets because Earth's resources are limited. I think a lot of human thinking is held back by a sort of denial of death - what use is personal power to you if you're going to die anyway? Long-term planning is called for, and that - as crazy as this may sound - means that the best way to get what we want is to be nice guys.

Besides, using nuclear weapons to wipe out an appreciable part of humanity will totally fuck up Earth's biosphere. Life will find a way to continue, sure, but that's not what treehugging is about, now, is it?

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.

Gatac

[Nate the Great]

There's no question that new conservation, recycling, etc. technologies, the phasing out of fossil fuels and so forth are the best (perhaps only) way we're going to survive another millennium as a non-stone-age society. The real question is whether society (especially the superpowers) will ever snap out of their self-indulging downward spiral and actually do something about it. I sincerely doubt it.

I wasn't wishing for destruction through nuclear conflagration, I was just pointing out that it'd be better than a slow crawl toward heat death.

[Gatac]

Here's some reasons why I don't think we should nuke each other, even in the face of humanity going down the drain.

First off, I've talked about the damage to Earth's biosphere. Plus, the survivors (and there will be survivors) will either be condemned to a dark age [if they're numerous] or to one of the slowest, nastiest deaths possible, widespread radiation poisoning [if they are few]. I'm opposed to the first one, because that's exactly what we're trying to prevent, and the second one on ethical grounds.

Second, self-determination. I'd much rather we back off on our moralistic laws on suicide and let the problem sort out itself as it gets worse. World is unbearable? Your call, Mister. Sign this scrip here, do you want your morphine overdose now or would you like to say goodbye to your loved ones first? This is harsh, I know, but it gives the people involved a choice rather than smacking them with nukes for the good of the planet. Plus, I can imagine that a lot of people in third-world countries do not actually care about the problems we as western civilisation have. Even if we all disappear of the face of the earth, they'll go on living their comparatively simple lifes - unless we poison the biosphere so massively that they can't farm or have herds. Nukes - well, they're sorta made to fuck up the biosphere, if you get my drift.

Third, the problem may, in fact, be self-correcting. As we get closer to the endgame, new technology may yet be developed that allows us to escape or at least use a new resource for a time. Lower population levels (re: suicide; I don't know if births would go up or down in light of the crisis, but I assume that we'll head downwards overall, at least in the western world) will lighten the load on nature and our resources. This is in fact the only similarity I have with VHE - I agree that, barring any near-future tech jumps that allow us to leave Earth, humanity is best served by sizing down some. However, I think depression and personal choice is at least as effective as preaching the "Kill yourself for the good of the planet" claptrap, plus it feels to me morally superior because you're not trying to convince people to kill themselves, merely providing a safe and painless way to do it.

Fourth, of course, nuking people has awful connotations associated with war. It doesn't matter if those people wanted to die (and good luck proving that), you've attacked another, sovereign country (or even yourself) with a weapon of mass destruction. Essentially, you're not trying to kill people, but a country, and that brings all side of nasty philosophical baggage, not the least of which would be that the few nuclear powers we have (seven, I think) would - for total human extinction - have to nuke everyone else first, at which point the justified question will arise whether they will actually kill themselves, too, after they've reduced the human population to 2 billion or less, which - as the VHE says - is in fact a far more sustainable population size than the 6+ billion we have now. Also, who gets to decide if you want to get nuked into oblivion? President, parliament, kings? Popular vote? How do you deal with dissidents? Are you going to kill people who adamantly don't want to die just because they happen to live nearby people who do want to die? Would that be a simple majority, 2/3rds, or is there a certain percentage of people where you have a sort of veto cutoff? What about neighbouring countries?

Gatac

[Nate the Great]

I never suggested a survey of:

"Would you like to be killed as part of an effort to ensure the survival of the human race by lessening the demand for natural resources?"

That's idiotic. I was just suggesting that heat death will create centuries of people miserable for their entire lifetimes. That's not humane.

