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Laser-Armed Martian Robot Now Vaporizing Targets of Its Own Free Will (dailymail.co.uk)
Slashdot reader Rei writes: NASA -- having already populated the Red Planet with robots and armed a car-sized nuclear juggernaut with a laser -- have now decided to grant fire control of that laser over to a new AI system operating on the rover itself. Intended to increase the scientific data-gathering throughput on the sometimes glitching rover's journey, the improved AEGIS system eliminates the need for a series of back-and-forth communication sessions to select targets and aim the laser.
Rei's original submission included a longer riff on The War of the Worlds, ending with a reminder to any future AI overlords that "I have a medical condition that renders me unfit to toil in any hypothetical subterranean lithium mines..."
Rei's original submission included a longer riff on The War of the Worlds, ending with a reminder to any future AI overlords that "I have a medical condition that renders me unfit to toil in any hypothetical subterranean lithium mines..."
Run! Run while you still can!
At least the thing can't come back to earth, right? Right?
this is kind of dangerous, the last thing we want is some kind of rogue alien probe with a rock boring drill running around new york city like a big daddy from bio shock
Once upon a time the icon would have been a shark. Sigh.
I don't think that means what you think it means.
Are you actually a writer over at El Reg?
Doesn't this site deserve better than this garbage? Does every article about weapons have to be framed as 60's crappy movies about robot uprisings?
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Don't want it shooting one of own wheels off, thinking was some curious object that didn't seem to belong.
Giving such a young machine free will and a laser, isn't that a little like leaving the gun on the kitchen table where the four year old can grab it while you're out in the garden?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
At least the thing can't come back to earth, right? Right?
Its not like it matters if the probe has lasers when it left. Look at V'ger, it left with only a camera and a sound system and it came back pretty heavily armed.
this is kind of dangerous, the last thing we want is some kind of rogue alien probe with a rock boring drill running around new york city like a big daddy from bio shock
Damn right its dangerous. Look at what the martian probes did to earth when they started sampling things for organic compounds in HG Wells' historical account.
Once upon a time the icon would have been a shark. Sigh.
And since when is HAL's camera blue? Hmm what color was SAL's camera?
This is journalistic BS, disguised as 'science'. Like all computers, these robotic vehicles do only what they are programmed to do. Even so-called "random number generators" are deterministic, given the seed which generates them.
We won't be able to impart true "free will" to machines, in the human sense, until we eventually verify that we humans actually do have free will and understand how it works in us. Including understanding self-awareness ("consciousness") and how human reasoning and volition works. (Seems to be and "analog" process, not "digital").
Man ISIS is every where .....
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
If you don't pay me 1 million dollars the laser will blowup washington dc
yea, we all have that, that's why we build these things in the first place.
You admit that you have no idea how "free will" emerges, but you pretend to know that a "machine" can't have it. I don't believe that the Mars rover or any AI program has volition comparable to a human's, but I don't see any reason why future computers shouldn't acquire it. Even current computers, as deterministic as they are (modulo physical glitches and IO), are often beyond predictable, and their decisions are increasingly hard to trace back and explain by humans. As to "free will" -- I've never understood what philosophers mean by "free" in that context. Psychology has demonstrated that our decisions originate before we are conscious of them and are rationalized afterwards. So if anything in me has a "free will" it is not my conscious self. How free is that will? I don't know. I don't even know what the question means.
You play a game of semantics. "Free will" is a word we made up. It only seems mysterious because the definition is deliberately vague.
We observe that humans make decisions, whereas rocks don't. So we slapped this word "free will" on that behavior and got ourselves all confused.
First, you give me a clear, precise, no-bullshit-word-games definition of "free will," and then I will tell you whether or not computers do it.
While we are at it, "consciousness" is an extremely sloppy word full of equivocation and religious tripe. Throw it away completely. Are we talking about "subjective experience" or are we talking about "the capacity to respond to stimulus?"
I'm coming for you!
Have gnu, will travel.
What makes you think humans aren't deterministic but everything else is? Surely not science.
This is journalistic BS, disguised as 'science'. Like all computers, these robotic vehicles do only what they are programmed to do. Even so-called "random number generators" are deterministic, given the seed which generates them.
We won't be able to impart true "free will" to machines, in the human sense, until we eventually verify that we humans actually do have free will and understand how it works in us. Including understanding self-awareness ("consciousness") and how human reasoning and volition works. (Seems to be and "analog" process, not "digital").
