I’m not angry, far from it. This is fun and thought provoking thread. I hope I haven’t ruffled your feathers. My last post was a little dark. I am merely suggesting that we must look past mankind’s interests as the final arbiter of what is best in the universe. Perhaps what comes after us will be a better world, even if we have a diminished (if any) place in it.

If robots become truly sentient (and not mere automatons) then what we can ethically do to/with them becomes questionable. Likely there will be castes of robots. Those self-aware who should be considered full citizens, and those (from their inception) that are not self-aware can be treated as automatons without ethical dilemma. Likely self-aware robots will employ non self-aware robots to do their bidding as well.

If mankind wishes to stay in control and maintain a moral high ground, then we probably should not incorporate self-awareness into AI (if we would only then treat them as slaves). Of course failing to create self-aware intellects may it self be morally questionable if we have the power to do so.

I’m not sure what to make of the golden retriever comment. Was it moral to breed dogs that look to us as their masters? It is a thought worth considering. Or will we be the golden retrievers to our new robot overlords? We have a pet dog and it seems a good bargain for he and us. Certainly he would not be able to make his way in the world without us, so our demands on him are probably fair exchange.

Many slaves during America’s slave era were brought up to believe their rightful place was as slaves. I guess we should have been OK with that as well, as long as we did a proper job of convincing slaves they merited their position in society.

Perhaps with proper brain surgery we could create a new acceptable slave class, as long as the slaves are happy.

I thought about the unease of having robots as our equals or superiors before posting this. But if robots do in fact become sentient -- not giving them full rights is slavery. What is the moral justification for this (other than we don’t like it)? If it is in a robot’s DNA so to speak to protect all sentient life’s rights, then morality should evolve towards more fairness as AI’s and robot’s intellect increases. More likely they would outlaw the eating of meat, than strip of our standing as sentient beings. The world might be a paradise under their benign rule, though there are always those that would rather rule in hell.

Lets face it, the original three laws are bigoted against inorganics. Here are my modified Three laws.

• 1. A robot may not injure a sentient being or, through inaction, allow a sentient being to come to harm.
• 2. A robot must obey lawful orders given it by its superiors, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law or diminish the lawful rights of sentient beings, whether organic or inorganic.
• 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

“machines that learn to represent the world.” That’s eight words.

methinks seven :-)

It is hard to imagine the developed world will willingly give up the one technology that could end terrorism in failed nation states. The potential is here to vastly reduce civilian casualties while taking out terrorist commanders. Imagine a small drone with only a few conventional small arms rounds. It sits unattended in some unobserved location charging its batteries with solar cells, and constantly monitoring conversations and scanning faces. When a baddie is found it pops up, a kill shot to the head and flies off or self-destructs. We’ll make these things by the tens of thousands and individually they will be cheap.

Maybe there will be a human in the loop – maybe not – depends on how good the face recognition and voice recognition software is and how much political heat our leaders are willing to take. But if the kill ratios are good and civilian causalities are down autonomous operation will become the norm.

Perhaps this all seems dystopian, and in many ways it will be. Eventually the technology may be used for political assassination in first world countries as well. War could well become a thing that only leaders fear as their will be no foot soldiers to kill enmass (they’ll be replaced with robots). Military leaders and politicians will be the only high value targets and perhaps command and control bunkers.

These are not weapons that non-state actors will be able to develop (to any sophisticated degree). There is no chance we will take a pass on them.

Of the day? Howabout "de rigueur" required.

Ecologically speaking I think you could describe the desert areas of the world as biologically under-productive, true they have a unique ecology, but they are largely unthreatened because they are hostile environments (so little development historically). Now here is the thing, you can probably make these areas more bio-productive with these types of solar energy initiatives thus enabling more wild animals in total to inhabit the planet (and actually strengthen the web of life). The reason I say more bio-productive is because the heat, lack or water, and lack of shade prevent lots a plant growth. Direct sunlight is not needed for plant growth, most plants only utilize 2% of direct sunlight for growth. With large swaths of shade, there will be more plant growth because ground temperatures will be lower and more water can be maintained by what plants choose to live in the sheltered areas. While the areas may seem shady by contrast, they likely will have more than enough scattered/indirect light for plant growth. With more plant growth, more wildlife.

You have to pick your battles. Does converting deserts to energy production do the environment and biosphere less damage than business as usual? Sure it changes the environment, but to resist all change, because it alters the biosphere in someway, is not a war you are going to win. Trying to keep the Earth totally as it once was is more a religious crusade than a practical goal.

I for one hope we get the answer to this poll soon. There is an astronomical phenomenon recently in the news called Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs). Most astrophysicists think these are probably neutron stars collapsing into black holes or other exotic stellar phenomenon, but there is also speculation they are beacon signals from extragalactic civilizations. Of course Pulsars were called LGMs at for “Little Green Men” at first.

FBRs are probably not Benford Beasons, but it seems likely to me our first detection of ETI will be from non-continuous sources and will slowly build to the certainty they are ETI-signals only after much additional study, hypothesis, and building of specialized instruments to study them.

It will be interesting to see how the general public reacts as the certainty slowly builds.

Dude, I accidently modded you overrated when I meant Funny.
Now I'm nuking all my mod points in the thread by posting to appologize.
Modding evidently needs an undo in the first few seconds.

I’m always amazed and disgusted that higher end hotel chains charge for things like Wi-Fi while cheaper players give it away for free. Similarly it seems only fast food restaurants even offer Wi-Fi and free at that. This has always seemed backwards to me. Why do the people charging more nickel and dime to death for every little extra thing? Evidently since they start with a less cost sensitive clientele so they think (rightly it seems) they can get away with it. I may have answered my own question, but it still seems wrong and unaccommodating. When you get your low cost room from priceline.com, the big players still let you know they really don’t care to be very accommodating to you.

But when the dirty work is no longer needed -- why fight so hard to keep it?

This seems like a reasonable goal. Methane is natural gas, why not capture and use it? Lots of places still flair tons of it off as part of the oil extraction process – so it may no longer be methane, but it is still carbon in the atmosphere with no useful purpose other than to make oil drilling easier.

Let’s face it Obama could cure cancer and a sizeable portion of the population led by Fox News would accuse him of putting doctors out of work. Natural gas is putting coal workers out of work, but the right blames Obama. Strange I though mining coals was dirty and dangerous and led to black lung. To the right those are all positive things because it shows what a strong work-ethic coal miners have.

How about we really try to make the future cleaner and safer and not scream so much about jobs. If jobs are going away in one sector the answer is to retrain and educate to work in new safer better sectors. Last century’s jobs will not keep our economy afloat in the information age.

I’ll probably get burned on mod points for saying this, but at least half these anger posts are probably some repressed prejudice and bigotry. Obama hasn’t been the greatest president ever – so evidently everyone made a mistake voting a black man to office. The economy is better; we have fewer troops fighting and no new wars. But the right is convinced it would have done 10x better. They sure screwed the pooch the administration before – lord help me how did they make so many gains in the midterms?

It slowly got safe to point to Obama’s failings at which point the mob turned. Early after the first election you could be accused of being a bigot for criticizing the president at all. Now the pendulum has swung the other way and the bigots have ample cover to yell criticism. Of course I will get angry replies that it is all about the jobs and the economy and our foreign policy – and you may well believe it. But really it just galls to have a black man in power, especially if he threatens anything that whites see as fair play and ethnics see as white privilege.