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I was in kindergarten in 1990, and my school had robotics books describing some of these home robots, but they were never very realistic about their actual capa

I was in kindergarten in 1990, and my school had robotics books describing some of these home robots, but they were never very realistic about their actual capabilities. Being a young child, my imagination ran wild. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View actually has a number of home robots on display, which was cool because it was the first (and last?) time that I could see them in person.

Isamu 8y ago
>Being a young child, my imagination ran wild. This is the source of much of our collective imagination about robots. And all the dystopian movie plots about robots overthrowing humans and killing them all. I think that is completely projection - somebody is thinking "well, if I were a robot, I'd kill everybody." It really says a hell of a lot more about humans than robots. For robots to take over the world or kill all humans, first they'd have to give a shit. They'd have to perceive themselves as oppressed or something. And have some motivations, akin to emotions, driving the behavior. Good luck on coding that up.
- madengr 8y ago
  Asimov is robots done right.
  - mrob 8y ago
    Asimov's Three Laws don't even work in the fictional setting. A common theme of his robot stories is humans investigating strange or harmful behavior of robots, that ultimately turns out to be a consequence of the laws as the robot understood them. They're good storytelling, but bad real-life ethics.
- tudorconstantin 8y ago
  > They'd have to perceive themselves as oppressed or something. Those robots wouldn't have to search very much on the internet to find out what happened to that Microsoft AI Twitter bot when it started to misbehave
- pvg 8y ago
  somebody is thinking "well, if I were a robot, I'd kill everybody." Most of these, from the earliest, are various allegories about responses to exploitation and oppression not people thinking how they’d want to kill everybody if they were a robot.
  - krapp 8y ago
    IIRC, the word "Robot" itself comes from the Czech play "Rossum's Universal Robots[0]" and translates to slave, so the metaphor of class struggle was always there. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.
    - pvg 8y ago
      It doesn't quite translate to that but yeah, the theme of 'make a thing and it turns against you' itself is one of the oldest around.
    - enkiv2 8y ago
      It translates to 'worker', & the play came out shortly before the russian revolution, so it's clear that the subtext of the term in its original use is not merely a criticism of slavery but also a marxist criticism of the exploitation of the proletariat under industrial capitalism. (Important to note that, just like in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep & Blade Runner, the 'robots' in R.U.R. are not mechanical devices but instead genetically engineered synthetic humans. That helps the metaphor a great deal: rather than being a pure 'other' whose behavior might be seen as a design error, it's simply a different breed or race of humans with different heredity that makes them convenient for othering, along with some argument about hereditary traits that supposedly make them more suited to hard labor.)
      - pvg 8y ago
        It translates to 'worker' It's a made up word. If it translated to 'worker' he'd have just written 'worker' in Czech.
        8y ago
- Reedx 8y ago
  > They'd have to perceive themselves as oppressed or something. Not necessarily. All they need to have is a single minded goal of creating paperclips and optimizing for that.
Bluestrike2 8y ago
When I was in kindergarten (maybe first grade; not sure I remember which), I called Carnegie Mellon's main line and was redirected to their Robotics Institute where I asked when I could expect to buy a regular robot. I may have told them I'd have to grow up a bit and help them speed things along when the answer wasn't "soon." I also called Learjet around the same time. They even sent me a set of photos and a sales prospectus my parents still have. Though they were less than enthused when they realized I gave them our address and had to explain why a sale wasn't likely to the salesperson who followed up. There's something truly inspiring to a lot of kids about what engineers can build. Inspiring to me as an adult, too.

Isamu 8y ago

>Being a young child, my imagination ran wild. This is the source of much of our collective imagination about robots. And all the dystopian movie plots about robots overthrowing humans and killing them all. I think that is completely projection - somebody is thinking "well, if I were a robot, I'd kill everybody." It really says a hell of a lot more about humans than robots. For robots to take over the world or kill all humans, first they'd have to give a shit. They'd have to perceive themselves as oppressed or something. And have some motivations, akin to emotions, driving the behavior. Good luck on coding that up.

madengr 8y ago
Asimov is robots done right.
- mrob 8y ago
  Asimov's Three Laws don't even work in the fictional setting. A common theme of his robot stories is humans investigating strange or harmful behavior of robots, that ultimately turns out to be a consequence of the laws as the robot understood them. They're good storytelling, but bad real-life ethics.
tudorconstantin 8y ago
> They'd have to perceive themselves as oppressed or something. Those robots wouldn't have to search very much on the internet to find out what happened to that Microsoft AI Twitter bot when it started to misbehave
pvg 8y ago
somebody is thinking "well, if I were a robot, I'd kill everybody." Most of these, from the earliest, are various allegories about responses to exploitation and oppression not people thinking how they’d want to kill everybody if they were a robot.
- krapp 8y ago
  IIRC, the word "Robot" itself comes from the Czech play "Rossum's Universal Robots[0]" and translates to slave, so the metaphor of class struggle was always there. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.
  - pvg 8y ago
    It doesn't quite translate to that but yeah, the theme of 'make a thing and it turns against you' itself is one of the oldest around.
  - enkiv2 8y ago
    It translates to 'worker', & the play came out shortly before the russian revolution, so it's clear that the subtext of the term in its original use is not merely a criticism of slavery but also a marxist criticism of the exploitation of the proletariat under industrial capitalism. (Important to note that, just like in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep & Blade Runner, the 'robots' in R.U.R. are not mechanical devices but instead genetically engineered synthetic humans. That helps the metaphor a great deal: rather than being a pure 'other' whose behavior might be seen as a design error, it's simply a different breed or race of humans with different heredity that makes them convenient for othering, along with some argument about hereditary traits that supposedly make them more suited to hard labor.)
    - pvg 8y ago
      It translates to 'worker' It's a made up word. If it translated to 'worker' he'd have just written 'worker' in Czech.
      - 8y ago
Reedx 8y ago
> They'd have to perceive themselves as oppressed or something. Not necessarily. All they need to have is a single minded goal of creating paperclips and optimizing for that.

Bluestrike2 8y ago

When I was in kindergarten (maybe first grade; not sure I remember which), I called Carnegie Mellon's main line and was redirected to their Robotics Institute where I asked when I could expect to buy a regular robot. I may have told them I'd have to grow up a bit and help them speed things along when the answer wasn't "soon." I also called Learjet around the same time. They even sent me a set of photos and a sales prospectus my parents still have. Though they were less than enthused when they realized I gave them our address and had to explain why a sale wasn't likely to the salesperson who followed up. There's something truly inspiring to a lot of kids about what engineers can build. Inspiring to me as an adult, too.