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A mad scientist lab?
Posted Sep 5, 2007
[This looks like the traditional mad-scientist lab, except that it looks like it's just moved in; half the weird machines and strance devices haven't been removed from their boxes, the flasks and glass tubes of strange liquids have barely begun bubbling, and the giant monster plant next to the Auto Seymour Maker is looking a bit boxed-in. Even now, several Metools are finishing with setting up a computer against one wall, as well as placing a nearly-completed machine on a workbench; this they are able to do despite having no arms.]
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Latest reply: Sep 5, 2007
Reason
Posted Sep 2, 2007
"In short, Mort was one of those people who are more dangerous than a bag full of rattlesnakes. He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe. Which was going to be hard, because there wasn't any. The Creator had a lot of remarkably good ideas when he put the world together, but making it understandable hadn't been one of them."
- Terry Pratchett, "Mort"
I was pondering artificial intelligence -- specifically, the titular robot in John Sladek's novel "Tick-Tock." Not to spoil it for those of you who haven't read it, but the robot apparently breaks Asimov's First Law of Robotics and commits multiple murders against humans. My thoughts turned to how it might be prevented without using "Three Laws" or "asimov circuits" which would override what it might do anyway. (Yes, I know, in Isaac Asimov's original stories, they were built into its behavior to begin with, but ... well, the premise of the stories is the following hypothesis: "Three simple laws can effectively constrain a robot's behavior." Asimov explored this in fifty or more of those short stories, novels, and so on, and the conclusion pretty much all of them reached was "No they can't," even though the Laws were only actually altered, to my knowledge, in precisely two of them.)
Wait, I know! Psychological conditioning! You just "raise" the robot, through programming or learning, so that it won't WANT to harm people, or through inaction allow people to come to harm (followed by obedience and self-preservation, in descending order of importance). I once started writing a short story in which its robotic characters were simply amused by the fact that they were property. And if you have any problems, just have 'em spend some sessions with some sort of robopsychologist like the infamous Susan Calvin, and ...
... wait a minute ...
At this point I ran into a currently-rather-unyielding roadblock, which is that artificial intelligence won't be the same as human intelligence. It is the height of human arrogance, or at least a really big mistake, to assume that just because something can think, this automatically means it thinks exactly like a human, especially a human who thinks like /you/.
Part of this is because even if you managed to make something that "started out" psychologically in every way to a human being, well, our behavior is emergent. This means that however simple the rules of the game are, you can't possibly anticipate what the results are going to be unless you go out and let it happen. And humans are so complicated, we don't KNOW most of the "rules". To quote Lyall Watson, "If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't."
Furthermore, if you change ONE thing in an emergent system, pretty much everything that follows from it will be affected. Even if you start out with an artificial brain that is entirely human (so to speak), the "mere" fact that it is artificial and knows it will change ... well ... EVERYTHING. It'd be like taking Langton's Ant (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langton%27s_ant ), and expecting the same results if it's a checkerboard of black and white squares at the beginning instead of all of them white. You'd almost have to rewrite psychology from the ground up, and the results would only be valid when you had enough robots to constitute a "population", i.e. one with normality against which abnormality can be contrasted.
So, in short: WAY easier said than done.
(By the way, I've crossposted this to my LiveJournal. http://yarkramer.livejournal.com/45349.html )
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Latest reply: Sep 2, 2007
Huh.
Posted Aug 31, 2007
[The silence of someplace that is technically someone's home, but overall it looks like nobody's been here in a while.]
[Yar walks into the room, wearing pajamas and a black bathrobe. He looks around, about half in disbelief and half nostalgic.]
[Yar] ... Huh.
[He checks to make sure nothing's actually exploded, or melted. Against his better judgment, he opens the fridge, which is entirely empty, save for a small note for the postman saying that the fungus has moved to a new address. Yar stares at it for several moments, then closes it again.]
[Yar] Meh.
[He goes over to check his messages, and he looks rather surprised that there's not more than there is. Then he frowns.]
[Yar] Cafe ...? Oh. Right, Mog'll ... [trails off]
[He shrugs, then deletes some of his old entries. He gets up, and stretches, then shrugs.]
[Yar] Ah well, guess I'm back for now ...
Discuss this Journal entry [52]
Latest reply: Aug 31, 2007
Moderation
Posted May 18, 2002
I'm not a rabid Zaphodista. I'm just an ordinary H2G2-goer. But I do agree with the Zaphodistas that the Moderation thing is a bit over-done on the BBC's part. I also agree that we were doing just fine without the Moderators.
I think that we should have, instead of Big Brother Moderator, someone we should /tell/ if someone does something really offensive. None of this pre-emptive Moderation, but if a "Now listen here, you" in the actual forum isn't enough, we want someone to intervene and mediate the problem. If it works in real life communities, why shouldn't it work in an online community?
The reason, one might argue, is that we haven't recieved ANYTHING, post, page, or E-mail, directly from the Moderators other than "Removed by Moderator". I have never been in any other online community where the "mods" were no more than Big Brother. I even can attatch a name, if not a face, to the moderators in, say, Bob and George's community or that of RPGClassics. I even know some of them. But on the H2G2, the most you can say of them is "Big Brother" and they contribute to the H2G2 in no positive way whatsoever. I want Moderators I can relate to.
Of course, the reason Moderators have never tried to join in the community is probably half because they feel alienated by all these anti-Moderator sentiments. (And the other half is because they're part of a bureaucracy. 
) They feel that if they join in and say "Hi, I'm a Moderator," they're going to get flamed to bits. (Though why a Moderator would be afraid of /flames/... ) Of course, they should have joined the fun in the first place to prevent this very situation from happening.
If any BBC Moderators want to talk to me via E-mail during their off-hours, my E-mail address is [email protected] and is also on my front space.
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Latest reply: May 18, 2002
Something Completely tnereffiD
Posted Feb 21, 2002
Immediately afterwards, the giant red-orange panda climbed out of the dashboard. The surfboard salesman thereupon retreated, complaining about the mints. Exactly why the Ghost of Charlton Heston had chosen to haunt this particular tea-cosy factory was unclear, so the Robotics Consortium returned to find that the Doubtful Guest had filled all the cubbyholes with Aces of Spades. At this Her Ladyship panicked, fearing for his wealth, but the Starship Captain assured them that the spice would be carefully placed back inside the fish. Since all the droids were much too busy disassembling the battered Ford Prefect in the shop, he released the rabbits in a secluded park where no one would worry them. Finally, the penguins, for whom none could find great use, stormed the fortress, but their efforts were thwarted by a lack of throat lozenges. And that's how it all began.
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Latest reply: Feb 21, 2002
Dizzy H. Muffin
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