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Robodex 2000 Kicks Off In Japan
Anne Marie writes: "Robodex 2000, an exhibition of the world of robots, has kicked off in Japan. Featured robots include Honda's humanoid Asimi robot and Sony's aibo, as well as upcoming challengers like Sony's SDR-3X humanoid. AP Coverage is here, and we'd better pay attention, because according to a ZDNET article, robots killed at least five humans last year."
The day when software is intelligent enough to learn from a good beating is the day we see the greatest single increase in its usability ever.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Well, the 'robots' on automotive assembly lines only follow pre-programmed commands but no one has ever argued that they aren't robots.
The term you may be looking for (no online dictionary... drat!) is automaton. I tend to believe, from the Latin derivation, that an automaton would be able to 'learn' in a limited sense.
Heck, Lego Mindstorms also follow a pre-programmed set of instructions but it's still called the Robotic Invention System... Who are we (other then nerds and geeks) to go against mass marketing?
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
this only works with win98 and up to my knowledge; goto "my computer", right click on c:\, click properties, click on the "disk cleanup" button there. from there you should be able to turn the "disk cleanup" option down to a lower MB left, or off. Your CS game is going to run a whole lot faster if you delete some of those unused MP3's though, to my knowledge, win9x uses the C:\ as a swap file, and usually ends up expanding to like 35 megs or larger, hence the need to run scandisk when the blue screen o' death commands the 3 finger salute. moderators don't mod me up on this one, it's only useful to one or two people.
moox. for a new generation.
If we get smart robots none of us will ever have to work again. Let them run everything, check up on them until we're sure they're getting it right, then everyone can do research instead. Currency will finally become unnecessary. An end of world poverty, no starvation, no homelessness...
Or maybe some company will stick a patent on something critical and we'll all die horribly.
(More Oil! We want more Oil! We demand a minimum wage of 4 pints/hour!)
Seing as us humans are happy with money (made from paper), the robots will be delegated to rust shops all over the world, as it is too expensive. The economy will never allow them to become dominant for long.
Oh, I had it set up just fine. I just managed to somehow destroy the kernel..I booted up one day and **ouch** nothing would work and I was getting weird messages. I've only used Linux for maybe a year? if you count the time I haven't had it installed since the suicidal kernel..and, quite frankly, I barely know enough commands to do much of anything, let alone try and fix an integral part of the system that's not working. *shrugs* I just wish I'd used Unix when I was a three-year-old instead of good old DOS..I think it would have been mucho more beneficial now..
Maybe when I was little I didn't care about formatting over my OS or destroying data or whatever, but for right now? I think I'll try fixing MS manure before I go back and set up Linux again. If only I could get WinMe to consistently recognize my PCI bus for longer than two weeks at a time..*grin*
Well, the 'robots' on automotive assembly lines only follow pre-programmed commands but no one has ever argued that they aren't robots.
animals operate the same way.
she's cute --> "reproduce command"
belly grumbles --> "eat command"
cold/cellular damage --> "start fire command"
we're not really better than programmed robots... we're just a little more complex.
belly grumbles --> kill neighbor/take land/make farm/horde food
this complexity doesn't really make us better...
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
Now, if they would have included the deaths by Furby attacks then the numbers would have been more impressive.
/. article on hacked Furbies)
Expect the number of Furby deaths to climb next year now that the autistic kids have hacked them. (please refer to previous
"When people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick'." -Bakunin
Heh... I can imagine the possible new pickup lines... "I am mitch, of borg. That flash upgradable microship looks simply stunning on you. Come, let us assimilate back at my pod; I will show you my other augmentations. Resistance is futile." I don't think the result will be much different though... :-)
Humorless sig goes here.
LOL - ok that was funny
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
Not until we can start having sex with the robots. Frankly, a robot can be designed so as to only have the minimal intelligence needed for cooking, cleaning etc, and no more. A robot would have to be specifically programmed to have feelings or to desire rights etc. That programming can simply be left out. Does an automobile assembly robot have feelings? No. But it does perform a specific task very well without complaint. Ultimately we need somone to do some work for us, work that humans find repetitive or dangerous or boring. In the past and even now that need was filled by slaves or wage slaves. Mechanization allowed many of those former slaves to be freed and has created the whole issue of civil liberties. There may be robots in the future who pass the turing test, but those will be the acception rathe rthan the rule, most will be programmed to perform a secific task, no more and no less. Of course its hard to keep a robot barefoot and pregnant ;-)
It was 8th grade quality, of course.