Your sentiment is correct (most current stories about AI are bullshit), however your facts are unfortunately somewhat wrong. A number of the current hardware random number generators use either resistor noise or balanced diodes. Since these are based on quantum effects they are truly non-deterministic in a hard and measurable way. Also IMHO it's possible that we come to understand the components of intelligence without understanding what it is. In this case we could build intelligence never having understood how reasoning and volition work.
https://xkcd.com/1504/ "That's Opportunity's side of the planet."
> A number of the current hardware random number generators use either resistor noise or balanced diodes.
Yes, by sampling avalanche noise etc. But these devices have to be carefully timed and balanced to eliminate sampling biases. I doubt that such finicky devices would be used in remotely deployed systems. Indeed, the pseudo-random generators tend to be far more useful, in a systems engineering sense, because test sequences can be easily generated by repeating a seed number, for regression testing etc.
In any case, I don't think human free-will (if it indeed exists) is the same as perfect randomness, because I think we'll all agree that human behavior is somewhat predictable on a broad scale. But at the smallest scale, human actions can seem to be very "surprising", yet simultaneously "intelligent". Is that free will? I don't really know.
But so far, no functioning robot, AFAIK, has made any decision that it was not programmed to make, even if it was just flipping random switches.
When it was Star trek the motion picture.
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
Some poor martian will be continually shouting, "Ow! Knock it off! Ow! stop following me!..."
Table-ized A.I.
https://memegenerator.net/instance/55930171
-Legal.Troll (evading bad karma)
The thing that gets me is that people argue so much about free will without ever stopping to analyse their definition of what free will actually is. It's like arguing that about whether our planet's second moon is made of purple cheese or green eggs without stopping to define the word moon or checking if our planet has more than one. Here's my conclusions from when I actually took the time to think about it:
- we are just lumps of meat: no souls, spirit, essence, or any other metaphysical mumbo.
- we obey deterministic (or at least probabilistic) laws of physics, so no magical "but free will means I could have done y instead" bullshit: meat lump was in state a, meat lump had interaction b, causing meat lump to take action x.
- but, you *are* that lump of meat, nothing more nothing less. It was *your* choice because *you* (the lump of meat) processed input based on *your* past history (interactions, memory, genetic inheritance etc) to arrive at *your* decision. Yes it was deterministic, but it was still *your* decision and an expression of *your* will because *you are the lump of meat that did it*.
And yes, I would draw from this that computers have free will, as does everything else. The question of whether they have consciousness/awareness or should be accorded rights etc is another one entirely.
If there are any aliens on mars, could this be a war provocation? Now they could send, to eartg, a huge scientific 6 leg robot to start laser probing our citys.
Unintended consequences does not require "free will".
So all actions are deterministic for you then? No, for whom then?
Without knowing it, you solved all of science with a "God".
Robots and AIs do decisions they were not programmed for all the time. There are errors in logic, cosmic rays, new unplanned situations, emergent properties of complex systems, chaos. There's no use classifying anything as "free will" or not if you can't define it though.
Deterministic in "they will happen as time goes along", yes.
Deterministic in "you can tell in advance what will happen", no. Predictability is something that can be achieved only for a limited subset of outcomes based on the study of physical laws.
Seeing as how a turtle could outrun Curiosity's top speed of 0.09 mph, I think world domination might take a while.
The problem with your deterministic theory of physics is that physics isn't deterministic at all at its most fundamental level. It is random, chaotic and statistical. You can only make predictions at a macroscopic level, and sometimes not even then.
This is journalistic BS, disguised as 'science'.
Its from the Daily Mail, so the "journalistic" part is completely incorrect.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Firstly, deterministic is not the same as predictable. Any sufficiently complex system (I'm tempted to use computer networks as exhibit a here) is unpredictable, but that does not make it non-deterministic. Second, introducing randomness into a system is not magic - it's just an extra input that is not determined by any prior input. I would assume that an actual "free will" system would determine it's action based on input plus internal state. Finally, chaos (the mathematical sort) is by definition deterministic. Chaotic just means the outcome is increasingly sensitive to some input, so you might need 10 decimal places to predict the output in 10 minutes, 20 places for 20 minutes and so on. See for example the logistic equation for an extremely simple deterministic chaotic system.
So just like in Quatermass and the Pit, we are the martians.
It's cute that you think you have free will