Well, free will is [...] the capacity to decide and act without any external impetus.
No, that's automation.
I'm really interested in is dissecting this screwbot.
Sure. Everybody needs a hobby.
Since it was clearly a factual and well-recorded historical event, I think we deserve answers.
Haha
You can take my AmigaOS from my cold, dead hands!
Good questions. This is getting very philosophical.
Pygmalion's statue/daughter/wife was not built as an android, but really just a statue that looked alive, and then by divine intervention came to life. That's why I said she probably doesn't count. But of course that is a matter of interpretation, I didn't say that she definitely doesn't count. (Humans are programmable, aren't they? Free will just means not under coercion, it's one of those things that can only be proven by absence.)
In contrast, the Golem was built as an automaton for doing simple tasks (as befits a golem), programmed by written instructions placed in its head, not unlike punch cards or paper tape.
Seeing how Hephaistos later married Aphrodite, and, although the elder gods paired them as a joke (Hephaistos was born crippled, and Aphrodite was the sex goddess, and the others found that juxtapositon amusing somehow), it was a happy marriage for both, I don't think he was a fool. He also had a reputation for fooling others with his practical jokes, which he did for revenge. I'm sure he knew something that the others didn't. (And the sex toy was probably not it's entire volume filled with gold. Plus, seeing how machines get warm from entropic waste heat, it may have even been warm to the touch. Who knows? While myths and legends often have a kernel of historic truth, this one may be entirely fictional.)
The movie was made circa thirty years before the word "robot" was even coined.
Yes, TFS mentions that.
It also looks more like an automata
The singular form is "automaton"; "automata" is plural, and is the name of the book on the subject by Heron of Alexandria (circa 1st century).
Robots are automata.
The International Standards Organisation defines robots as programmable machines with at least three degrees of freedom. That falls within the scope of Heron's automata.
Around the 16th century, when Heron's book was translated into Italian, androids (automata that looked like people, what today we might call animatronics, or puppets) became popular with show people. Those who built and operated them were known as necromancers. (Although at least one Christ-shaped temple machine was in operation since the late middle ages.)
The word "robot" is younger, of course, as the fine summary mentions, and in Capek's play it didn't refer to automata, but rather to mass-produced variants of Frankenstein's creature. (From the book, not the Hammer Films adaptation, which is very different, and also quite a bit later.) In his books, Isaac Asimov distinguished between androids (made from organic tissue like Frankenstein's creature and Capek's robots) and robots (ambulatory positronic computers, sometimes humaniform).
The Golem of Prague also perfectly fits the description of a robot, although it is centuries older than the word.
(The word "golem" meant someone who does menial tasks. That particular golem happened to have been a programmable machine, made from clay in an imitation of the story of Genesis, so a sophisticated form of necromancy. Although there is no evidence that the story isn't science fiction.)
There's an even older story from China, about a puppet that is so human-like that the king doesn't believe that it isn't a human, until the creator dismantles his work to prove it, destroying it in the process.
Going further back, Hesiod describes the Greek god Hephaistos (Vulkan in the Roman adaptation) as creating different kinds of automata, including tables that move around by themselves, and even a sex bot made from gold. (The story of Pygmalion probably doesn't count, it's just about a life-like statue that miraculously comes to life.)
Automation saves lives.
The less you have to think about the details, the less opportunity you have to screw it up. Especially when its a problem that has been solved corretly before.
every nuclear weapon on the planet requires
That's just nonsense.
The two bombs dropped on Japan didn't require any keys to be turned.
Most nuclear weapons are vertically deployed anti-personell devices. They usually just have a switch to arm them.
American ICBMs require that thing with the simultaneous keys, but that's not all the nuclear weapons on this planet, only most of them.
The Russian Dead Man's Hand can launch ICBMs autonomously. It requires human intervention to prevent a launch, in case there is a false alarm. The idea is that there might be nobody left alive to do that in case of an actual attack.
You are making the assumption that everyone has the exact same disposable income.
