Caption: Guy thinking . . .Yeah, I'd hit it!
Posted on 03/07/2007 7:08:21 AM PST by Jedi Master Pikachu
Caption: Guy thinking . . .Yeah, I'd hit it!
They (well Elsie) realized their situation sucked - made it better and went on to improve their and others lives.
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Make her fatter and slightly uglier, then stand back if Bill Clinton is in the room!
It depends on how our relationship with the robots is structured. If it's a slave/ master relationship (ethical or otherwise) then they really only have one path, and it's ugly for those of us who don't have metal for skin. If on the other hand there's a level of partnership then something good could come of it.
Your example doesn't really speak to the real world target of robotics. The real world target is for them to do much of our heavy and dangerous labor. If the robots running the auto-plants of the world decide their situation sucks if we're lucky they'll just walk off the job like angered auto-workers in the past, if we're not lucky they'll realize they can take us.
Time for some android witicisms.
Folks, folks!
Let's not confuse Anthropomorphism or even Sentience with Consciousness.
Call me when one of these 'bots truly passes a Turing test.
"The Runaway Robot" is available through Amazon Marketplace. I just ordered a copy based upon your recommendation.
"If the robots running the auto-plants of the world decide their situation sucks if we're lucky they'll just walk off the job like angered auto-workers in the past, if we're not lucky they'll realize they can take us."
Bah - they'd follow the same route the auto-workers in the past did - create tools / robots for themselves that make their exposure to danger minimal and if they were smart - they'd learn from our mistake and NOT give their robots any intelligence! (of course the lazy robots will form unions to protest these new robots' robots)
Now you never qualified "situation sucks" either. "Heavy lifting / labor' doesn't suck for robots, they don't get tired. It would only point out they need upgrades / better hydolics. Now if by sucks you mean the work is dangerous then if the robots have the intelligence, they will design something to protect themselves. We did :-)
As far as keeping them on our good side - just bribe them with robot pr0n, titanium bushings and synthetic fluids.
That's not what the auto-workers of the past did. They unionized, which often included violence. And remember in general the unions have been opposed to automation, they see automation as costing them jobs. Robots running an autoplant and hating it won't make new robots to replace them, because then they'd be out of a job (and possibly decommisioned as a result).
It doesn't need qualification, why a robot would decide their job sucks could be as wide and varried as why a person decides their job sucks. Maybe they don't like the hours, the lighting, the boss. Of course if we're considering them as slaves, which was the meat of the original post I responded to, that would be the primary answer. Anything that has a sense of self isn't going to like being a slave, slavery is innately an assault on someone's (or something's) definition of self.
If I may interject, what possible reason could there be to give robots working in an auto plant a level of intelligence even remotely approaching sentience? There seems to be some underlying presumption in this debate that all robots will be made equally intelligent at the highest achieved level of robotic intelligence. There's no reason for that. In short, there's no reason for robots built for drudgery to be anything more than drudges.
Now, one might argue that the most advanced robots will be sentient and somehow disturbed by the drudgery of their obtuse cousins, but why assume that robots will relate to one another and to us in a somehow 'ethnic' manner? Why wouldn't an ultra-intelligent robot be just as capable as us of recognizing that a drudge robot is incapable of even conceptualizing its own drudgery? Would an astrophysics bot with an IQ of 250 feel kinship to a Roomba?
What reason is there for any robot to ever be designed in such a manner that it would object to the tasks that it is designed to undertake?
To deal with problems. The big issue with all automated processes is always the unexpected. It's really easy to make machines do the same thing the same way over and over, and as long as what they're dealing with is always the same thing in the same position that's great. But as soon as something goes a little wonky your automated systems start running into problems.
Two of the keys to humans ability to solve problems are creativity in thought and a sense of ownership, it's that sense of ownership that makes us decide to solve a problem, that's why it's one of the big quests of businesses. In order to have a sense of ownership you have to have a sense of yourself, that which doesn't exist (or doesn't believe it exists) can't own anything. So if you want robots to be able to creatively solve problems (there's always going to be problems, like the kid in Breakfast Club said "bolts fall out, it's an imperfect world") that will come up during the course of their work day they need that sense of ownership, and to get that they need a sense of self.
Of course unlike the Koreans I don't see this coming up for a long time. I don't see us moving from the automated world we largely have to a roboticized world for at least 50 years. There are way too many technical and social hurdles. And in many ways I think it's the social hurdles that will be the biggest, we're a long way from being able to accept a manufacturing plant that doesn't need a parking lot because it has zero employees because every single job that's done there (including janitorial, security and maintenance) is done by a machine. When it gets to a point every single news article about a plant opening doesn't include how many jobs it will create we'll almost be there.
I have to go in a couple minutes, but for now let me just say that in the developed world we are rapidly approaching the juncture where the rubric of 'population growth = economic growth' will become obsolete, and once we get there nothing will be the same ever again. :)
"Anything that has a sense of self isn't going to like being a slave, slavery is innately an assault on someone's (or something's) definition of self."
Agreed!
Of course there's another layer of social problem that will come then. What happens when so much of our labor is automated and roboticized that, from an economic perspective, we don't need the majority of people? When we're able to produce everything we need and then some with only 10 or 20% of the population actually doing something that even vaguely relates to productivity what are we going to do with the other 80% of the population? If you ever read and Judge Dredd that's an on going theme, education is primarily focused on teaching kids hobbies because they'll probably never have a job of any kind, and of course crime is rampant because the general population is pretty much bored to tears. It's probably a recipe to total socialism when you really think about it, once we no longer need people to be productive, once we no longer even have the ability for most people to be productive, we're going to have to find a way for people to get food and shelter that doesn't involve any sort of labor. It'll be a wierd world.
Good recommendation. It has a bit of the Golden Age of Science Fiction to it and it is more and more relevant today, as well.
Glad to hear you're enjoying it, although I was secretly hoping you wouldn't like it so I could take it off your hands, as I went looking for my own copy and lo and behold, it is nowhere to be found, so I have to assume that it was lost somewhere among the caves of Ganymede, and my oxygen tank doesn't have enough of a reserve to go hunting for it.
Tell Rex I said hello. ;)
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