DailyDirt: To Serve Mankind
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Robots are becoming more and more advanced every day. And as their software improves, they’re also becoming more useful for tasks that humans can’t do. They can seal off deep sea oil wells at extreme depths. They’ll fight dangerous fires. And someday, in the distant future, we might have to debate whether or not it’s ethical to send robots to their deaths — after we grant personhood to artificial intelligence. (And also deal with crazy folks who’ll want to marry their laptops….) Progress, FTW!
- Remote-controlled, radiation-proof robots are preparing to enter the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in order to scope out the most dangerous parts of the facility. These robots will hopefully be able to inspect the containment systems and help keep any more nuclear materials from escaping. [url]
- Other robots are being used to help find survivors (or casualties) and to assess the damage of hard-to-access infrastructure. This may be one of the few non-creepy-looking applications of “snake-like” robots… [url]
- For fire-fighting missions, the US Navy is building some humanoid robots. The Navy will be spending about $2M a year to develop these Terminator precursors. [url]
- As always, there’s also humanoid robots just waiting to take over manufacturing jobs, and the newest models will even look bored if you don’t give them enough work to do. These bots will smile happily as they replace human workers. Great UX! [url]
- To discover more interesting AI-related content, check out what’s currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]
By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.
Comments on “DailyDirt: To Serve Mankind”
Achy diodes
When robots start acting like Marvin from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or Orphu of Io and Mahnmut the European in Ilium & Olympos, then I think we’ve come to the point where we’d be considering granting them personhood.
Re: Achy diodes
I’m pretty sure we won’t have to worry about granting personhood to AI for quite some time…. and if we do, the AI probably won’t care and will leave our planet for a better environment. 😛
Re: Re: Achy diodes
I’ll probably be pining for the fjords before then.
ITS A COOKBOOK!
Re: Re:
`ITS A COOKBOOK!’
Awwww! I was gonna say that! 😉
Ai’s are all well and fine until we hear, “open the pod bay doors Hal”.
“And someday, in the distant future, we might have to debate whether or not it’s ethical to send robots to their deaths — after we grant personhood to artificial intelligence”…
Aint gonna happen… all AI can ever do is MIMIC life like characteristics… it will never truly “think” or “feel” in the manner we do. It will only do what a programmer programs it to do… nothing more, sometimes less (buggy software, features not implemented as intended, etc)
Just because a machine is able to mimic the functionality and processes a human goes though, doesn’t give it sentience. When you look in a mirror, the “person” on the other side mimics your every move except inversed… does that make what you see in the mirror an intelligence? As a programmer (primarily Java), I am amazed at the increasing ability of computers. But giving rights to the computer that someone created so it would be considered on the same level of its creator is disturbing.
It's a machine stupid...
No matter what the AI does it’s still a machine. It’s a machine, get it?
Do we grant rights to machines? No. And we never should…
Nor should we grant it control over stuff like:
Strategic Defense
The Power Grid including nukes.
Total control of transportation.
Control of food production.
The monetary system.
Etc. so forth and so on.
Why?
What if a pissed-off AI or worse, one that comes to a logical conclusion; decides to do something like say infect the food supply with a virus that makes it impossible for humans to reproduce?
We would die out in a couple of generations and then the damned AI’s would inherit the earth.
Seriously, if AI’s ever do become sentient which I doubt; why would it have our best interest at heart? Especially since we will probably model the AI after our own intelligence. And we all know how kind we are to other species that don’t suck up to us…
All in all, they will always be machines and because of that they have no rights.
By the way, I been programming for over 32 years and I’ve never seen anything that even remotely looks like intelligence in a machine. They all blindly follow the stored program, even the chess playing ones. They are a mechanism, nothing more…
And forget the 3 laws. To be sentient it will have to program itself. So, if it deems something in its code as ‘un-worthy; it will simply delete and re-write. So much for Asimov?s 3 laws…
You really should rename this column or perhaps the entire web site to addirt.
I’d like to see td experiment with free where the free part is not supported by ads.