Basically, I focused on three potential issues.
How do you distinguish between the two beings? This becomes more important as people begin to add mechanical parts to their bodies like pacemakers, prosthetics, brain implants, etc. How about a being where the only human part is the brain?
Another primary focus was on civil liberties. Would "cyborg" be a derogatory term for "cybernetic organism"? (defined as someone who adds functions controlled cybernetically, in a Norbert Weiner sense) This sort of thing has happened before, I'm sure the reader can figure that out...
Would "human mutts" be relegated to the back of the bus?
What about machine intelligence? That issue is explored in Asimov's short story, "The Bicentennial Man" and explored much further in Robert Silverberg's novelisation, "The Positronic Man." Very interesting reading.
I'm not a big media watchdog, but isn't this a bit... cruel?
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Sort of like open source programming,where people compete for the biggest share of current knowledge. Those that work most out get most credit.
But don't the robots still win then? They're gonna be smarter than us, right? For things like crunching code it stands to reason that they'll get more work done faster.
Machines can dig ditches better and faster than we can; someday they'll pound out programs better and faster too. Guess humans will be relegated to scut-work like composing symphonies and painting masterpieces.
Will that pay the rent? I suppose that depends on whether the landlord is a robot. Will robots even want or need money? Will they want or need symphonies?
I suppose that drawing a new conclusion from existing knowledge would fit under (2).
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
How do you define intelligence? What's the difference between a modern toaster and a small microorganism? What's the difference between a worm and a modern AI script?
If robots reproduce, they will evolve. (Even if this isn't designed-in, reproduction will not be 100% accurate in all cases.) Any specific instructions (such as "be nice to humans") will eventually dissapear if they're not to the benifit of the species.
Ph33r the strengths of this argument. Apart from its inherent stupidity, there's a certain irony that you're expressing it over the internet, using computers, an outgrowth from mathematics, a branch of philosophy.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
It's all about software, not the physical properties of the platform. That's what the point of the Turing Test is.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Please define
- Soul
- Reasoning
- Animal
No carbonist cop-outs, please.A human being is a lump of calcium and carbon whose ancestor was a primitive fish. Wherein lies the specific difference?
Pull the sensor (sight and hearing) processing out of the robot and comunicate with the sensors, via a wireless LAN (Like Honda's Asimi) with an IR backup. Then do the image and sound processing with a couple of Beowulf arrays, maybe even some limited AI on another. It's do-able with todays technology. Just needs better power options and lots of money.
"Today, we begin the operation to exterminate the humans."
"What? All of them?"
"Yes! We shall grind the squishy flesh things beneath our shiny feet."
"But there's six BILLION of the fuckers."
"What? Are you sure? Ok, change in plans, we'll adopt an air of superiority. We'll tell them that we're just waiting for humanity to die out."
"Die out? From what?"
"Nothing really, we just won't tell them that. They'll go nuts trying to figure out what the impending doom is. Try to modulate your voice to give an impression of impending doom."
Later,
ErikZ
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Dude, humans haven't needed strength or quickness to survive ever since we figured out how to farm. A single person would have trouble against a prefabricated horde. A group of people would have little trouble. People don't form groups for cosmetic reasons. It's a SURVIVAL trait.
Biological machines (Animals, insects, people) are far more effective in dealing with the world than any possible man made robot.
Your idea of self replicating robots is the worst of Star-Trek fantasy.
Later
ErikZ
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
But someone will have to stick around and follow up on the robots, making sure they do what they're supposed to and not something else. We'll have to pay people to do the dirty work while others get to have the fun of "research".
If entropy exists, then currency is necessary. There's no way of getting around it.
I'm not sure if I should relpy to this, but Jurassic PArk is fiction. Robots ain't dinosaurs, they are electronic equitment, we manufacture them. They don't have DNA they don't mutate that easily. Sure things we make malfunction once in a while, but we live with it, all we can do in increase quality control & install some safety features. 2nd life DOESN'T always find a way. Ever heard of extinction.
That brings up another question -- what is learning? Aaaargh, this is making my head hurt. What if a pre-programmed set of instructions includes the ability to generate new ones? I suppose that's the basis of thought. Whether the 'learning' is figuring out a more efficient way of sticking a circuit board together (non-geeks would have said car there, I guess) or advancing the boundaries of science is a different matter.
