Some Robots Are Good
People probably already know this, but there is a trend occurring at the moment to adopt a very dark viewpoint of where technology might take us, and especially Artificial Intelligence, with everyone from Elon Musk to Steven Hawking talking about the dangers of killer robots.
In Fukushima there are robots going where people can’t go, which is very important, since the tsunami came and triggered a nuclear meltdown. They are helping to clear around 600 tonnes of toxic waste from the site.
http://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-41505801/the-origami-inspired-bots-that-could-perform-surgery
At MIT, origami inspired robots are being looked at as having the potential to carry out various surgeries. There are other instances too.
Sophia the Robot in Dubai being given rights is not a great example, when people in that country are suffering obvious human rights abuses.
It’s been a fascinating subject for a long time — explored in great depth by writers such as Isaac Asimov (the original thinker on a lot of the ramifications of AI). Now there are people who specialize in it — futurists and the like. People who don’t even like the term AI, because it is an expression derived from a chauvinistic viewpoint that suggest human superiority.
Much discussion is given to whether or not one has the right to hobble an AI as it grows and becomes sentient — if it doesn’t have the ability and potential to develop a sense of good and evil, and an ability to commit acts that may fall into either camp, then how can we really claim sentience for it?
Is it just that we want to develop something that has a very shallow intelligence that is merely push button? A slave consciousness that can think as far as we deem necessary and no further? Are we looking to deny it an internal life? It would be nice to think that we will have all the kinks hammered out before a machine wakes up and becomes a problem, but given the way that we usually operate, it is more likely that we will dream the thing is safely locked down in laboratory conditions, and it will surprise us. Currently, in our quest to create intelligent life, we have a marginal grip on how structure functions, but we do not have much of a picture in the science community of how consciousness arises from those physical structures.
Good and bad robots are likely to be as complex, and maybe more so due to their alien nature, as human beings are.
