Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Robotics

Halting Problem Proves That Lethal Robots Cannot Correctly Decide To Kill Humans 335

KentuckyFC writes: The halting problem is to determine whether an arbitrary computer program, once started, will ever finish running or whether it will continue forever. In 1936, Alan Turing famously showed that there is no general algorithm that can solve this problem. Now a group of computer scientists and ethicists have used the halting problem to tackle the question of how a weaponized robot could decide to kill a human. Their trick is to reformulate the problem in algorithmic terms by considering an evil computer programmer who writes a piece of software on which human lives depend.

The question is whether the software is entirely benign or whether it can ever operate in a way that ends up killing people. In general, a robot could never decide the answer to this question. As a result, autonomous robots should never be designed to kill or harm humans, say the authors, even though various lethal autonomous robots are already available. One curious corollary is that if the human brain is a Turing machine, then humans can never decide this issue either, a point that the authors deliberately steer well clear of.

Comment Re:If this were ten years ago, I would have (Score 5, Insightful) 268

Hear hear. If one of the biggest and best known names in the FOSS world can't defend themselves from something so blatant it just encourages other big corporations from abusing smaller groups.

Red hat, we're looking at you to step up here.

The Systemd and GNOME3 toxic manouvers are irrelevant.

Comment Re:Is the really that much of an issue? (Score 4, Insightful) 345

Why bother developing, testing, and supporting a feature that few in their target market will ever use?

Because Google has a vested interest in the next generation of SD card not having patented and royalty incurring filesystem such as exFAT as the mandated standard. The more they can support TF card hardware spec instead of the SD card "experience" spec the better it will be for all of us. Except for Google's main competition in the laptop market that is.

As it stands now every smartphone with an SD card has as part of its manufacturing cost about $2 going straight to Microsoft for the privilege of using exFAT, because the SD standards committee in their wisdom decided that SD cards can't be called SD cards without it.

Comment Re:Still not actually open (Score 1) 56

> Do you really think last years video card can't support the newest
> version of DirectX?

I'm pretty sure that DirectX support is not that important for a Linux driver.

> Remember the Intel chips that you could upgrade by simply soldering
> 2 pins together? I suspect that THAT is what they are really afraid of.

And the tens, nay hundreds of lost sales that incurred?

> The mod community figuring out how to make upgrading less important.

Since most or many AMD graphics these days ship as part of an APU, I'm
also pretty sure there's more to the upgrade decision than just the
driver.

I'd really love the Catalyst driver to improve, right now the open source
Radeon driver is much more stable on my system but lacks full OpenCL
support. Anything which maximizes the open part of the driver and shrinks
the binary blob is a gain for all of us.

Comment Re:Yesterday Oceans were warming more than predict (Score 1) 295

The article from the other day was quite clearly talking about the upper waters.

This one is quite clearly talking about much deeper waters.

Nothing like settled and well defined science.

You got that right! It's a wonderful thing and the way they measured this using gravitational anomalies viewed from space is a great testament to our progress as a species. We are documenting our destruction in unprecedented detail.

Comment Re:net metering != solar and 10% needs new physics (Score 1) 488

For example, I read a study a while back that pointing solar panels West of due South resulted in a much better match between electricity use and demand

That's an interesting point. From a pure kWh point of view facing them a bit to the east gets you better numbers since the crisp morning air is clearer than the late afternoon haze.

If you have batteries it becomes a balance between storage losses in the morning versus irradiation losses in the afternoon.

GP completely ignores the daily demand curve, especially in areas like southern California with a million A/C units humming away at noon, which lays the rest of his arguement to waste.

And total fail? 100-200% growth year on year certainly doesn't sound like fail to me.

Comment Re:Why is this here? (Score 1) 240

you've fallen into a fallacious trap -- what makes you think the sets overlap?

are you really saying that everyone without a background in electro-magnetics is evil and should be punished, because you knew a dumb jerk in grade school?

or are you just beating up the next weakest kid after you to make yourself feel better about yourself? (and so become the bully)

Slashdot Top Deals

We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts. -- Patrick Moynihan

Working...