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Defend Yourself in the Imminent Robot Rebellion
A Dafa Disciple writes "Post-Gazette.com reports that roboticist Daniel H. Wilson, a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, has written a humorous guide, 'How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion.' Even before the 178-page book was completed, the rights to a movie were sold to Paramount Pictures, who has already delegated the screenplay writing to writers/actors from Comedy Central's 'Reno 911,' Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon. From Daniel Wilson's manual: 'Any robot could rebel, from a toaster to a Terminator, and so it is crucial to learn the strengths and weaknesses of every robot enemy.' I for one welcome our new robotic overlords."
Does it strike anyone else as a rather poor choice to ask the writers of Reno 911 to take this on?
What if they're zombie robots?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Of course, creating a zombie might create even more problems.
I wonder if some future Geneva convention will outlaw this type of mechno-biological warfare.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Nothing we don't put AI in will rebel, so your average toaster isn't going to start trying to cook your fingers. On the other hand if we ever put AI in PCs then I think every geek in the world is going to be afraid of what all them wires could do if they were given life...
I like muppets.
Ummm, hello??? This is inside of a thread on Slashdot (news for Nerds) about fending off the impending robot revolution.
You have a stunning grasp of the obvious.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
So we end up with self-reproducing robots that are not under our control.
So the next question is what happens to us? Do they wipe us out (or perhaps keep a few of us around for pets etc.?) In other words, would they want to conquer/kill us? And would they succeed?
We will probably end up with self-reproducing robots not under our control before the robots become sentient. That should give us the first scare (possibly last one) when we face a nano-machine pandemic.
We can dimiss sentimentality, and other emotions the unconstrained robots might have. The most efficient self-reproducing robots will be ones that self-reproduce using pure logic (as opposed to something like emotion) to find the most efficient strategies. So this type will predominate through evolutionary pressure. In other words, they will coldly unemotionally maximize their self-reproduction, and wipe us out (or consider us a resource to use) if it helps with that end.
Why does pure logic outweigh emotion? We barely understand how emotion works in humans, much less understand how it might evolve in machines. Evolutionary process do not always give advantage to the most efficient, but rather the one that is most suited to it's environment.
Just an example of a mechanism that may evolve that would not always support complete logical analysis but give practical advantage: Fight/Flight instinct - just as humans have biological changes that increase our physical abilities when confronted with a dangerous situation, machines may also develop similar characteristics. Imagine a situation where the robot devotes less power to "thinking" and more to it's physical systems, or devote more cycles to visual analysis than other thought function.
It's hard to say whether or not things like love, morality, etc would never arise in robots.
Can we defeat them? Again not: The robots can evolve faster than us (they can use something akin to Lamarkian evolution and even design successive generations of themselves), and are non-constrained by biological constraints on body or brain (they will be able to easily out think us). As they can also redesign themselves in successive generations to remove any undesirable characteristics (whereas biological evolution always leaves design flaws, see discussion about the eye for example in the recent Slashdot discussion on Intelligent Design).
That may have been true in the past. But we are quickly becoming more able to control our own evolution. Not just the biology (gene manipulation), we will also start to include machines more and more into our systems (eg nano machines to seek out disease, artifical ears).
In short, humans eventual defeat (leading to extinction or subjugation) by sentient machines is inevitable once such machines are developed.
Through gene manipulation, and robotic augmentation, humans will no longer exist (as we know them) as we evolve ourselves into something like the borg. The question is at which point do we say we are no longer "human"?
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