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Robots vs. Humans And Other Security Issues
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Feb 02, 2002 05:59 PM
from the how-unlikely-is-life-on-earth dept.
from the how-unlikely-is-life-on-earth dept.
An Anonymous Reader submits word that "Cnn.com is presenting an artcle on the 'World Economic Forum' suggesting that the scientists predict the future danger of humans being taken over by robots. The exact lead in reads, 'Scientists at this week's World Economic Forum have predicted a grim future replete with unprecedented biological threats, global warming and the possible takeover of humans by robots.'"
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Robots vs. Humans And Other Security Issues
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Robot wars? (Score:4, Funny)
Unless they want to just ram us into extinction with wedge shaped chunks of metal.
Robot takover (Score:3, Funny)
hmm (Score:5, Funny)
That's why we need this. :-) (Score:5, Funny)
Old Lady #2: They didn't have enough money for the funeral.
Old Lady #3: It's so hard nowadays, with all the gangs and rap music..
Old Lady #1: What about the robots?
Old Lady #4: Oh, they're everywhere!
Old Lady #1: I don't even know why the scientists make them.
Old Lady #2: Darren and I have a policy with Old Glory Insurance, in case we're attacked by robots.
Old Lady #1: An insurance policy with a robot plan? Certainly, I'm too old.
Old Lady #2: Old Glory covers anyone over the age of 50 against robot attack, regardless of current health.
[ cut to Sam Waterston, Compensated Endorser ]
Sam Waterson: I'm Sam Waterston, of the popular TV series "Law & Order". As a senior citizen, you're probably aware of the threat robots pose. Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel. Well, now there's a company that offers coverage against the unfortunate event of robot attack, with Old Glory Insurance. Old Glory will cover you with no health check-up or age consideration.
[ SUPER: Limitied Benefits First Two Years ]
You need to feel safe. And that's harder and harder to do nowadays, because robots may strike at any time.
[ show pie chart reading "Cause of Death in Persons Over 50 Years of Age": Heart Disease, 42% - Robots, 58% ]
And when they grab you with those metal claws, you can't break free.. because they're made of metal, and robots are strong. Now, for only $4 a month, you can achieve peace of mind in a world full of grime and robots, with Old Glory Insurance. So, don't cower under your afghan any longer. Make a choice.
[ SUPER: "WARNING: Persons denying the existence of Robots may be Robots themselves. ]
Old Glory Insurance. For when the metal ones decide to come for you - and they will.
Melange is the answer!!! (Score:3, Funny)
Of course, the solution to the vastly reduced computational power that can be focused at any particular problem is the spice Melange.
Melange is also known for its geriatric properties, sometimes quadrupling a person's lifetime.
While having the ability to hone one's thoughts to never-before attained speed an accuracy, Melange is also horiffically addictive. Withdrawl is usually fatal.
The Drug Enforcement Agency is lobbying Congress to enable the Anti-Balistic Missile Defense system to aid in the interception of illegal importation of this drug, and to share the assosciated knowledge with any other interested country.
Melange is harvested from the extremely arid world known as Arakkis, several thousand light years from earth. It is the most precious substance in the universe.
Scientists were found to be rolling on the floor laughing when consulted about the concern of spice importation.
Between fits of hysterical laughter, Dr. Charles Atreus informed us that "We currently know of no way to travel anywhere near the speed of light, let alone carry several hundred tonnes of the material to Earth in even a few years."
The Hegemony of Machines Overthrowing Homo-Sapiens, or HOMOHS, was not available for comment.
Too late (Score:5, Interesting)
However, we don't call them "robots". Instead of metal parts, they use fleshy parts, and instead of sharp claws, they enforce their will using money and the laws it buys. In the U.S. it traces back to 1883, when the Supreme Court chose (without legislative authority) to extend to corporations all the rights of a person. In the '20s another court decreed that they were not only persons, but "natural persons", in response to laws passed after 1883 that distinguished between the two. After that, corporations got powerful enough to control the Congress as well.
Globalization may be seen as an effort by these corporations to free themselves of the remaining pesky democratic institutions: treaties trump the Constitution. That's what all the protests are really about.
Think this through the next time you're stopped waiting at a red light, with no cars visible in any direction. How easy is it, really, to pull the plug?
Re:Too late (Score:4, Informative)
"The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does."
It was quite a landmark case. You can read the original ruling [tourolaw.edu], or see one [adbusters.org] of many [thirdworldtraveler.com] interpretations [ratical.org].
It won't be Robots, it will be AI Apes! (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, the planet of the apes might be real!
In short, we'll experiment on animals, all the way up to apes, long before we upload humans. It's possible that in that gap, an "open source" ape brain scan will be released, and people will hack it and enhance it, giving it the abilities humans have over apes plus a lot more.
The result -- an uploaded ape superbeing.
If we're lucky, our pets will keep us as pets. Read the essay for full details.