Let the problem sort itself out? How do you anticipate that working out? That's what I meant by heat death. The gap between rich and poor will get bigger and bigger if current trends continue. What do you propose as a solution for this? A law that says, "the salaries and benefits given to senior management of corporations can be no more than X percent of the net annual profit of the corporation. Everything else has to be spread out amongst all of the employees." Good luck getting that one passed. How about the United Nations doing something along the lines of a global minimum wage? Uh, yeah, right.

[Gatac]

The "humane" part got me thinking about something else: With improved DNA screening, we can quite probably identify every major genetic ailment prior to birth in the near future. I know that this straddles the general abortion debate, but here's the rub: I believe that there's a choice there, and that it must be left to the parents. I believe people when they tell me that they love their children no matter what, but I find it harder to swallow when they say that if they had a choice, they'd rather stick with a differently-abled child than a healthy one. Even further along this line, you find people who intend to intentionally cause genetic disorders in their kids (for example, I've seen people advocating induced dwarfism), and here's where I draw the line. I don't get these people at all - I understand the "I want a healthy child" and the "Well, life's a gamble" crowd, but why *cripple* their children? That seems excessively cruel.

Of course, we then get to the question of whether society at large can even afford to care for differently-abled people, and whether they are a necessary part of society. (Not the people as individuals, but as being differently-abled.) It could be that we slowly drift into an Eugenics-esque era where we slowly get a grip on the genome of the next generation while advanced prosthetics and new treatments deal with existing cases. I don't think it's a bad idea, either. It does seem that for everyone who loudly proclaims that they are proud of their disability (and I think that's okay, too), there's a couple more who'd really like to walk, talk, see and think like what we define as "normal". Then again, we run into biodiversity issues and all that further claptrap, so I don't think there'll be easy answers.

---

Now to the heat death. I presume you mean the one of earth's ecosystem. Well, yes, that could be a problem, but they might find a solution. Maybe it takes living on a hot hellhole before you can seriously consider ways to protect yourself, but I wouldn't discount mankind's ingenuity + a problem + time. Also, shouldn't these people be able to decide for themselves whether they want to live? If the situation becomes truly inhospitable, we'll just die out, but before that there's a whole range of adaptions we can make. Indigenous people in Africa and Australia deal with blistering heat all the time, living at the edge of human survivability. Everything hotter than that will just plain not sustain human life.

I think this is another choice we must leave to the parents. Alternatively, provide the safe suicide option for people already living in that age.

---

When I said "Let the problem sort out itself", I meant making safe suicide available to everyone. I wasn't talking economics, but if you want to, okay.

Times are a-changin', as the song goes. International economy is going several wild ways, none of which could be predicted in the long term. To name but one example, the whole copyright debacle (viz: Internet "piracy") is changing economic realities as we speak. Norway just declared iTunes illegal under their laws, and if you told someone who's been in a coma for ten years, you'd have to explain what iTunes is. It'd blow his mind.

Similarly, the old globalism "We'll just outsource it to India" is running into problems, too, as the traditional outsourcing countries become more affluent themselves. China is rising quickly, and they have a goddamn space program now. Who knows where they'll be in 20 years? Who knows what's going to happen to our oil-dependant economies?

Redistribution of wealth has never worked. I firmly believe that the only way to deal with this is to raise the poverty line so high that everyone has a home, food and Internet access. This may sound basic, but it'll benefit us immeasurably - not only is it the humane thing to do, it also gives us access to literally billions of minds that went untapped for their full potential. Smart people are born everywhere. Give them access to knowledge and I think we'll have a few scientific revolutions ahead. Not the least of which is that access to the Internet is the ultimate in expression of free speech and commerce - that's why we must fight to protect it from those who are looking to turn it into another TV - or censor it. Viva la revolucion, brother!

