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Asimov added a 4th law: A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm. Is it just me, or is, "don't be evil" a little too c
by BIair 13y ago
Asimov added a 4th law:
A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
Is it just me, or is, "don't be evil" a little too close for comfort?
- thibauts 13y agoIt's all right. If adopted, the second part has provision for protecting us from terrorists. I can relax now.
- troymc 13y agoThat would be the "Zeroth Law", zeroth because it supersedes all the others. A version of it first showed up in Asimov's short story "The Evitable Conflict": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evitable_Conflict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evitable_Conflict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeroth_Law_of_Robotics#Zeroth_Law_added https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeroth_Law_of_Robotics#Zeroth_... If you give robots autonomy, they inevitably end up having to make moral decisions. For example, "Should I, an autonomous car, run over the elderly man or the girl with terminal cancer, those being the only two options?" Asimov's laws (initially suggested by an editor, John W. Campbell) were a first pass at some principles for decision-making. Others have since devised more elaborate ones.
- PavlovsCat 13y agoIt's all still just words. No two humans could ever fully agree on what constitutes "harm", racist ones would even debate who is "human". It's like everybody has the public methods what_is_harm() and what_is_a_human(), but how they're implemented matters, not the function signature. The laws of robots are just placeholders for something that never got written. Words are tricky. What if robots decide that the best way to avoid harm coming to humans is to prevent any being born? So that means you have to rephrase it, into something like maximizing human happiness. Oh no, now they're injecting everyone with drugs and cloning humans by the planetfull. What now? Actual source or it didn't happen.. just creating an empty file called solution_to_the_problem.txt doesn't work, I tried it.
- timdev2 13y ago> Words are tricky. Words are relatively easy. Ethics are not reducible to lexicography.
- PavlovsCat 13y agoThat's why trying to reduce ethics to a few words is.. tricky. > Ethics are not reducible to lexicography. Nor is anything else, which was kind of my whole point.
- philwelch 13y agoThere are robot stories by Asimov that explore a lot of these questions. The Three Laws were a basis for storytelling more than anything.
- jodrellblank 13y agoThey are placeholders to something written several billion times over in various ways in every human brain. We don't learn ethics by reading it as a dry description; why do we expect to build other minds that do?
- n09n 13y agoBecause that would be consistent with how those minds "learn" everything else they "know".
- altero 13y agoWhy? Dogs are autonomous as well, but live happily without such philosophical conflict.
- salient 13y agoThe intelligence of the dog is limited. I guess it depends on whether we'll let such robots have limited intelligence, too, or we'll give them access to everything, and make them as smart as they can be (much smarter than us).
- n09n 13y agoOr admit that there's no single axis we can use to measure intelligence. The computers will have virtually unlimited memory space that they can access perfectly and huge processing power but will have no idea how to perform basic actions that dogs understand instinctively.
- tunesmith 13y agoDogs are also stupid enough to jump into someone and break the person's leg while catching a frisbee, as happened to a friend of mine who had just gone off health insurance.