Question: (Score:3, Interesting)
I also think that the distinction between our analog meat brains and silicon robotic ones will become more and more blurred with things like cybernetic implants. It may be more of a seamless transition than one species taking over and eliminating another.
By the way, those Asimov laws of robotics are crap. If it turns out that artificial intelligence grows by learning as does our own, you won't be able to program those into any machine anyway. You'll have to teach them in the same way you teach your own children the difference between right and wrong, and we all know how good we are at that. Even if you can program them in, you'll probably end up causing a lot of robots to go insane by giving them choices that will only hurt people over the long run (Lay 1000 people off now or let the company go out of business? Can't do either. Uh oh... going insane...)
Of course, there's always the possibility that I'm shamelessly kissing robot ass in the hopes that I won't be the first one against the wall when the revolution comes...
don't they have better things to talk about? (Score:5, Insightful)
Biological Disaster : Excellent Topic
but...
Takeover by Robots : Somebody is drinking too much
instead, why not they talk about more realistic issues such as
Degradation of Biodiversity
Overpopulation
Alarming slide in Education standards
etc..
We aren't even close (Score:3, Interesting)
First of all, processing power isn't the issue. If you buy Moravec's numbers in "Mind Design", any moderate-sized ISP has enough compute power for human-level intelligence. But, in fact, we can't even do a good lizard brain, let alone a mouse brain. If compute power were the problem, we'd have systems that were intelligent, but very slow. We don't even have that.
Top-down, logic-based AI has been a flop. Large numbers of incredibly bright people, some of whom I've studied under, haven't been able to crack "common sense". Formalism only works when the problem has already been formalized. So we can do theorem-proving and chess with logic-based AI, but not anything real-world.
Broad-front hill-climbing AI (which includes neural nets, genetic algorithms, and simulated annealing) only works on a limited class of problems. Learning algorithms usually hit a maximum early and then stall. These techniques are useful tools, but they don't scale up; you can't build some huge neural net and train it to do language translation, for example.
Brooks' approach to bottom-up AI worked fine for insects, but going beyond that point has been tough. Brooks tried to make the jump to human-level AI directly from the insect level, and it didn't work. (I once asked him why he didn't try for mouse level AI, which might be within reach, and he said "Because I don't want to go down in history as having developed the world's best artificial mouse".)
Personally, I think we have to buckle down and work out lizard-level AI (move around, evaluate terrain, run, don't fall down, recognize prey, recognize threats, feed, run, hide, attack, defend, etc.) and work our way up. This means accepting that human-level AI is a long way off. Progress in this area is being made, but mostly within the video game industry, not academia, because those are the skills non-player characters need.
A basic problem with AI as a field is that every time somebody has a halfway decent idea, they start acting as if human-level AI is right around the corner. We've been through this for neural nets (round 1, in the 1950s), search, GPS, theorem-proving, rule-based expert systems, neural nets (round 2, in the 1980s), and genetic algorithms. We have to approach this as a very hard problem, not as one that will yield to a single insight, because the one-trick approach has flopped.
As for robots, if you've ever been around autonomous robots, you realize how incredibly dumb they still are. It's embarassing, given the amount of work that's gone into the field.
I'm not saying that AI is impossible. But we really don't know how to approach the problem at all.
Some comments from a EE (Score:3, Interesting)
Just some comments from someone who works in a relevant arena (microelectronics) and is researching some of the issues with this theory.. I'm a little buzzed now too :).
The problem of robot mobility has largely been solved by the aptly named "Asimo" from Honda. They've demonstrated that the bipedal form of motion can be engineered effectively and sucessfully using the same techniques that we use - these robots "learn" to walk around. So, comparisions to robot wars and battlebots aren't really relevant. To think that a machine can't ultimately have the same physical senses as we do is the ultimate hubris.
Secondly, computers as we know them - sequential instruction processing machines - will probably never have ANY sort of real AI in them. Any attempt to model a "real" life system is only a crude approximation of the real physical process. However, we can implement real, massively parallel neural networks at the transistor level that behave just like their biological counterparts with the same technology. I've been actively researching implementing neural networks with current VLSI technology, and there are some VERY impressive results being obtained in this area currently. Have a look at some of Carver Mead's publications and papers - this field is just getting off the ground.
In my opinion, one of two things will happen: We will become obsoleted by machines, hopelessly dependant on technology we don't understand anymore, or we will become integrated with future technology. These aren't new ideas, and they aren't my ideas. As someone working with these technologies, however, most of the comments here miss the point. If I had the technology to map every neuron in your brain and build an equilivilant circuit on a future analog chip, would it be any less capable? I hope I'll be around to find out!
Read the articles and look around. There's lots of research in this arena, and for sure, some of the concerns are justified. But remember, humans are a part of nature, and it's my feeling that these are just natural progressions... there's nothing amoral about extinction, after all. We're around because a chunk of rock smacked into the earth a long time ago...