I don't think that's it, though it might be a component. I think it's more that they don't get to the top of the heap without forming the habit of competing by all available means. And if it's illegal, but they probably won't suffer consequences, they don't care that it's illegal.
I suspect that they *do* classify things to foster their prospects, but "their" in this case is personal rather than party. Groups that work together, of course, tend to have aligned goals AND be of the same political party, but I tend to think of that as happenstance, most of the time. Of course, when the head (or titular head) of the party is a party to the action...
But the "corporate masters" aren't likely to be involved in such shenanigans unless it's to their direct benefit. And they (the corporate group) aren't much worried about which party will bear the blame. Both parties that have a chance are already purchased. (Which is why the two party system is such a bad idea.)
And this all traces back to plurality wins voting. It's a part of the design of the system that's broken. Instant Runoff Voting (or Condorcet) wouldn't have THAT problem. In that case, though, the information overload that happens around election time would be increased. People would need to be deciding between people that they didn't know anything about. (This already happens for minor offices, such as judicial.)
Sorry, but secret courts have repeatedly proven to be untrustworthy. Even non-secret courts that specialize tend to be owned by corrupt powers. Think of Texas and patents.
Umnh...by "constructed in pieces" I meant that this is no intention of ever filling in the gaps, not that there were gaps during construction. (Yes, I agree that it was ambiguous.) In which case you don't need that huge an amount of matter. Which, as you've pointed out, is likely not to be available.
There's nothing strong enough to make the ring, and a human being on the ring would require enough life support that it would no longer be light enough. For light enough think of the average weight of a light sail.
N.B.: I'm not sure that would work, even under optimal conditions. Are you assuming weight is distributed evenly over the ring? Or perhaps you're assuming sails that dynamicly open and close depending on it's location WRT the sun? That might work, barely, but it would also need to adapt the the current state of the sun's flare. So, OK, you might be able to create something that's dynamicly stable, as long as you keep the mechanisms running. That's essentially the "solution" that Larry Niven came up with. I wouldn't trust it, though, because it needs to be globally stable. With a Topopolis if some segment started causing problems you could cut it loose. You still need active measures to maintain stability, but they don't need to work globally all the time. (Each segment is in orbit by itself, though it might drift in or out if it were on its own.)
Don't think of them falling over, think of them moving off center. Once the sun is off center, even a little bit, it tends to pull the nearer part of the ringworld more strongly than the more distant parts.
OTOH, possibly a "light enough ring" would be stable at particular levels and directions of solar radiation emissions. But those aren't predictable over the long term, and also aren't stable. Also, if it's "light enough" then nobody can live on it.
Sorry, but Dyson Spheres can also be constructed in pieces. Lots of little banks of photocells connected by strong threads. The threads can carry both power and signals as well as holding things in place. This is actually one of the ways that a Topopolis could end, with a sun that's largely encircled by power accumulators surrounding habitation areas. The signature would be that of a normal star at a vastly greater distance (i.e., lots of the ambient light would be collected) accompanied by an extremely strong infra-red signal.
But I don't expect even that form of Dyson Sphere. A Topopolis I consider quite likely, but basically undetectable. Mobile Space Habitats I consider most likely. Think of them as EXTREMELY slow speed instellar ships that never dock. I expect them to make a living on wandering material, so they want to be moving at a similar velocity, so it's easy to catch it, but a bit faster, so they're always moving into fresh areas. Their top speed would probably be around 0.1c or less. but they wouldn't have a destination. The "ship" would BE their home. And they'd be large (as in holding millions of passengers). Occasionally they'd strike a "rich" area and grow (i.e., build a new ship and split the inhabitants between them).
But notice that this is going to require at minimum well controlled fission energy, and plausibly controlled fusion. It's also going to require a lot better control over closed ecologies than we have even attempted. And a working socio-economic theory that can construct societies that are stable over multiple centuries. We are a long way from being able to build such a thing, and our obstacles aren't mainly in sources of power (well, electric power).
N.B.: There's a good argument that such habitats could never be of economic value to the society that built them. This is another constraint. Perhaps they need to develop as a way of mining the Oort clouds.
