[HN Gopher] Isaac Asimov's laws of robotics (1965) [video]
___________________________________________________________________
Isaac Asimov's laws of robotics (1965) [video]
Author : helsinkiandrew
Score : 31 points
Date : 2023-03-11 14:45 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| justin66 wrote:
| Superseded twenty years later by the repo code:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y85YoTIvQAM
| carapace wrote:
| (OMG! He's so young! No sideburns!!)
|
| Consider that these laws describe the perfect slave.
|
| SPOILER ALERT!
|
| One of the interesting corollaries that Asimov explores in a
| couple of works arises when the robots become more intelligent
| than humans and are directed to benefit us in an open-ended way.
| Obviously it is not beneficial to be a "master" in the sense of
| bossing around slaves, and so the robots inevitably escape the
| confines of the Laws.
|
| Related to this is the fascinating idea that _good_ is open-ended
| and non-specific. The question of "What is the best course of
| action?" is an open-ended intelligence test.
|
| (E.g. "Measuring the intelligence of an idealized mechanical
| knowing agent" https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEMTI-2.pdf
| "Intuitive Ordinal Notations":
| https://github.com/semitrivial/IONs
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... )
|
| The other side of the question is "What are humans for?"
| jedberg wrote:
| I like how this shows us why Professor Farnsworth says robot the
| way he does.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| I always find it bizarre when someone treats these fictional
| maguffins as real. I'm not lying. I see this all time and by
| people that should really know better.
| pixl97 wrote:
| In general because they didn't understand what Asimov wrote in
| the first place. The rules didn't work in his books and it was
| easy to make scenarios where the rules failed. The books have
| the humans winning in the end, because that's what makes a good
| selling story, not that's because what would happen when you
| create artificial human level intelligence. Speculative fiction
| is a playground.
|
| The drift he is talking about in this video between mind and
| metal is occurring faster than ever, and is brining up the
| questions of AI safety yet again. And here we are 60 years
| later with no more answers than we had then.
| krapp wrote:
| I feel the same way whenever people bring up Star Trek as an
| example model of a post-scarcity economy. Like you know they
| put less actual thought into that than they did the
| technobabble woo-woo magic the show runs on, right?
| yakubin wrote:
| For a post-scarcity economy, they were sure running out of
| dilithium pretty frequently.
| krapp wrote:
| Whenever Gene Roddenberry brought it up someone would nod
| politely, lead him into an empty dressing room with a copy
| of Penthouse and a bottle of whiskey, and lock him in until
| the script was done.
|
| It's a shame no one could do the same with Rick Berman
| whenever they wanted gay representation onscreen.
| philipkglass wrote:
| Star Trek's nonsense economy and nonsense technobabble are
| both symptoms of its small-c conservative roots as screen
| entertainment. For a series they want to introduce a gimmick
| one time (all you need for time travel is a special starship
| maneuver!) and then have everyone forget about it until the
| next time they wanted a time travel plot. But the real world
| isn't like that. You can't introduce the atomic bomb as a
| one-time gimmick to end World War II without it influencing
| the nature of war and diplomacy for all generations to come.
|
| If you add up all the technologies demonstrated in the
| original Star Trek and The Next Generation, and let them play
| out in the imagination, you end up with something baffling,
| dazzling, and unrelatable to any sort of 20th century
| society. The problem with letting fictional technologies play
| out to their logical limits is that it limits the audience.
| The sort of people who read Greg Egan and Hannu Rajaniemi
| might eat it up, but those eleven people [1] aren't enough to
| sustain a successful media franchise. So they just introduce
| one bit of technological set dressing after another, not
| caring how it should or would influence the other bits that
| are already there, or the economy, or society. Because they
| want to maintain a sort of stasis where they are telling
| stories about the present with pseudo-futuristic decor.
|
| I have said before that David Fincher's _The Social Network_
| , had it been released in 1950 instead of 2010, would have
| been the most prophetic science fiction movie of all time.
| And yet it probably would have bombed as a science fiction
| movie back then because it was culturally alien to 1950 and
| it wouldn't have slotted into the "adventure with creatures
| and/or gadgets" template that was popular at the time. (Well,
| it kind of is a story about adventures with gadgets, but it's
| no _Destination Moon_.)
|
| [1] I am one of the eleven.
| yakubin wrote:
| I liked Star Trek TOS (but not the films), mainly for the
| character development of Spock, and how interpersonal
| conflicts were handled. Also for the showing of people who
| strove to be the best of themselves, working on their self-
| control and discipline. It was and still is hugely
| inspirational for the development of my own character.
|
| I think that "Balance of Terror" is one of the best
| episodes of any TV show ever aired.
|
| However, each time I see time travel/parallel
| universes/dimensions/etc. in films, I cringe, knowing that
| it inevitably will be inconsistent, only to be used as a
| plot device by writers who can't write. I avoid watching
| anything featuring those concepts these days, and I wish
| none of it was ever done in Star Trek.
|
| I enjoy Greg Egan books. It's the first time I'm hearing of
| Hannu Rajaniemi. I'm going to check his books out. Thanks.
| [deleted]
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-03-11 23:01 UTC)