Those 5000 are the average, and the average tends to be skewed by outliers in the top 1%.
Which means that for most people, and the median, 500 is significantly more than 10%.
More realistic is that there are a bunch of people who wouldn't even notice that amount missing behind their couch.
A very small percentage of people, but enough to support this kind of business model.
(And they probably all know each other.)
in their culture, sons are valued much higher than daughters, so sex-selection abortions were occurring
Not according to the CIA Factbook.
There are cultures where the family of the bride is expected to pay for the wedding, and it is those in which sons are valued more than daughters.
China is not one of those.
Besides, the one-child-policy was in the 1960s. That hasn't been relevant for decades.
With the 2020s they now have a pro-natalist policy.
Nobody is going to buy Zoom.
Matrix can do everything Zoom can do, and do it better, and without the security holes.
And it is already open source. Free software, even.
I already have a perl script that is reading webcomics for me.
There is no such thing as a tragedy of the commons.
It was invented by a eugenicist.
Someone looked at the facts regarding his claim, and it turns out that Garrett Hardin was wrong. Who would have thought.
It only becomes a tragedy as soon as someone puts a price on commons. In other words, the problems start when the commons are privatised. When they stop being commons.
So what would you use, gamma rays? https://xkcd.com/273/
IR is higher frequency than microwaves.
in China, pro-democracy speech is restricted
Not really, no. China sees itself as a democracy.
Maybe you meant to say that pro-union speech is restricted?
Or outspoken support for Communism?
Or any criticism of the dear leader?
If a company gets too big, they might try to use this to pressure teh government into getting its way
In the US, there's no real need for this
Indeed.
What could you say about Xi that you can say about Trump?
That he is the president of the USA?
That he is friends with Elon Musk?
That he was friends with Jeffrey Epstein?
That he imposed tariffs on imports from China?
There are eight parties in the central parliament and the central government in Beijing. It hasn't been a single-party system ever since the CCP defeated the KMT in 1949. The CCP has the absolute majority by popular election.
This is different from countries where a single party rules without the need of having the absolute majority, or even a relative popular majority. In the UK, for example, the ruling party has less than a quarter of all the votes. (And the head of state isn't elected at all.)
Intellectual property? Which type? Copyright, trademark, patents?
Copyright means a temporary monopoly on fine art, you created it, and whoever you sold the rights to can determine who gets to make money off of it and who does not. (In most countries you cannot sell copyright, it is automatic and unalienable. So only you get to decide who gets to do with your work what you want.)
Trademark means that you get what you expect, and nobody else can label something similar with the same brand and claim that it is the same thing. Unless, of course, you let them get away with it. Trademarks must be registered, and they expire as soon as you don't care anymore, so you must also always defend them against appropriation.
A patent means a temporary monopoly on an invention for a specific purpose. Anyone using the invention for something else is not covered. Anyone using a different invention for the same purpose is not covered. Patents must be registered and paid for, whereupon they are published for all the world to copy, but not sell. (And in most countries, the patent must have a working prototype to be eligible. There aren't many patent offices that will blindly register an application, take the money, and leave it to the public to contest the monopoly on grounds of "prior art", "too obvious", or "it doesn't even work".)
Intellectual property means "don't think of it as a monopoly, think of it as property, which the state has to defend against thieves trying to cut in on my monopoly!" Or in other words: "Intellectual property is anything that lets me dictate how other people use the things they own."
This is about none of these things.
What this is about is personality rights. You have the right to your own name, nobody else may pretend to be you; that would be identity theft. (Although there are a lot of people who share the same name; and some people have more than one name. And then there's transliterations of names. Actually, a name is not a good way to identify someone.) You have the right to your own likeness, nobody else gets to pretend to be you. Except, of course, when there is no danger of the pretense being mistaken for the real thing, such as in parodies (Spitting Image comes to mind) or in biopics.
If you don't have time to do it right, where are you going to find the time to do it over?
