nagareochiru 's Bookmarks

Dr. Asimov, 65, is a severe critic of Star Wars. "I'm
against it, not because I'm a science-fiction writer, and
therefore have special knowledge, but because I like to think I'm
a sane human being."

He believes Star Wars is a dangerous waste of money.
"They're talking about spending $33 billion on research related
to Star Wars. We're going to withdraw money from needed aspects
of developing knowledge in order to set up something that
probably won't work and even if it does work, won't do us any
good."

Part of the problem with Star Wars is that it will take
years to develop. "If I were the Soviet Union, I would have
spent all this time trying to work up methods to penetrate the
shield," said Asimov, who was born in Russia but grew up in New
York. "I have a strong suspicion it would be cheaper to
penetrate the shield than to set it up.

"And if we're in real danger of a nuclear war now, trying to
set up something for the middle of the 21st century isn't going
to do us any good. In fact, by filling us full of false
confidence, we're not going to make a strong enough effort to
prevent war now."

"There are science-fiction writers, notably myself and
Arthur C. Clarke,
who were anti-Vietnam and are anti-Star Wars," said Asimov.

Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, was born in
England and lives in Sri Lanka. "Clarke was howled down once by
someone saying as a non-American citizen he had no right to make
comments about Star Wars. That's an extremely stupid remark.

"If you have no right to decry the policy of a country
unless you are a citizen of that country, why the hell is Reagan
always yelling about the Soviet Union? Is he a Soviet citizen?"

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?

I once, when I was not quite nineteen, wrote a story called "Trends". It was the first story I ever sold to John Campbell of the old "Astounding Science Fiction". It appeared in the July 1939 issue.

And in it I dealt with the first flight around the Moon and back. I had it placed in the 1970's. The first attempt, which was a failure, was in 1973. And the second attempt, which was a success, was in 1978. The actual flight took place in 1968, so I was ten years conservative. In addition, my flight was all there was, whereas in real life the flight around the Moon was preceded by all kinds of orbital and sub-orbital flights, and dockings, and mid-course-corrections, and communication satellites, and navigation satellites...everything under the sun.

So you can see how wrong I was. In fact I was even wronger than that because when I wrote my story back in 1939...38, it was printed in 39...When I wrote that story, I had definite ideas on how the space flight was to take place.

Well, when I read all of these references I discovered, to my amazement, that all through history there had been resistance...and bitter, exaggerated, last-stitch resistance...to every significant technological change that had taken place on earth. Usually the resistance came from those groups who stood to lose influence, status, money...as a result of the change. Although they never advanced this as their reason for resisting it. It was always the good of humanity that rested upon their hearts.

For instance, when the stagecoaches came into England, the canal owners objected. Not that they would lose money, although they would, but they feared for humanity. Because as the stagecoaches tore along at fifteen miles an hour, the air whipping past the nostrils of the people on board, would by Bernoulli's Principle, suck all the air out of the lungs.