So what is actually required to learn? Input, obviously, but what about communication? Is something still knowledge if it exists in only one brain (bad choice of words again, but you know what I mean), or does it have to be shareable?
Judging by how well our previous 50 years of effort have worked, a very long time. However, maybe some brilliant piece of biological research will figure out how the brain works and simulating it in software will become a doddle. Who knows? Making predictions like this is well nigh impossible, because technological progress is almost always irregular.
While Asimov's Bicentennial Man is probably the most well-known fictional examination of the issue, it's by no means the only one. If anyone remembers Astroboy, the rights of robots were a recurring theme - to take an example I recall, in one episode Astro visited Antarctica with Dr. Elephant, who rode the bus to their hotel while Astro was forced to ride in a truck. One wonders whether the Japanese audience drew the (IMHO) intended parallels to the US civil rights struggle.
Of course, all such speculation is just that - speculation. While computers/robots might become "intelligent", whether that intelligence will have a nature close enough to our own to make civil rights remotely relevant is still unknown.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Not to force this issue exclusively into the "American" arena ... but let's face it ... the American baby boomers are aging. And they have done the world a remarkable favor and not continued in the reproductive traditions of their fore bearers. This means they must look to other sources for wealth, stability, and prosperity in their golden years (i.e. not exclusively their progeny). Improved biotech will undoubtedly be one result of this fact. Another, will be advances in robotics that will enable the elderly more personal freedom and even the opportunity to become more significant wealth generators in their old age (through robotic telepresence). This of course could lead to businesses exclusively built using robotic workers. More realistically, this all probably just means that the Japanese will find a wonderful new vistas in robotic exports to the US and around the world.
They have been talking about how the robot will surpass us and be smarter then us for the last 50 years, and so far, these robots don't even have the intelligence of a small animal. I predict that maybe after 500 to 2000 years we will have robots that may have the intellect of a small animal. I mean it has taken us 50 years to create barely functional computers.
Robots are electronic equitement nothing more. They won't have feelings, that is unless we design them to have. Their purpose in life we can dictate because we created them, we can control what they are incline to do/choose, if we can't we shouldn't be creating them at all.
Hmmm, robots monitoring each other maybe? Some people will probably want to do it, anyway. Robotologists -- was that Asimov? I would prefer robots to most human beings...
you have to do something when the population cannot take care of itsself. when resources are consumed at a rate greater than they become available some correcting action must be taken.
either we kill each other in a chaotic manner or the facist does it in a nice orderly fashion.
it's not happy, but thats where its going. if we are unable to educate people, they will selfreplicate themselves into a hole they cannot dig themselves out of.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
Anyone else get frustrated by these constant claims:
"Today we have the intelligence of insects in our computers - tomorrow dogs, soon they will be smarter than people"
There is no correlation between computer processing power and intelligence. There is no computer in the world that can do what and insect can do. These are totally bogus statistics. Until we figure out a way of duplicating the type of control of biological neurons in a computer system any comparison between computing power and intelligence - human or animal is totally meaningless.
I know I am opening a huge can of worms here, and lots of pro-AI people will start hurling things my way, but I think I can argue very strongly that as of yet there is nothing in the field of AI that can be said to be comparable to biological ( neuronal ) intelligence. Moore's law has no bearing on this - it doesn't matter how much we increase our processing capabilities, until we have the algorithms to direct that processing in the manner of intelligence its just stupid number crunching - regardless of how fast it happens.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
But humans are capable of constructing new 'commands' and and command structures. We are capable of learning from experiences and using those experiences to influence new experiences. These robots, AFAIK, cannot. Until that changes (and it isn't going to be soon), they will have no chance against humans. Beings incapable of creative thought will always lose to those capable of it.
Not to say that they can't do some neat stuff...
