3 ms·

Isaac Asimov’s laws of robotics (1965) [video]

jonathankoren 4y ago
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.
- krapp 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    For a post-scarcity economy, they were sure running out of dilithium pretty frequently.
    - krapp 4y ago
      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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
      - earthboundkid 4y ago
        My feeling watching TOS is that even though the special effects are cheesy and the plot devices are lame and the dialogue is wooden, it still has a feeling of reality. I think some of that is just the chemistry of the actors, but some of it was that the people writing about a crew on a warship had been in the military during the war themselves. James Doohan (Scotty) was missing a finger from the war! It wasn’t just a bunch of kids imagining what it’s like to be in a military, but people with at least some experience of it.
        krapp 4y ago
        To the point that one of the best episodes, "Balance of Terror" is basically submarine combat in space (including the ridiculous plot point that the crew all has to be quiet to avoid I guess tripping Romulan space sonar?)
- pixl97 4y ago
  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.
- GauntletWizard 4y ago
  The other day I came up with my sickest burn ever - I called LessWrong "Asimov's Robots ERP". I stand by that statement; Not just a joke but the truth.
carapace 4y ago
(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 https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEMTI-2.pdf "Intuitive Ordinal Notations": https://github.com/semitrivial/IONs https://github.com/semitrivial/IONs https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22Intuitive%20Ordinal%20Notations%22&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ) The other side of the question is "What are humans for?"
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jedberg 4y ago
I like how this shows us why Professor Farnsworth says robot the way he does.
justin66 4y ago
Superseded twenty years later by the repo code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y85YoTIvQAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y85YoTIvQAM
aaron695 4y ago
[dead]

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.

krapp 4y ago
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 4y ago
  For a post-scarcity economy, they were sure running out of dilithium pretty frequently.
  - krapp 4y ago
    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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
    - earthboundkid 4y ago
      My feeling watching TOS is that even though the special effects are cheesy and the plot devices are lame and the dialogue is wooden, it still has a feeling of reality. I think some of that is just the chemistry of the actors, but some of it was that the people writing about a crew on a warship had been in the military during the war themselves. James Doohan (Scotty) was missing a finger from the war! It wasn’t just a bunch of kids imagining what it’s like to be in a military, but people with at least some experience of it.
      - krapp 4y ago
        To the point that one of the best episodes, "Balance of Terror" is basically submarine combat in space (including the ridiculous plot point that the crew all has to be quiet to avoid I guess tripping Romulan space sonar?)
pixl97 4y ago
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.
GauntletWizard 4y ago
The other day I came up with my sickest burn ever - I called LessWrong "Asimov's Robots ERP". I stand by that statement; Not just a joke but the truth.

carapace 4y ago

(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 https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEMTI-2.pdf "Intuitive Ordinal Notations": https://github.com/semitrivial/IONs https://github.com/semitrivial/IONs https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22Intuitive%20Ordinal%20Notations%22&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ) The other side of the question is "What are humans for?"

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jedberg 4y ago

I like how this shows us why Professor Farnsworth says robot the way he does.

justin66 4y ago

Superseded twenty years later by the repo code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y85YoTIvQAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y85YoTIvQAM

aaron695 4y ago

[dead]