Posted on 07/20/2004 9:30:30 PM PDT by ckilmer
Movie tests Asimov's moral code for robots
11:33 16 July 04
NewScientist.com news service
The possibility of developing truly intelligent machines, and their potential to be friend or foe to humanity, gets the Hollywood treatment in a new blockbuster film I, Robot, which opens in the US on Friday.
In the movie, robots wrestle with human-like emotions (image: 20th Century Fox)
At the heart of the movie are Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics", invented as a simple, but immutable moral code for robots [See below]. The film's plot revolves around an apparent breaking of the laws, when a robot is suspected of murdering a famous scientist.
Yet, while the movie is an enjoyable action romp, robotics and artificial intelligence experts admit they are a long way from having to worry about such rules yet. "The difficulty is building something that would understand them," says Alan Bundy, at Edinburgh University's Artificial Intelligence Institute in the UK. "That is well beyond the state of the art at the moment."
Bundy notes that simple safety measures are already a crucial part of the design of industrial robots, which have in rare cases caused the death of people. But these measure are hardly the same as Asimov's laws, he says.
"It is interesting to think about what would be required to make something that would obey the laws," he told New Scientist. "But all we can do for now is to build rules in at a simple level."
Programmed intelligence
Even if researchers are ever able to build robots with enough intelligence to comprehend Asimov's laws, they are unlikely to be implemented. Although they attracted some interest in the early stages of artificial intelligence research, the rules were quickly abandoned as too prescriptive and simplistic.
"Asimov's laws are about as relevant to robotics as leeches are to modern medicine," says Steve Grand, who founded the UK company Cyberlife Research and is working on developing artificial intelligence through learning. "They stem from an innocent bygone age, when people seriously thought that intelligence was something that could be 'programmed in' as a series of logical propositions."
The key problem, Grand says, is that the basic operating principles of the human brain - the only model for advanced intelligence that we have - are not well understood. There are currently many theories and possible approaches to generating artificial intelligence, and Bundy warns that the field remains hideously fragmented for now.
One way to create thinking robots, which is being championed by Grand and others, may be through teaching. Grand is experimenting by teaching a simple robot, called Lucy, and hopes that robots could one day develop complex intelligence by mimicking the way humans learn.
"They'll just have to learn the difference between right and wrong, like the rest of us," he told New Scientist. "I’m confident we’ll get there, but I think it’ll happen in a series of sudden, unpredictable lurches, not a steady progression."
Asimov's Three Rules of Robots:
1 - A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2 - A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3 - A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
(Asimov eventually added a fourth law that required robots to protect humanity as a whole)
Will Knight
I thought it was a good movie..
I predict a more cybernetic evolution of this technology, where the lines between man and machine are blurred, and a network of interconnected thought becomes the most efficient way to communicate.
Keyboards are so 20th century. This typing thing is neanderthal.
And having to actually pick up and answer a cell phone? Wouldn't an incoming thought be so much easier to handle?
So, let your imagination run with that for a while, then read about the Tower of Babel. Gen. 11:1-9
Scary stuff.
Great to know. Thanks.
The self checkout at Walmart is my enemy.
Bingo! I believe that AI, gentetic engineering, and cloning is one of the Towers of Babel. In these sciences we are trying to play God, to create life from lifelessness and to shape a human being without God's intervention.
In the not too distant future, scientists may try to redo the first tower, finding a way into heaven without moral living and dying.
Or check out Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. The concept of being a "neuro-linguistic" hacker is freaky.
The only thing it has in common with the Asimov story of the title is the 3 laws of robots
I predict a more cybernetic evolution of this technology, where the lines between man and machine are blurred, and a network of interconnected thought becomes the most efficient way to communicate.
Keyboards are so 20th century. This typing thing is neanderthal.
And having to actually pick up and answer a cell phone? Wouldn't an incoming thought be so much easier to handle?
So, let your imagination run with that for a while, then read about the Tower of Babel. Gen. 11:1-9
Scary stuff.
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the tower of babel story is an interesting one. consider the line:
And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top [may reach] unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
This beginning is just like Oedipus tragedy. As in "I am Oedipus whom all men call great." This tracks pretty well with "let us build us a city and a tower, whose top [may reach] unto heaven; and let us make us a name"
These people were going to make the tower for their own glory. God responds by giving the greatest attaboy/compliments to men ever recorded.
Gen 11:6 And the LORD said, Behold, the people [is] one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
So God becomes jealous and breaks up their language.
So how can men achieve great things without making God jealous? Jesus gave answers to this in Mt 19:26, Lu1:37, Heb:11:6.
In contrast just about any movie with William Macy is good.
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