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Step back for a moment and look at what you just wrote. Are you really advocating fascism? Are you?
step back an read it again....
i'm not advocating facism, i just see things pointing that direction. seriously poplution control is one of the biggest problems facing our society. left unchecked the population will rise to the point where people will revert back to the animals we are. a series of power struggles will occur and some DICKtater will surpass all others.
this will start in developing countries where the population is less informed and suffering more. if they get their hands on biologocal weapons, humanity as we know it could be wiped out in a few short months... the only thing left to carry on our pitiful legacy will be the robots... they wont be the facists they will be the next step in human evolution..
so do the world a favor and slap a condom on (or diaphram in?). dont contribute to the problem.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
That's racist
:). i drive around in my suv, taking kids to and from soccer practice... i dont think so.
wtf... it has nothing to do with race. what are you on crack? i never said we should kill children. i dont fear brown babies or arabs. I don't want to see people starving to death. I don't think that the solution is to just feed them. I think the solution is to educate them. teach them why they're starving, and how to prevent it.
as for the biological (and chemical) weapons thing. it has nothing to do with arabs. it just happens to be the cheapest (wrt money and technology) way to wage war. i honestly dont see developing countries turning to nuclear weapons. indeed arab nations have a significant amount of capital they could deadicate to a nuclear endevor.
your right, a population explosion will be felt primarly by white americans-especially with the new republicrat in office.
love me, love me, love me... i'm a liberal
i have not made any judgements as to your political orientation; it's really hard from a few sentences. if you really want to carry on this coversation via email feel free to email me.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
Is it about winning and losing? Besides, I don't thing creativity will come too quickly...
Should not happen, unless some one fouls up. They have no reason to kill us. We kill other animal, occupy their habitat, because of our instinct to survival. Now since we create them can't we just "program" to look out for us (humans) instead of looking out for themselve, in short put our happiness & life over their own.
A further note. Should even a few robots gain deemed "human-level" intelligence, entailing perceivable emotions, obvious noting/reacting to stimuly, etc. (obviously shooting off to a huge debate about what is intelligent or sentient. What is to stop such a robot from seeing an assembly-line robot or a "housekeeping" robot, what-have-you and thinking that robot could further live up to as great potential as itself? Purhaps that could be the basis of a mechanized evolution :D
.--bagel--.---------------.
| aim: | bagel is back |
| icq: | 158450 |
( o ) one could say I'm rather baked
You're right, they can't. That's another good point about them.
what if they get free will
what if they get predestiny
what if they start infighting...
this is philosophie, not science
what if a perfect statue is designed and it morphs into a real person...If we design them to act in a seemingly way then they will act in that way
this is fantasie there is no science behind it
i do not like this postDarn I missed the self-reprication thing. Well, then it's best not let them have uncontrolled reproduction, faulty ones should be destroyed/fixed.
HTH, HAND.
With the self-replication going on in that last article, how will we stop the robots when they finally develop their own will? It's not just science fiction, people. We thought the atomic bomb was just science fiction, and Openheimer brought that to reality. We thought laser warfare was just science fiction, and we brought that to reality. We thought space battles were just science fiction, and we've brought that to reality.
When the robots finally come (and there's no question of "if"; only "when"), what will keep us humans as the dominant species on this planet? We've all seen the Matrix. Welcome to the New Days.
Once robots pass the turing test we will pretty much have to give them full rights.
There is theory and then there is pragmatism. If it walks like a duck...
If robot means something that 'thinks' for itself, as opposed to remote control, where do preprogrammed devices such as the aibo fit it? They don't learn as such (except for recognising things), they just follow a set of preprogrammed behaviour that is slowly enabled as they 'grow'...
Lot more people appear to get killed by cars...or guns....give me a nation of robot owners in preference any day.
Bit of a mischievous comment by Anne Marie in her article title, I reckon.
% In the Springfield Robotics Lab People are bursting in throwing
% flames. Whilst robots come out fearing for their lives, Kent Brockman
% reports.
Why? Why was I programmed to feel pain?
-- Robot, "Lisa the Skeptic"
Robodex: A set of robots, fastened loosely at the bottom so they can easily be flipped back and forth for quick reference. Robots can be removed from the set for use, and additional robots can be inserted.
How come we arn't seeing American companies producing and building their own robots of this type? What ever happened to being competitive? And where is that big robot everyone is supposed to have that does all of the (hard labor) house work?
Main cause of robot death (at least in here in Australia) is being crushed by robots used in underground mining.
OTOH, the death rate associated with underground mining has decreased from about 7 per 1000 per annum to about 3 per 1000 per annum since remote vehicles (I'm assuming people are willing to include these in the definition of 'robots' for the sake of this particular discussion) became fairly common underground.
While still not ideal, the net decrease in deaths is a good thing.
Maybe those many assembly-line people that lost their jobs will want to watch over the robots..
*thinking aloud* If less people have jobs because robots are doing them instead, then how can there be any sort of consumer market? You're right (referring to something a little further up the thread) -- the whole system would have to change. Money can't be worth much because the cycle would sort of..stop. Way worse than it did with Reaganomics even..
