This link has been bookmarked by 6 people . It was first bookmarked on 31 Mar 2008, by nagareochiru.
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01 May 16
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04 Oct 13
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31 Mar 08
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We have lots of computers and robots today and not one of them has even the rudiments of the Three Laws built-in. It's extraordinarily easy for "equipment failure" to result in human death, after all, in direct violation of the First Law.
Asimov's Laws assume that we will create intelligent machines full-blown out of nothing, and thus be able to impose across the board a series of constraints. Well, that's not how it's happening. Instead, we are getting closer to artificial intelligence by small degrees and, as such, nobody is really implementing fundamental safeguards.
Take Eliza, the first computer psychiatric program. There is nothing in its logic to make sure that it doesn't harm the user in an Asimovian sense, by, for instance, re-opening old mental wounds with its probing. Now, we can argue that Eliza is way too primitive to do any real harm, but then that means someone has to say arbitrarily, okay, that attempt at AI requires no safeguards but this attempt does. Who would that someone be?
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We already live in a world in which Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics have no validity, a world in which every single computer user is exposed to radiation that is considered at least potentially harmful, a world in which machines replace people in the workplace all the time. (Asimov's First Law would prevent that: taking away someone's job absolutely is harm in the Asimovian sense, and therefore a "Three Laws" robot could never do that, but, of course, real robots do it all the time.)
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