8.0 Day in the Library (Spamlogs)
Oct. 17th, 2011 07:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no_fastolfe[Private to Sherlock]
At your convenience. I will understand if the way is impassable, however. I found myself among a wetland on my way this morning.
Library Spams]
[Vasilia is in the library, shelving books and generally getting the lay of the stacks. When she sees something out of place she goes for it-- surgical, putting it back in order as if she blames it for being out. Patterns, she's always been good at patterns.]
[OOC: Sorry about the lateness, Nemo!]
At your convenience. I will understand if the way is impassable, however. I found myself among a wetland on my way this morning.
Library Spams]
[Vasilia is in the library, shelving books and generally getting the lay of the stacks. When she sees something out of place she goes for it-- surgical, putting it back in order as if she blames it for being out. Patterns, she's always been good at patterns.]
[OOC: Sorry about the lateness, Nemo!]
action.
Date: 2011-10-23 07:34 am (UTC)I mean-- now don't get me wrong, I am well in favour of robotic theory and research, but I've also dug into analytical discourse regarding where we-- my people-- went wrong. But if you create an artificial intelligence designed to power a race of machines to complement humanity, how do you avoid the inevitable rebellion should they gain self-awareness? Such as, we, as organic lifeforms, have different priorities than machines, our need for territory and sustenance being of a different nature than what machines need.
Or-- you mention symbiosis. Did you design them to require humanity?
action.
Date: 2011-10-23 07:38 am (UTC)Advanced robots are indeed self aware. But they have been designed to need humanity. As human instinct and action are shaped at the most primitive level by our needs to breathe, consume food, sleep, and excrete-- at that base level, the ascenion robot has the three laws of robotics. They are not oppressed by their service-- any more than we are by hunger and thirst.
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Date: 2011-10-23 07:42 am (UTC)Humans weren't created. Unless you subscribe to the idea of intelligent design and religion, which I do not, I think we crawled out of a swamp and descended from the trees. Nothing is responsible for us.
We are responsible for the robots. We can be blamed.
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Date: 2011-10-23 07:50 am (UTC)And we can be-- we must be blamed if robots cause harm. We are their stewards, and my experience with the T-X unit aboard this vessel has only solidified the abstract possibility of catastrophe. I do not blame her for what she is; in her past, generations of machines back, a human designed an intelligent machine that could kill!
[Robotic philosophy. She cares about it very deeply.]
There is a cautious path to walk between creating a safe but inert intelligence-- a non-learning thing-- and creating a brilliant and infinitely adaptable but also infinitely unstable intelligence. I believe that the Three Laws provide a guide along that path.
action.
Date: 2011-10-23 10:11 am (UTC)But on the other hand, it's a matter of free will. The choice to not be terrible, over simply being programmed.
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Date: 2011-10-23 04:22 pm (UTC)You can hurt an Ascenion robot-- if you will pardon my clumsy analog-- 'hurt' them by leading them into conflict, in which they cannot obey their guiding Laws. You can, if you know how, order even an advanced robot with high self-preservation potential to destroy itself.
And yet if you do that you do not deserve access to robots! If they lack the range of responses of humanity than it is also humanity's responsibility to provide the structure they need. Not to change them-- but to change their operating environment. You would not set a harvesting combine in the ocean and expect it to work. No: you place it on an agricultural plot and do not ask it to choose if it would like to swim instead.
I think the question I would ask-- in much shorter terms-- is this: does a sapient being deserve, by default, 'Free Will?'
action.
Date: 2011-10-23 10:55 pm (UTC)Well, it sounds as though your people found success in this area. And really, 'free will' of humanity has its own limits. We've laws, pressures, doubt. We're programmed in our own way.
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Date: 2011-10-23 11:24 pm (UTC)If you still wish to learn Ascenion programming, it will be a rather more in-depth lesson. But you know the basic foundations of it, the theory now.