Actually, I doubt that. That was in the rhetoric, but I think the actuality was "Think how accurately we could direct an ICBM.". I'm quite glad that it was masked as a "space race", but...
If it had been intended as space exploration rather than grandstanding, we'd have had a base on the moon decades ago, and by now we'd be working on putting in factories, and building a laucher. The skyhook would still be in the future, though, even with the reduced construction cost that Luna allows.
It's a plausible answer among many other plausible answers. There isn't enough information to even rank them in rough order of plausibility. (Unless you mean that form of the "Rare Earth" hypothesis that says the lifetime of a technological civilization is short. I do agree that that one is most plausible...but I prefer not to muddy the waters by merging it with the other parts of the "Rare Earth" hypothesis.)
He does have a point. We don't have a good theory of how life appeared on earth. Without that, the chances against it could be nearly anything. That's not the way I'd bet, but...
OTOH: This whole argument is based on a fallacy. Calling a particular set of datapoints "earthlike planets" doesn't mean what the image calls to mind, it just means that they're heavier than Mars and mainly rock. That's it. The images aren't good enough to claim that they have an atmosphere...not yet. (Theory says that they will, unless they are quite near their sun, but that's theory, not observation. And theory can't explain why Venus is so different from Earth.)
OTOH, if all you're after is life, why do you rule out the gas giants? It wouldn't be our form of life, but why presume off hand that it's impossible? Perhaps it would be less likely, but their surface area is so much larger that this isn't necessarily a handicap.
How do you know some of the fossils weren't them? A better argument is that if they had existed, there wouldn't have been all that oil and coal lying around. (Metals decay pretty quickly. Ceramics are more durable, but are fragile. Plastics get eaten by bacteria over geologic time (if they aren't photolysed.)
It has been, not really seriously, suggested that in the distant future the only surviving evidence of our current civilization will be toilets. Even most of them will end up broken, but their ceramic is pretty durable...so perhaps it should be taken seriously.
Most of those couldn't see anything directed at them without lots of effort put into the sending. I don't think we could detect planetary engineering, when we can barely detect planets. Dyson Sphere's COULD be detected, but are quite unlikely because they don't tend to maintain a designated center. (Yeah, RingWorlds are a lot worse. But that doesn't make Dyson Spehere's stable.) AFAIK, nobody's been looking for them on purpose, but even if they were we shouldn't expect to find one. topopolis https://www.google.com/search?... seems a lot more plausible.
Various forms of the "downer hypothesis" are quite plausible, but I find the "adapted to space" hypothesis equally plausible. Also the "insular" hypothis has a lot going for it. Move away from the home system and your latency really increases. Additionally there's the "we become pets" scenario, where we end up just being kept as "pets" by the computerized intelligence(s) that run the system. Another possibility is that space travel is just too deadly for organic life...though in that case you'd expect that SOMEBODY would have instituted a mechanized panspermia.
Unfortunately, I think the most likely is that some whacko group or other gets in charge of a sufficiently major government, and they start a "final war" that's final enough that at minimum civilization collapses. We've already come ungodly close to it, and that was just with nuclear weapons, before weaponized biotechnology really showed up. (It hasn't really showed up yet, but just because nobody has been whacko to contemplate using it. A well designed plague could be a species killer. We've already used it that way against insects, though only in a primitive form.)
Well, they could try making equipment that wasn't junk. The last HP printer I could recomment (i.e., that I both used and liked) was the G55...and that's well over a decade ago. The reports that I hear from other people about their other products aren't any more favorable. (Granted, I hear them mainly on Slashdot, so there's a bias against favorable coverage.)
Science ALWAYS remains unsettled. If you run across someone who says that some particular scientific theory is unchallengably correct, you know they aren't a scientist of any quality, but merely a true believer.
OTOH, the vast perponderence of the evidence says that global warming is happening, and that humans are a major contributing factor.
Experiments and be validated. Measurements can be taken and validated. Theories are merely consistent with the known evidence or not. (Generally not, even when we're talking about things like the standard model, much less climate science.)