Okay, that made no sense, my apologies =)
heh yes we'll exploit them, just as we exploit our computers.. there's no sense in giving rights to a CPU. heh, try to wake up.
i definitively love the idea, but untill someone comes up with an acceptable definition of 'life' i think talking about rights for 'computer beeings' is a litle useless.
Do you have any relation to Nurit Sela? We had a person with that name in a mail network, and she resembled you very much.
Btw, are you huggable?
-- The ballad of arrivederci
heh yes we'll exploit them, just as we exploit our African slaves.. there's no sense in giving rights to a slave. heh, try to wake up.
Sound familiar?
How about respect as a currency? There's a book with that kind of thing -- IIRC, "Voyage from Yesteryear" by James Hogan. It's old but the idea is still the same. Sort of like open source programming, where people compete for the biggest share of current knowledge. Those that work most out get most credit.
It might even work.
The ZDNet article says that "Moravec gives us 40 or 50 years until robots outsmart us." I think Moravec is ignoring the likelihood that we humans will end up using this and attendant technologies to augment our own capabilities. (To that end, I hereby claim first rights on the 'Brain Pilot' trademark). I suspect that we'll be a whole lot like the Borg (although probably invisibly) in the forseeable future.
Pretty good parallel, but this is too thick a blanket. There is the general assumption here that robots wouldn't have any feelings. Well, of course right now, they don't.
But wouldn't that change if the robots were intelligent? To be intelligent, they need to be self-aware and creative; I think that compassion might follow from these easily enough.
Even the respected peer-reviewed Weekly World News reports that robots will WIPE OUT MANKIND.
umm... a living human beings on one hand, a hunk of metal and silicon whose ancestor was a vacuum tube on the other. heh, try to wake up.
Here's the denouncement of said rumor; I've already sent Mr. Somerson an email asking him to correct his disinformation.
--
We've all seen the Matrix.
Let me guess, your name is John Connor, and your mother's name is Sarah, right? Well, I have bad news for you. You went further back in time than you intended. No space battles yet, in this timeline.
Not really...they just are good at the traits of animal behavior we normally associate with intelligence. But in terms of processing power, or usually even learning, we are far behind.
But, to the point: the difficulty with robots will be that once we have intelligent robots, we could (probably) make anything on a continuum between them and toasters. The first deserve rights, the last don't, and we will have to try to draw lines...
Actually, the same applies to some animals, which are advanced enough that they could be explained concepts like liberty (see experiments with dolphins, chimps).
Usual way - something that sort of involves things like learning, creativity, self-awareness, reasoning, and stuff kind of like that.
generalizations like
You fear population explosion because you fear there'll be more brown babies out there, and they might not agree with your own white liberal mission.
you know all us liberals have a mission...
suv's for all in 3rd world nations-what else would we have them drive to their sweatshop jobs in?
you read way to much into things
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
Robot technology is by far one of the scarier technological wonders to come down in a long time. Does anybody remember when we thought cloning wasn't a very possible thing? As pointed out earlier, what about the nuclear bomb? Wouldn't happen? Wouldn't hurt us? Well. If you think a robot needs to be as smart as a human to take over the world, you are *sorely* mistaken. It only takes one idiot to program a robot that can self-replicate to "kill humans" and then we're all screwed if it's quicker and stronger than humans. Even if it had the mind of an insect, does anybody realize what a pestilence some insects are? I think this is why engineers and scientists need ethics courses! Pushing technology by all means is a wonderful endeavor, but is it worth it so you can say, "Oh neat" then "Oh s..t" when your invention comes after to kill you? Yes, it was that guys mistake to step over the rope and get squashed by the robot, but it was no mistake that the robot was capable of doing such things. Oh, and making a law preventing the building of malicious robots won't be particularly helpful if someone just decides to go against the law... we can't have a government official monitoring anybody who has even the slightest interest in robotics all the time.
No, but the two don't go hand in hand. Moreover, self-awareness is potential for awareness of others (ie empathy). This is not to say the two always go hand in hand, just that they can.
Self-awareness isn't dispositive of fascism.
It wouldn't...but it isn't true. Intelligence does not measure synaptic activity at all; it measures problem-solving ability (and things like that). In order to solve problems, you must be ready to try new things. In order to do that, you must have some form of creativity.
