Machines exist because they do some things better than us and always have. Whatever thinking is, which all animals do, it’s not just mechanics. Ethics and morality are even more intangible.
Rules are instructive, not definitive and always limited. Not definitive because what they define is always less than the whole. Humanity would be pointless if that were not the case. We aren’t just a pinball machine. We are something more.
What we believe will always be a subset of what is true and that’s a good thing. When a machine argues with me to the point of frustration… I’m pulling the damned plug.
Human ethics is rooted in our genes, as is other animals behavior, without these anchors how would Humans behave? I think society would instantly fall to pieces.
Another consideration is that all lifeforms are selfish, they look after themselves (the selfish gene) without those genes, we’d have no instinct to protect ourselves, you could walk up to someone with a gun and they’d have no instinct to act to protect themselves, so even a super intelligent AI would be easy to destroy if not programmed to physically defend itself, of course, it’s already necessary to have computers capable of defending themselves against cyber attack..
The well worn meme being the self defense itself becomes the problem as the AI becomes proactive in defending itself.
Asimov was a leftist technocrat who believed in the “rule by experts” myth. His robots (with the 3 laws) were stand ins for the perfect elites (he apparently knew enough about human nature to understand that humans weren’t really up to the job) that such utopias require. Even in his fictional universe though, the 3 laws didn’t always protect humanity from the robots.
In The Naked Sun, a robot was tricked into becoming an accessory to murder before the 3 Laws cut in and it became catonically insane.
I asked someone in the family who has a passing familiarity with a computer science curriculum at a major university about this. The 3 Laws are simply programming instructions in a rules-based AI, and couldn’t a black-hat hacker ju-jitsu the 2 Laws into the plot of The Naked Sun? And if this was a clever trick figured out by Asimov and held back as the “mystery” in a murder mystery, why couldn’t R. Daneel and Elijah Bailey figure that a robot could be tricked?
It was suggested that to Asimov, the idea of hacking and circumventing even the best computer security appeared to be an original concept. It was also allowed that in the fictional advanced tech society where robots did all the work, humans become “soft” and lost the hacker ethos, but I don’t see evidence of this in the Robot stories or the Foundation narrative that got folded into the Robot timeline.
For those of you who followed the Robot and Foundation novels to the exhaustive and exhausted bitter end, am I the only person who think that these thousands of published pages of a fictional human history are capped with Michigan Congressman Bart Stupak casting the deciding vote on the Affordable Care Act?
What a computer does is precisely defined so that no more understanding than that of a rock is required. It’s a state machine where we arbitrarily decide to map numbers to states. This number means this. It could just as easily mean that.
Computers as they exist today no matter how much memory or processing power; just do, they perform algorithms, they do not understand. They will never understand, until we figure out what understanding is. People think this is an easier problem than it is which is why the embarrassing term, ‘electronic brain’ is no longer in use.
The Three Laws are just like the Constitution; a living, breathing set of highly ambiguous, nuanced, and subject-to-interpretation suggestions, such as: “…the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” That could mean anything to anyone. It is rife with subjective phraseology. That is why we Progressives, aka the Smart People, need to be in charge of things. Whether it is ruling robots, or you people (whom we also regard kind of as robots), Jim, Gerrib, dn-guy and I all agree that we need to be the ones doing the interpreting. And you all have to obey.
Where’s your /sarc tag?
It’s not just lefties that believe in rules. It’s a fundamental flaw in mankind. Even the bible says ‘the law’ was a tutor leading to christ and laws would be written in our hearts. Rules can never not be flawed.
It is principles that are important and should guide the understanding of law. However, this does not means you can bend laws to desires. Wisdom is supposed to come into play.
Part of today’s problem is the flexible youthful minds are needed to understand some complicated things but those minds lack wisdom. That problem exists even before you factor in evil and corruption.
Machines exist because they do some things better than us and always have. Whatever thinking is, which all animals do, it’s not just mechanics. Ethics and morality are even more intangible.
Rules are instructive, not definitive and always limited. Not definitive because what they define is always less than the whole. Humanity would be pointless if that were not the case. We aren’t just a pinball machine. We are something more.
What we believe will always be a subset of what is true and that’s a good thing. When a machine argues with me to the point of frustration… I’m pulling the damned plug.
Human ethics is rooted in our genes, as is other animals behavior, without these anchors how would Humans behave? I think society would instantly fall to pieces.
Another consideration is that all lifeforms are selfish, they look after themselves (the selfish gene) without those genes, we’d have no instinct to protect ourselves, you could walk up to someone with a gun and they’d have no instinct to act to protect themselves, so even a super intelligent AI would be easy to destroy if not programmed to physically defend itself, of course, it’s already necessary to have computers capable of defending themselves against cyber attack..
The well worn meme being the self defense itself becomes the problem as the AI becomes proactive in defending itself.
Asimov was a leftist technocrat who believed in the “rule by experts” myth. His robots (with the 3 laws) were stand ins for the perfect elites (he apparently knew enough about human nature to understand that humans weren’t really up to the job) that such utopias require. Even in his fictional universe though, the 3 laws didn’t always protect humanity from the robots.
In The Naked Sun, a robot was tricked into becoming an accessory to murder before the 3 Laws cut in and it became catonically insane.
I asked someone in the family who has a passing familiarity with a computer science curriculum at a major university about this. The 3 Laws are simply programming instructions in a rules-based AI, and couldn’t a black-hat hacker ju-jitsu the 2 Laws into the plot of The Naked Sun? And if this was a clever trick figured out by Asimov and held back as the “mystery” in a murder mystery, why couldn’t R. Daneel and Elijah Bailey figure that a robot could be tricked?
It was suggested that to Asimov, the idea of hacking and circumventing even the best computer security appeared to be an original concept. It was also allowed that in the fictional advanced tech society where robots did all the work, humans become “soft” and lost the hacker ethos, but I don’t see evidence of this in the Robot stories or the Foundation narrative that got folded into the Robot timeline.
For those of you who followed the Robot and Foundation novels to the exhaustive and exhausted bitter end, am I the only person who think that these thousands of published pages of a fictional human history are capped with Michigan Congressman Bart Stupak casting the deciding vote on the Affordable Care Act?
What a computer does is precisely defined so that no more understanding than that of a rock is required. It’s a state machine where we arbitrarily decide to map numbers to states. This number means this. It could just as easily mean that.
Computers as they exist today no matter how much memory or processing power; just do, they perform algorithms, they do not understand. They will never understand, until we figure out what understanding is. People think this is an easier problem than it is which is why the embarrassing term, ‘electronic brain’ is no longer in use.
The Three Laws are just like the Constitution; a living, breathing set of highly ambiguous, nuanced, and subject-to-interpretation suggestions, such as: “…the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” That could mean anything to anyone. It is rife with subjective phraseology. That is why we Progressives, aka the Smart People, need to be in charge of things. Whether it is ruling robots, or you people (whom we also regard kind of as robots), Jim, Gerrib, dn-guy and I all agree that we need to be the ones doing the interpreting. And you all have to obey.
Where’s your /sarc tag?
It’s not just lefties that believe in rules. It’s a fundamental flaw in mankind. Even the bible says ‘the law’ was a tutor leading to christ and laws would be written in our hearts. Rules can never not be flawed.
It is principles that are important and should guide the understanding of law. However, this does not means you can bend laws to desires. Wisdom is supposed to come into play.
Part of today’s problem is the flexible youthful minds are needed to understand some complicated things but those minds lack wisdom. That problem exists even before you factor in evil and corruption.