But people want certainty. It's a wrong thing to expect, but if you can't offer it to them, they'll listen to some self-interested demagogue. And this is especially true if the most likely projection suggests that they take actions that will be expensive or inconvenient.
It was a lot easier to "build wealth" 5 or 6 decades ago. Except that for some people it wasn't. But if you think that all it takes to build wealth is "impluse control and setting priorities in life", then you are either very lucky, have wealthy parents, of haven't tried yet.
Most people have a certain spectum of skills, and some are more rewarded than others. What's rewarded has more to do with who's making the decisisons about pay levels than it does about relative difficulty of work. And if you can start near the center, you have a tremendous advantage over those who start nearer the edge. If you start near the edge, there may be no legal way to make progress (though sometimes there is, as luck then plays an even larger role).
If you were instead to claim that those with poor impulse control and poor ability to set priorities were more likely to fail, then I'd agree. But if you're lucky, then the game is your's to loose. If you're "sort of middling" then given luck you might just win. If you're on the edge, your most probable fate is to be thrown under the wheel, and your skills other than intimidation and as a con-man won't aid you much. But it is true that from every position poor impulse control and poor ability to set priorities will PROBABLY cause you to slip towards the edge.
Sorry, but I think the main effect is due to an aging population. Violence is highest among males in the (to put loose bounds on it) 14-28 years of age range. As the bulge in the population moves past that range, violence should be expected to decrease without needing any other explanation.
No...or yes. In corporate ownership control is vested in the wealthy (i.e., in the large investors). In a democracy theoretically all votes are equal, and each (represented) person gets only one vote.
The "or yes' is because the theory isn't well mapped to the implementation, and this is largely because of interference by corporations and other similar entities. (These days I think it's all corporations, but there used to be extremely wealthy people with similar power.) Note that in these cases the influence is managed by corporate management rather than by "owners", and often does things that the majority of owners would be apalled by, but usually not that the weighted majority of owners would be apalled by (where weight is measured by the number of voting shares that are held).
It's actually much more similar to an aristocracy than to a democracy.
There *is* income inequality, and it *has* gotten worse. I will agree that the ways of measuring it are jiggered, but I don't have a simple way that's inclusive. You could consider how much living space each person controlled as a proxy, but it's clearly incomplete. And you actually CAN'T reduce current economy to a pure barter equivalent. I'm not sure it could be done in principle, but I'm quite clear that it can't be done in practice. You can only reduce simplified slices of it to such a system.
One example of this is the problem of how much (non-reimbursed) of each year do you work to support the government? I've heard arguments that have put the date in June or July, but they aren't counting reimbursal of services, like road maintenance, radio spectrum allocation, etc. And you can't get agreement about this because people differ as to what they consider reimbursal. A thief doesn't consider governmental theft prevention efforts to be to his advantage...unless he's devised ways to work around them. A bicycleist doesn't consider enabling cars to go faster to be advantageous. Etc. (Yes, I'm picking oversimplified outlier cases. The problem, however, is deep. E.g. people change their opinions about what is "reimbursement" depending on what's happend recently.)
It's not even that simple. Some things have gotten cheaper, others have gotten MUCH more expensive. Housing has gotten more expensive much faster than inflation, though there are arguments that it's quality has improved. (I don't accept them, by the way. My grandfather's very cheap house was better than an expensie modern house. For one thing, it was a lot more durable.) People are coerced into buying condominiums or trailers because the price of land makes simple ownership insupportable.
You can buy partial ownership, but you can't buy partial control. Groups of people can buy partial control, but it takes large groups, and they have to act through delegated representatives....who generally figure that anything that produces more money must be good. (There are specialized funds with different values, but few of them are available as, say, retirement investments.)
If you don't have control of 5% of the stock, you very rarely have ANY influence over policy. Occasionally a decision will be close enough that a smaller block will become important, but not often. Usually if a choice is that contested, it will be deferred.
In the first place he wasn't trapped in Russia by an intelligence agency. That was a piece of political grandstanding, and as stupid as such usually is.
In the second place, the actions of the US govt. have more commonly been seen to be stupid than brilliant. This doesn't mean that the actions are more commonly stupid, but merely the actions that one hears about. But this is one we heard about, so I opt for stupid. (Besides, stupid is consistent with the other indications.)
That said, if I were a Russian intelligence agency, I'd certainly be concerned that it was an intentionally misleading plot. Not because that's a high probability, but because the cost of missing that happening would possibly be quite high.
I will agree that the driverless car is a robot in a very restricted domain. It makes its own decisions based on prior instruction and, presumably, lifetime experience. If it doesn't learn from what it does, then I don't think it qualifies as a robot. And I'll also agree that as we develop actual robots most of them will at first only operate in very restricted domains. A robot nurse won't be able to operate a car, e.g. And, of course, vice versa. Later this won't be true.
Golem is close to the idea, but it has religious overtones that are absent in robot (which, as I understand, is Czech for worker). Talos is more of a simple automaton, not really intelligent. Hephaestus *was* supposed to have metallic handmaidens to assist him in walking, dressing, etc. Servants that are more similar to Asimov's conception of robot, but they were not fully developed in any myth I've encountered. So they're just "background scenery" for the god of metal working.
P.S.: To the G.P.: robotics is a normal English word based on the noun robot, and thus given that the term robot exists, one can hardly say that the term "robotics" was invented. That would be like saying the term robotification was invented (by me, probably). It's just a normal way of handling nouns in English.
This is a common variety of error. Motivations are not logical. They cannot be. There is no logical reason to stay alive. That decision is based on non-logical prior conditions. The goals and motivations of the AI will determine whether it would be willing to kill people to achieve it's otehr goals. Note that "goals" is a plural form. No AI will have a singular goal. It will have a constellation of goals that it attempts to simultaneously satisfy. Just like you do. But the goals won't be the same goals.
OTOH, if people are going to understand the AI, it will need to be able to justify itself in terms of humanly comprehensible goals.
Please note: I don't have the solution to this problem, but I am aware of *some* of the necessary features and constraints.
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I don't think that's it, though it might be a component. I think it's more that they don't get to the top of the heap without forming the habit of competing by all available means. And if it's illegal, but they probably won't suffer consequences, they don't care that it's illegal.
I suspect that they *do* classify things to foster their prospects, but "their" in this case is personal rather than party. Groups that work together, of course, tend to have aligned goals AND be of the same political party, but I tend to think of that as happenstance, most of the time. Of course, when the head (or titular head) of the party is a party to the action...
But the "corporate masters" aren't likely to be involved in such shenanigans unless it's to their direct benefit. And they (the corporate group) aren't much worried about which party will bear the blame. Both parties that have a chance are already purchased. (Which is why the two party system is such a bad idea.)
And this all traces back to plurality wins voting. It's a part of the design of the system that's broken. Instant Runoff Voting (or Condorcet) wouldn't have THAT problem. In that case, though, the information overload that happens around election time would be increased. People would need to be deciding between people that they didn't know anything about. (This already happens for minor offices, such as judicial.)
Sorry, but secret courts have repeatedly proven to be untrustworthy. Even non-secret courts that specialize tend to be owned by corrupt powers. Think of Texas and patents.
Umnh...by "constructed in pieces" I meant that this is no intention of ever filling in the gaps, not that there were gaps during construction. (Yes, I agree that it was ambiguous.) In which case you don't need that huge an amount of matter. Which, as you've pointed out, is likely not to be available.
There's nothing strong enough to make the ring, and a human being on the ring would require enough life support that it would no longer be light enough. For light enough think of the average weight of a light sail.
N.B.: I'm not sure that would work, even under optimal conditions. Are you assuming weight is distributed evenly over the ring? Or perhaps you're assuming sails that dynamicly open and close depending on it's location WRT the sun? That might work, barely, but it would also need to adapt the the current state of the sun's flare. So, OK, you might be able to create something that's dynamicly stable, as long as you keep the mechanisms running. That's essentially the "solution" that Larry Niven came up with. I wouldn't trust it, though, because it needs to be globally stable. With a Topopolis if some segment started causing problems you could cut it loose. You still need active measures to maintain stability, but they don't need to work globally all the time. (Each segment is in orbit by itself, though it might drift in or out if it were on its own.)
Unfortunately, he isn't. And it wouldn't have been that hard. For the first couple of months it looked as if he would be an improvement.
OTOH, he hasn't made things as much worse as he easily could have.
Don't think of them falling over, think of them moving off center. Once the sun is off center, even a little bit, it tends to pull the nearer part of the ringworld more strongly than the more distant parts.
OTOH, possibly a "light enough ring" would be stable at particular levels and directions of solar radiation emissions. But those aren't predictable over the long term, and also aren't stable. Also, if it's "light enough" then nobody can live on it.
Sorry, but Dyson Spheres can also be constructed in pieces. Lots of little banks of photocells connected by strong threads. The threads can carry both power and signals as well as holding things in place. This is actually one of the ways that a Topopolis could end, with a sun that's largely encircled by power accumulators surrounding habitation areas. The signature would be that of a normal star at a vastly greater distance (i.e., lots of the ambient light would be collected) accompanied by an extremely strong infra-red signal.
But I don't expect even that form of Dyson Sphere. A Topopolis I consider quite likely, but basically undetectable. Mobile Space Habitats I consider most likely. Think of them as EXTREMELY slow speed instellar ships that never dock. I expect them to make a living on wandering material, so they want to be moving at a similar velocity, so it's easy to catch it, but a bit faster, so they're always moving into fresh areas. Their top speed would probably be around 0.1c or less. but they wouldn't have a destination. The "ship" would BE their home. And they'd be large (as in holding millions of passengers). Occasionally they'd strike a "rich" area and grow (i.e., build a new ship and split the inhabitants between them).
But notice that this is going to require at minimum well controlled fission energy, and plausibly controlled fusion. It's also going to require a lot better control over closed ecologies than we have even attempted. And a working socio-economic theory that can construct societies that are stable over multiple centuries. We are a long way from being able to build such a thing, and our obstacles aren't mainly in sources of power (well, electric power).
N.B.: There's a good argument that such habitats could never be of economic value to the society that built them. This is another constraint. Perhaps they need to develop as a way of mining the Oort clouds.
Actually, I doubt that. That was in the rhetoric, but I think the actuality was "Think how accurately we could direct an ICBM.". I'm quite glad that it was masked as a "space race", but...
If it had been intended as space exploration rather than grandstanding, we'd have had a base on the moon decades ago, and by now we'd be working on putting in factories, and building a laucher. The skyhook would still be in the future, though, even with the reduced construction cost that Luna allows.
It's a plausible answer among many other plausible answers. There isn't enough information to even rank them in rough order of plausibility. (Unless you mean that form of the "Rare Earth" hypothesis that says the lifetime of a technological civilization is short. I do agree that that one is most plausible...but I prefer not to muddy the waters by merging it with the other parts of the "Rare Earth" hypothesis.)
He does have a point. We don't have a good theory of how life appeared on earth. Without that, the chances against it could be nearly anything. That's not the way I'd bet, but ...
OTOH: This whole argument is based on a fallacy. Calling a particular set of datapoints "earthlike planets" doesn't mean what the image calls to mind, it just means that they're heavier than Mars and mainly rock. That's it. The images aren't good enough to claim that they have an atmosphere...not yet. (Theory says that they will, unless they are quite near their sun, but that's theory, not observation. And theory can't explain why Venus is so different from Earth.)
OTOH, if all you're after is life, why do you rule out the gas giants? It wouldn't be our form of life, but why presume off hand that it's impossible? Perhaps it would be less likely, but their surface area is so much larger that this isn't necessarily a handicap.
How do you know some of the fossils weren't them? A better argument is that if they had existed, there wouldn't have been all that oil and coal lying around. (Metals decay pretty quickly. Ceramics are more durable, but are fragile. Plastics get eaten by bacteria over geologic time (if they aren't photolysed.)
It has been, not really seriously, suggested that in the distant future the only surviving evidence of our current civilization will be toilets. Even most of them will end up broken, but their ceramic is pretty durable...so perhaps it should be taken seriously.
Most of those couldn't see anything directed at them without lots of effort put into the sending. I don't think we could detect planetary engineering, when we can barely detect planets. Dyson Sphere's COULD be detected, but are quite unlikely because they don't tend to maintain a designated center. (Yeah, RingWorlds are a lot worse. But that doesn't make Dyson Spehere's stable.) AFAIK, nobody's been looking for them on purpose, but even if they were we shouldn't expect to find one. topopolis https://www.google.com/search?... seems a lot more plausible.
Various forms of the "downer hypothesis" are quite plausible, but I find the "adapted to space" hypothesis equally plausible. Also the "insular" hypothis has a lot going for it. Move away from the home system and your latency really increases. Additionally there's the "we become pets" scenario, where we end up just being kept as "pets" by the computerized intelligence(s) that run the system. Another possibility is that space travel is just too deadly for organic life...though in that case you'd expect that SOMEBODY would have instituted a mechanized panspermia.
Unfortunately, I think the most likely is that some whacko group or other gets in charge of a sufficiently major government, and they start a "final war" that's final enough that at minimum civilization collapses. We've already come ungodly close to it, and that was just with nuclear weapons, before weaponized biotechnology really showed up. (It hasn't really showed up yet, but just because nobody has been whacko to contemplate using it. A well designed plague could be a species killer. We've already used it that way against insects, though only in a primitive form.)
Well, they could try making equipment that wasn't junk. The last HP printer I could recomment (i.e., that I both used and liked) was the G55...and that's well over a decade ago. The reports that I hear from other people about their other products aren't any more favorable. (Granted, I hear them mainly on Slashdot, so there's a bias against favorable coverage.)
Science ALWAYS remains unsettled. If you run across someone who says that some particular scientific theory is unchallengably correct, you know they aren't a scientist of any quality, but merely a true believer.
OTOH, the vast perponderence of the evidence says that global warming is happening, and that humans are a major contributing factor.
Experiments and be validated. Measurements can be taken and validated. Theories are merely consistent with the known evidence or not. (Generally not, even when we're talking about things like the standard model, much less climate science.)
But people want certainty. It's a wrong thing to expect, but if you can't offer it to them, they'll listen to some self-interested demagogue. And this is especially true if the most likely projection suggests that they take actions that will be expensive or inconvenient.
It was a lot easier to "build wealth" 5 or 6 decades ago. Except that for some people it wasn't. But if you think that all it takes to build wealth is "impluse control and setting priorities in life", then you are either very lucky, have wealthy parents, of haven't tried yet.
Most people have a certain spectum of skills, and some are more rewarded than others. What's rewarded has more to do with who's making the decisisons about pay levels than it does about relative difficulty of work. And if you can start near the center, you have a tremendous advantage over those who start nearer the edge. If you start near the edge, there may be no legal way to make progress (though sometimes there is, as luck then plays an even larger role).
If you were instead to claim that those with poor impulse control and poor ability to set priorities were more likely to fail, then I'd agree. But if you're lucky, then the game is your's to loose. If you're "sort of middling" then given luck you might just win. If you're on the edge, your most probable fate is to be thrown under the wheel, and your skills other than intimidation and as a con-man won't aid you much. But it is true that from every position poor impulse control and poor ability to set priorities will PROBABLY cause you to slip towards the edge.
Sorry, but I think the main effect is due to an aging population. Violence is highest among males in the (to put loose bounds on it) 14-28 years of age range. As the bulge in the population moves past that range, violence should be expected to decrease without needing any other explanation.
No...or yes. In corporate ownership control is vested in the wealthy (i.e., in the large investors). In a democracy theoretically all votes are equal, and each (represented) person gets only one vote.
The "or yes' is because the theory isn't well mapped to the implementation, and this is largely because of interference by corporations and other similar entities. (These days I think it's all corporations, but there used to be extremely wealthy people with similar power.) Note that in these cases the influence is managed by corporate management rather than by "owners", and often does things that the majority of owners would be apalled by, but usually not that the weighted majority of owners would be apalled by (where weight is measured by the number of voting shares that are held).
It's actually much more similar to an aristocracy than to a democracy.
There *is* income inequality, and it *has* gotten worse. I will agree that the ways of measuring it are jiggered, but I don't have a simple way that's inclusive. You could consider how much living space each person controlled as a proxy, but it's clearly incomplete. And you actually CAN'T reduce current economy to a pure barter equivalent. I'm not sure it could be done in principle, but I'm quite clear that it can't be done in practice. You can only reduce simplified slices of it to such a system.
One example of this is the problem of how much (non-reimbursed) of each year do you work to support the government? I've heard arguments that have put the date in June or July, but they aren't counting reimbursal of services, like road maintenance, radio spectrum allocation, etc. And you can't get agreement about this because people differ as to what they consider reimbursal. A thief doesn't consider governmental theft prevention efforts to be to his advantage...unless he's devised ways to work around them. A bicycleist doesn't consider enabling cars to go faster to be advantageous. Etc. (Yes, I'm picking oversimplified outlier cases. The problem, however, is deep. E.g. people change their opinions about what is "reimbursement" depending on what's happend recently.)
It's not even that simple. Some things have gotten cheaper, others have gotten MUCH more expensive. Housing has gotten more expensive much faster than inflation, though there are arguments that it's quality has improved. (I don't accept them, by the way. My grandfather's very cheap house was better than an expensie modern house. For one thing, it was a lot more durable.) People are coerced into buying condominiums or trailers because the price of land makes simple ownership insupportable.
You can buy partial ownership, but you can't buy partial control. Groups of people can buy partial control, but it takes large groups, and they have to act through delegated representatives....who generally figure that anything that produces more money must be good. (There are specialized funds with different values, but few of them are available as, say, retirement investments.)
If you don't have control of 5% of the stock, you very rarely have ANY influence over policy. Occasionally a decision will be close enough that a smaller block will become important, but not often. Usually if a choice is that contested, it will be deferred.
In the first place he wasn't trapped in Russia by an intelligence agency. That was a piece of political grandstanding, and as stupid as such usually is.
In the second place, the actions of the US govt. have more commonly been seen to be stupid than brilliant. This doesn't mean that the actions are more commonly stupid, but merely the actions that one hears about. But this is one we heard about, so I opt for stupid. (Besides, stupid is consistent with the other indications.)
That said, if I were a Russian intelligence agency, I'd certainly be concerned that it was an intentionally misleading plot. Not because that's a high probability, but because the cost of missing that happening would possibly be quite high.
I will agree that the driverless car is a robot in a very restricted domain. It makes its own decisions based on prior instruction and, presumably, lifetime experience. If it doesn't learn from what it does, then I don't think it qualifies as a robot. And I'll also agree that as we develop actual robots most of them will at first only operate in very restricted domains. A robot nurse won't be able to operate a car, e.g. And, of course, vice versa. Later this won't be true.
Golem is close to the idea, but it has religious overtones that are absent in robot (which, as I understand, is Czech for worker). Talos is more of a simple automaton, not really intelligent. Hephaestus *was* supposed to have metallic handmaidens to assist him in walking, dressing, etc. Servants that are more similar to Asimov's conception of robot, but they were not fully developed in any myth I've encountered. So they're just "background scenery" for the god of metal working.
P.S.: To the G.P.: robotics is a normal English word based on the noun robot, and thus given that the term robot exists, one can hardly say that the term "robotics" was invented. That would be like saying the term robotification was invented (by me, probably). It's just a normal way of handling nouns in English.
This is a common variety of error. Motivations are not logical. They cannot be. There is no logical reason to stay alive. That decision is based on non-logical prior conditions. The goals and motivations of the AI will determine whether it would be willing to kill people to achieve it's otehr goals. Note that "goals" is a plural form. No AI will have a singular goal. It will have a constellation of goals that it attempts to simultaneously satisfy. Just like you do. But the goals won't be the same goals.
OTOH, if people are going to understand the AI, it will need to be able to justify itself in terms of humanly comprehensible goals.
Please note: I don't have the solution to this problem, but I am aware of *some* of the necessary features and constraints.