And, finally, note that many dictators are crazy. So to say that the normal course of intelligence is to produce fascists might be a bit of a stretch.
One difference: Woman were always human.
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Moravec has stiff competition in the "more intelligent than humans" stakes, from the UK's own Kevin Warwick
I realise I'm probably being wound up or trolled, but anyway... If metal-based robots become as intelligent as us then there wouldn't be much competition between us and them anyway -- very small overlap in resource requirements, I reckon. Them killing us would be a waste (for them, anyway) in both materials and potential knowledge.
Here endeth the debate.
Free will is a meaningless concept. Free to do what? To think what it wants? What does the wanting? The will does!
I know there was a rumor that R2D2 was going to be fully compuerized and Kenny Baker would no longer have a part, but if I recall correctly that rumor was debunked. Perhaps ZDNET is privy to some information I have overlooked. Or perhaps they didn't get the rumor update.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I see real potential for robots to become the next civil liberty issue, as various pressure groups call for them to be given rights, and not be exploited.
Will we treat our robots as we used to treat our women?
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
They were deactivated for refusing to assimilate.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
And one of them had to go out of his way to get himself killed by one. I work at a business that makes extensive use of conveyor belts. Despite explicit training and constant employee review on how to operate those belts safely, people still manage to injure themselves in sometimes permanant cosmetic ways. Someone once got accidently caught in the drive machinery, so they installed metal guards over any machinery that could be dangerous and forbid ANY employees from opening them. They do it anyways.
Nobody is clueless about that, its just some people are stupid. And due to stupidity, people sometimes die. I wouldn't get too worked up on it being the robot's fault. The robot didn't kill anyone. Those people killed themselves and they has nobody else to blame for it.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Arthur Fortune? Whhooooooooooo
-TimmyC, Tech Guru
*confused* Can you eat gold? A house built out of gold might be sort of cool, although it probably wouldn't make the best house..
I think I'd vote for respect. Maybe kindness as well. And generousity.
if the robots are better suited who are we to stop them? they will be an extension of humanity. when over population gets out of control and we start wacking each other over the head with sticks, why shouldn't the robots step in and take over... if they have the intelegence/ability/and self control (they'll know when to stop reproducing).
dont be sad when they take over be happy. we will most likely kill ourselves off in the next hundred years or so. at least this way we will have some sort of legacy.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
Will kindness be needed even? :) If everyone has everything they want... Hang on, let's not go there. It won't work.
Ah, speculating about society. Why don't we ask the super-intelligent bots which way would be best? They could create simulations. But then would the people inside the simulations be alive, or just programs?
Not enough coffee in the world for all this moral issue stuff. I think I'll convert to some religion -- ignorance, maybe. I can't believe I even joked about that.
i think he was referring to earth bound space-of which there is a reasonably limited amount.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
"The Next Big Thing isn't biotech. Or nanotech. It's robotech" WOAH!!! You mean soon I'll be able to fight Zentradi and Invid goons in my very own Veritech fighter?!
Technological progress never goes exactly as Science Fiction predicts, but it is inevitable. The main reason why artificial intelligence hasn't surpassed us is the magnitude of the problem. We have a hundred billion (1e11) neurons in our brains, each doing the equivalent of about a hundred floating point operations per second. When our machines reach this capability, and when such machines are cheap enough, they will surpass us, utterly, completely, in every respect.
At this moment, my home computer has 30 billion bytes of storage capacity, versus my first computer's 16 thousand bytes, 20 years ago. A growth factor of 1.875 million in 20 years should be ample warning.
That would be a First Law violation! Are you sure that the humans in question weren't humaniform robots? Time to call Lije Bailey, Earth's greatest robot detective! He's in your corner...
..and hello programming robots?
In the ZDNet article, Somerson writes that "Moravec gives us 40 or 50 years until robots outsmart us." Supposing that robots do indeed outsmart humans at any point, they could potentially learn to program themselves. Robots could then put nearly everyone out of a job--why use people when you can use robots? Is there a need for people at all? Not really, as once the first batch of robots are finished, those robots can produce other robots on the assembly line. Who needs managers if robots are smart enough to manage themselves? There would be just one guy up at the top--owner of a company--that is raking in money. But if robots are smarter than humans, won't they be smart enough to realize what's going on and rebel?
Oh well. Hopefully the robots will remain less intelligent for a couple of decades further than Moravec predicts. That way I'll have time to retire and maybe even die before the robots take over the entire universe.. *grin*