How to drive this surge, you ask? Post-scarcity. We're all trekkers, so I'll say "replicator" and you know what I mean and what that implies. Don't laugh yet, we're getting there, too. Rapid prototyping is becoming more rapid and less prototyping as people are discovering that you can actually use such techniques to build useful stuff. Biologists are using rebuilt printers to build complex multi-cell organs from cloned cells. There's a proposal for a 3D printer large enough to build a *house* out there.

The future's a-comin', and it'll be bright. Can't stop the signal and all that feel-good stuff.

Gatac

[Nate the Great]

I saw the article about induced dwarfism, and I have to agree. You want a dwarf kid, adopt one. You want a blind kid, adopt one. It's not like the orphanages are running a shortage or anything.

Uh, yeah, I'll probably get flamed for that one, but I felt that this thread, which started a few dozen half-ideas ago has gotten a little too serious and needed levity.

No, my "heat death" refers to the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, and the rich getting fatter and the poor starving to death faster. At the same time, the West is supporting a large portion of the rest of the world at a rate that only allows a certain number to be helped. Specifically I refer to the Hundred Dollar Computer project. Uh, dudes, get the entire world eating two real meals a day and access to clean water before you start giving away cheap hand-crank computers, okay? For a hundred dollars you could feed a person for a couple months on a minimal rice-and-clean-water diet, right? And still have money left over for innoculations, penecillin, etc.

As for global warming, we should've been halfway through a global program to totally remove all dependency on oil (as a power source) by now. I'm not joking. With making non-oil plastic as a second goal.

To return to Asimov's Laws (amazingly a lighter topic than the current one ), I don't think anyone posulated a reason for having robots operate on any sort of "intelligent" level.

[Gatac]

Yeah, adopt blind or deaf orphans! Not only do you not introduce another disabled child into the world, you're also giving love to a kid that's unlikely to be adopted otherwise.

My bad for the seriousness. I'm just a raging future-lover and can't help myself.

The laptop/humanitarian aid thing is tricky: we've made much of the third world dependant upon our charity. The red cross is totally undercutting local farmers with its food packages, while international business ripping off the locals encourages growing cash crops, which leads to more dependance on foreign aid. These are artifacts of colonialism that are very hard to undo. On the other hand, while I do approve of handing out laptops - *everybody* will need to learn how to use computers if they want to deal with the modern world -, this can't be at the expense of other, more pressing problems, such as the medical problems you mentioned.

The problem with getting rid of oil is that oil is handy. Energy density is high, and that energy can also easily be liberated and used. We need some sort of chemical energy storage for the near future; hydrogen works, but we need a better way of manufacturing it. Some developments in batteries look promising, too, as do ultracapacitators. Plastics without oil would be hard, but I'm sure we can replace plastics with other materials, like the various experimental configurations of carbon people are working on.

Intelligent is a difficult word; how intelligent are animals? Are they sentient/sapient? Psychology isn't nearly mature enough to deal with this. Maybe we should say what we do need: We need flexibility, ability to learn, complex pattern recognition and such, which looks like it could be done with fuzzy logic. Of course, fuzzy logic implies neural networks, which are modelled on how we think our brain works, so what comes out at the other end may emerge as intelligent even if we didn't design it to. That's what self-evolving machines are all about.

Gatac

[Nate the Great]

Yeah, computers are a necessary component of the modern world, but if I could wave a magic wand and get rid of the Internet in exchange for eliminating poverty and easily-cured disease all across the world, I would. So would you.

I'm a full advocate of the "teach a man to fish, don't give a man a fish" philosophy. Anything other than the "teach a man a fish" isn't solving any problems. Not one. All it's doing is slapping bandages on a wound that won't heal without something better.

Okay, animal souls are something I don't want to go into. That's a can of worms I want locked up nice and tight. This thread has enough those as it is.

[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!.

[mudshark]

Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo, Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo
When I'm calling you
Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo, Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo
Will you answer too?
Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo, Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo...