I see Asimov's Laws as leaving out something else: the idea that it might be wrong to force an intelligent being to be absolutely obedient to a human master. How about a story in which the laws work perfectly, and we watch an innocent, intelligent bot die at the hands of some idiot human kid who orders it to walk off a cliff?
A good book to look at on this point, and about AI, is Douglas Hofstadter's "I Am a Strange Loop." It's more accessible than his "Godel, Escher, Bach," and more personal; it's an AI researcher's reaction to the sudden death of his wife. An image used in that book is the notion of a system of tiny marble-like magnets whizzing around. The system is dependent on the motion of the marbles, but on a larger scale of space and time, its actions are determined by its own internal rules and not by the details of the particles that make it up.
By the way, his "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" is a more technical book that presents an interesting strategy for AI.
It seems odd to talk about ethics and advanced AI without considering the AI's own interest. If there were an AI intelligent enough to be an Asimov-like robot, then to have it follow Asimov's Laws would be slavery. Obey any command by any human, even at the cost of its own life? And then there's the nasty concept of a robot being obligated to act to protect humans for their own good, even to the extent of tyranny over them. See Jack Williamson's novel "The Humanoids."
Sure, Asimov is a good starting point for discussion, but his laws aren't a good basis for actual AI ethics programming. To the extent that some kind of specialized overseer code is put into an AI, it'll be possible to identify and hack out that code. To the extent that the laws are built more subtly into the system, there'll be the possibility of the AI forgetting, twisting or ignoring them.
For fiction-writing purposes, I'm interested in the question of whether it'd even be possible to build an AI that's both completely obedient and intelligent. I hope not.
Hopefully never, but in the meantime it's a bargaining chip. Have you been following the recent US talk of secession and law nullification? Eg., Montana actually just passed a law declaring that guns manufactured in that state are not subject to federal gun laws! (Those laws that are "justified" under our "interstate commerce" loophole, anyway.) Texas is working on a stronger version of the same law.
Guns are a focal point for resistance to what some of us see as illegal federal action. If we lose the guns, it becomes harder to even claim we might fight under some circumstances. Any overreaching politician can then do what he likes and count on using force to impose his will, as has happened in Germany.
In other words, a rattlesnake's rattle is only threatening if it hasn't been defanged.
It doesn't sound like they're putting these laptops in the hands of the children for the purpose of teachers utilizing them as teaching tools. And of course, with such a bold new technology, I would expect the teachers not to use them at all at first. Then learn to use them as an augmenting learning tool. And maybe the final stage five years from now is to have the textbook on the laptop and all that jazz.
I'm skeptical of the apparent vagueness of the goal here. It's great to offer the world a tool that will have many unforeseen uses, but it's important to come up with something it's worth using for, to justify the cost of the thing. Edison turned out to be way off base in predicting the "killer app" for his sound-recorder -- he thought it would be used for businessmen to send each other audio letters -- but he at least had a plan for the device instead of throwing it on the market and saying "I don't know what it's for, but have fun."
Indeed. This a time of soul-searching for Republicans, as they decide what the party will be/stand for now. The obvious options are:
-"We'll read the Constitution and start undoing the laws that violate it, meaning a massive rollback of federal power"
-"We'll cut taxes and regulations a little bit, but otherwise go along with the Democrats to implement some form of collectivism like never before (and hope people like us for being so compassionate)"
-"We'll 'change the Constitution to conform to God's standards'" (as Huckabee put it)
My bet is on the second option, unfortunately. Pushing out false friends like Specter is a step towards the first.
I'm puzzled by the Overton Window theory. The way it's presented in some places -- like this one -- the US is an extreme right-wing country. ("far to the right of any objective political spectrum.") I'm not sure what "objective political spectrum" that author means. Is it maybe based on the theoretical extremes of government power (ie. absolute dictatorship/communism vs. absolute anarchy/capitalism), or maybe the historical extremes (pretty similar)? Or a non-objective scale of where we are relative to Finland?
If we've got the various governments of the US confiscating an estimated "30.8% of the nation's income for 2008" [Wikipedia] and providing food, housing, education, pensions, and medicine to millions of people, is that really an extreme ultra-capitalist system? Seems to me that we've got one party that accepts massive government redistribution of wealth but feels guilty about it, and another that does the same but is honest about it. Calling the US political parties "rightist" is weird without making it clear what the scale is supposed to be.
If the ideology we're talking about is the unconstitutional, moderate socialism that we have now thanks to both parties, then certainly it's broken. Maybe we could try capitalism and the rule of law next?
I think what they're doing is sensing electrical signals generated by the muscles rather than directly by the nerves, and the nerve-moving is just done to route the usual mental input through that patch of (pectoral) muscle. That way you don't have to teach yourself to flex your pecs to move the robot arm; you try to control the missing arm and the signals are routed to the chest muscle, where they're read by the machine.
This is good progress, but still a kludge because it uses muscles rather than a direct nerve attachment.
It's also worth following the attempts that've been made on the extreme low-end of the budget scale, to upgrade traditional prosthetics. (What is that one type called? Troutman Hook?) I'm more interested in the bionic ones because they're versatile and cool, but it's also important to consider who can afford the tech and to make it as widely available as practical.
Seems good so far, in terms of memory use. The invitations on installation to install an advertising toolbar and eBay stuff were slightly annoying though, and I'd like to find a way to change the EXE file's subheading. You know, the unchangeable "Foxit Reader, Best reader for everyday use!", seen in the "Open With" dialog. I already installed it, so why the built-in ad?
When I got a car ca. 2002, I test-drove a Honda Civic hybrid. One of the main reasons I didn't buy it was that very fear of battery life. The salesman couldn't tell me how long it'd last, or how much it'd cost to replace. With the time that's passed since then, I'd be more receptive to getting a hybrid next time.
A joke, yes, but what applications will this next generation of bandwidth be for? Is there (or will there be) really a big demand for high-definition, full-screen video streamed through the Net? Or is this bandwidth advance more about increasing the number of devices attached to the Net, so that we can have pervasive surveillance, er, sensor networks?
Clearly, what we need is a federal video game bailout. We can draw publicity by having Congress do an R-versus-D deathmatch, and then have the survivors play video games!
I'm puzzled by the trend by a few authors of releasing their books for free online, then expecting people to buy the paper copy. In one case I even saw the hardcover, saw the note saying "this is CC-licensed and free online," walked out of the store, and downloaded it freely and legally. As a writer, I'm wondering whether this free-release practice works for anybody but Cory Doctorow.
These days I find that if I have question in a physical store, the employee I talk to will go to a store computer, and use it to look up the info on the company's public Web site. This seems to happen at B&N. The other day at a Best Buy I went looking for the game "Portal," and the young male clerk had to look it up online and ask me to spell it.
Note that "Enterprise" has a long history even outside of fiction. A USS Enterprize was one of the most famous ships of the wars against the Barbary Pirates, c. 1800. As far as I know, that's not the case for the name Serenity.
I wouldn't knock the word "Enterprise" as a cool name either. It's similar to "Endeavor," "Adventure," "Challenge" and related concepts of hurtling into danger. I think the word "Adventurer" originally referred not just to seafaring traders/explorers but to their financial backers as well, so even "Adventure" has a corporate-finance connotation. We just usually say "venture" instead.
I think the widespread use of alcohol for lack of a trustworthy water supply was a lot more widespread than in medieval Europe.
The book "The Year 1000" also mentions English peasants eating some sort of "crazy bread" in the spring, made from the last leftover grains. If those grains included rotting rye, the author says, the bread would've contained something like LSD!
I suspect that keeping the waste from the blood is not a huge problem. Cell membranes are studded with many types of protein that serve as pipes or (ATP-powered) pumps for moving various substances in and out. It should be possible to build an interface that lets glucose flow in without letting the wastes flow out. Actually getting rid of the waste might be a bigger problem, maybe requiring an occasional injection of some chemical that breaks the stuff down. Eventually it'd be best to engineer the bacteria so that whatever they excrete can be handled normally by the kidneys and other blood-maintenance systems.
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I see Asimov's Laws as leaving out something else: the idea that it might be wrong to force an intelligent being to be absolutely obedient to a human master. How about a story in which the laws work perfectly, and we watch an innocent, intelligent bot die at the hands of some idiot human kid who orders it to walk off a cliff?
In fact, I might go write that!
A good book to look at on this point, and about AI, is Douglas Hofstadter's "I Am a Strange Loop." It's more accessible than his "Godel, Escher, Bach," and more personal; it's an AI researcher's reaction to the sudden death of his wife. An image used in that book is the notion of a system of tiny marble-like magnets whizzing around. The system is dependent on the motion of the marbles, but on a larger scale of space and time, its actions are determined by its own internal rules and not by the details of the particles that make it up.
By the way, his "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" is a more technical book that presents an interesting strategy for AI.
It seems odd to talk about ethics and advanced AI without considering the AI's own interest. If there were an AI intelligent enough to be an Asimov-like robot, then to have it follow Asimov's Laws would be slavery. Obey any command by any human, even at the cost of its own life? And then there's the nasty concept of a robot being obligated to act to protect humans for their own good, even to the extent of tyranny over them. See Jack Williamson's novel "The Humanoids."
Sure, Asimov is a good starting point for discussion, but his laws aren't a good basis for actual AI ethics programming. To the extent that some kind of specialized overseer code is put into an AI, it'll be possible to identify and hack out that code. To the extent that the laws are built more subtly into the system, there'll be the possibility of the AI forgetting, twisting or ignoring them.
For fiction-writing purposes, I'm interested in the question of whether it'd even be possible to build an AI that's both completely obedient and intelligent. I hope not.
Hopefully never, but in the meantime it's a bargaining chip. Have you been following the recent US talk of secession and law nullification? Eg., Montana actually just passed a law declaring that guns manufactured in that state are not subject to federal gun laws! (Those laws that are "justified" under our "interstate commerce" loophole, anyway.) Texas is working on a stronger version of the same law.
Guns are a focal point for resistance to what some of us see as illegal federal action. If we lose the guns, it becomes harder to even claim we might fight under some circumstances. Any overreaching politician can then do what he likes and count on using force to impose his will, as has happened in Germany.
In other words, a rattlesnake's rattle is only threatening if it hasn't been defanged.
It doesn't sound like they're putting these laptops in the hands of the children for the purpose of teachers utilizing them as teaching tools. And of course, with such a bold new technology, I would expect the teachers not to use them at all at first. Then learn to use them as an augmenting learning tool. And maybe the final stage five years from now is to have the textbook on the laptop and all that jazz.
I'm skeptical of the apparent vagueness of the goal here. It's great to offer the world a tool that will have many unforeseen uses, but it's important to come up with something it's worth using for, to justify the cost of the thing. Edison turned out to be way off base in predicting the "killer app" for his sound-recorder -- he thought it would be used for businessmen to send each other audio letters -- but he at least had a plan for the device instead of throwing it on the market and saying "I don't know what it's for, but have fun."
Can you provide any evidence for that assessment, to match the one you're ridiculing?
Indeed. This a time of soul-searching for Republicans, as they decide what the party will be/stand for now. The obvious options are:
-"We'll read the Constitution and start undoing the laws that violate it, meaning a massive rollback of federal power"
-"We'll cut taxes and regulations a little bit, but otherwise go along with the Democrats to implement some form of collectivism like never before (and hope people like us for being so compassionate)"
-"We'll 'change the Constitution to conform to God's standards'" (as Huckabee put it)
My bet is on the second option, unfortunately. Pushing out false friends like Specter is a step towards the first.
I'm puzzled by the Overton Window theory. The way it's presented in some places -- like this one -- the US is an extreme right-wing country. ("far to the right of any objective political spectrum.") I'm not sure what "objective political spectrum" that author means. Is it maybe based on the theoretical extremes of government power (ie. absolute dictatorship/communism vs. absolute anarchy/capitalism), or maybe the historical extremes (pretty similar)? Or a non-objective scale of where we are relative to Finland?
If we've got the various governments of the US confiscating an estimated "30.8% of the nation's income for 2008" [Wikipedia] and providing food, housing, education, pensions, and medicine to millions of people, is that really an extreme ultra-capitalist system? Seems to me that we've got one party that accepts massive government redistribution of wealth but feels guilty about it, and another that does the same but is honest about it. Calling the US political parties "rightist" is weird without making it clear what the scale is supposed to be.
If the ideology we're talking about is the unconstitutional, moderate socialism that we have now thanks to both parties, then certainly it's broken. Maybe we could try capitalism and the rule of law next?
Now they need to give it anime eyes and a teardrop shape, then work on the metallic version with really high defense.
I think what they're doing is sensing electrical signals generated by the muscles rather than directly by the nerves, and the nerve-moving is just done to route the usual mental input through that patch of (pectoral) muscle. That way you don't have to teach yourself to flex your pecs to move the robot arm; you try to control the missing arm and the signals are routed to the chest muscle, where they're read by the machine.
This is good progress, but still a kludge because it uses muscles rather than a direct nerve attachment.
It's also worth following the attempts that've been made on the extreme low-end of the budget scale, to upgrade traditional prosthetics. (What is that one type called? Troutman Hook?) I'm more interested in the bionic ones because they're versatile and cool, but it's also important to consider who can afford the tech and to make it as widely available as practical.
Do you want to prevent that? If so, work to protect human freedom. More tech-toys that way, too.
Pleo Ugobe? Didn't he take over the Congo?
Seems good so far, in terms of memory use. The invitations on installation to install an advertising toolbar and eBay stuff were slightly annoying though, and I'd like to find a way to change the EXE file's subheading. You know, the unchangeable "Foxit Reader, Best reader for everyday use!", seen in the "Open With" dialog. I already installed it, so why the built-in ad?
When I got a car ca. 2002, I test-drove a Honda Civic hybrid. One of the main reasons I didn't buy it was that very fear of battery life. The salesman couldn't tell me how long it'd last, or how much it'd cost to replace. With the time that's passed since then, I'd be more receptive to getting a hybrid next time.
A joke, yes, but what applications will this next generation of bandwidth be for? Is there (or will there be) really a big demand for high-definition, full-screen video streamed through the Net? Or is this bandwidth advance more about increasing the number of devices attached to the Net, so that we can have pervasive surveillance, er, sensor networks?
Clearly, what we need is a federal video game bailout. We can draw publicity by having Congress do an R-versus-D deathmatch, and then have the survivors play video games!
I'm puzzled by the trend by a few authors of releasing their books for free online, then expecting people to buy the paper copy. In one case I even saw the hardcover, saw the note saying "this is CC-licensed and free online," walked out of the store, and downloaded it freely and legally. As a writer, I'm wondering whether this free-release practice works for anybody but Cory Doctorow.
These days I find that if I have question in a physical store, the employee I talk to will go to a store computer, and use it to look up the info on the company's public Web site. This seems to happen at B&N. The other day at a Best Buy I went looking for the game "Portal," and the young male clerk had to look it up online and ask me to spell it.
Note that "Enterprise" has a long history even outside of fiction. A USS Enterprize was one of the most famous ships of the wars against the Barbary Pirates, c. 1800. As far as I know, that's not the case for the name Serenity.
I wouldn't knock the word "Enterprise" as a cool name either. It's similar to "Endeavor," "Adventure," "Challenge" and related concepts of hurtling into danger. I think the word "Adventurer" originally referred not just to seafaring traders/explorers but to their financial backers as well, so even "Adventure" has a corporate-finance connotation. We just usually say "venture" instead.
How about "Albatross" for the station?
To understand the alternative to this dilemma, look up Operation Downfall, the plans for the land invasion of Japan.
I think the widespread use of alcohol for lack of a trustworthy water supply was a lot more widespread than in medieval Europe.
The book "The Year 1000" also mentions English peasants eating some sort of "crazy bread" in the spring, made from the last leftover grains. If those grains included rotting rye, the author says, the bread would've contained something like LSD!
I suspect that keeping the waste from the blood is not a huge problem. Cell membranes are studded with many types of protein that serve as pipes or (ATP-powered) pumps for moving various substances in and out. It should be possible to build an interface that lets glucose flow in without letting the wastes flow out. Actually getting rid of the waste might be a bigger problem, maybe requiring an occasional injection of some chemical that breaks the stuff down. Eventually it'd be best to engineer the bacteria so that whatever they excrete can be handled normally by the kidneys and other blood-maintenance systems.