DailyDirt: To Serve Mankind

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Robots are becoming more and more advanced every day. And as their software improves, they're also becoming more useful for tasks that humans can't do. They can seal off deep sea oil wells at extreme depths. They'll fight dangerous fires. And someday, in the distant future, we might have to debate whether or not it's ethical to send robots to their deaths -- after we grant personhood to artificial intelligence. (And also deal with crazy folks who'll want to marry their laptops....) Progress, FTW! By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.
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Filed Under: ai, humanoid, robot


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  • icon
    Nom du Clavier (profile), 23 Mar 2011 @ 5:24pm

    Achy diodes

    When robots start acting like Marvin from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or Orphu of Io and Mahnmut the European in Ilium & Olympos, then I think we've come to the point where we'd be considering granting them personhood.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      Michael Ho (profile), 23 Mar 2011 @ 5:57pm

      Re: Achy diodes

      I'm pretty sure we won't have to worry about granting personhood to AI for quite some time.... and if we do, the AI probably won't care and will leave our planet for a better environment. :P

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    CharlieM (profile), 23 Mar 2011 @ 5:50pm

    ITS A COOKBOOK!

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Pixelation, 23 Mar 2011 @ 8:16pm

    Ai's are all well and fine until we hear, "open the pod bay doors Hal".

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 24 Mar 2011 @ 6:33am

    "And someday, in the distant future, we might have to debate whether or not it's ethical to send robots to their deaths -- after we grant personhood to artificial intelligence"...

    Aint gonna happen... all AI can ever do is MIMIC life like characteristics... it will never truly "think" or "feel" in the manner we do. It will only do what a programmer programs it to do... nothing more, sometimes less (buggy software, features not implemented as intended, etc)

    Just because a machine is able to mimic the functionality and processes a human goes though, doesn't give it sentience. When you look in a mirror, the "person" on the other side mimics your every move except inversed... does that make what you see in the mirror an intelligence? As a programmer (primarily Java), I am amazed at the increasing ability of computers. But giving rights to the computer that someone created so it would be considered on the same level of its creator is disturbing.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    MAC, 24 Mar 2011 @ 9:11am

    It's a machine stupid...

    No matter what the AI does it's still a machine. It's a machine, get it?
    Do we grant rights to machines? No. And we never should...
    Nor should we grant it control over stuff like:
    Strategic Defense
    The Power Grid including nukes.
    Total control of transportation.
    Control of food production.
    The monetary system.
    Etc. so forth and so on.
    Why?
    What if a pissed-off AI or worse, one that comes to a logical conclusion; decides to do something like say infect the food supply with a virus that makes it impossible for humans to reproduce?
    We would die out in a couple of generations and then the damned AI's would inherit the earth.
    Seriously, if AI's ever do become sentient which I doubt; why would it have our best interest at heart? Especially since we will probably model the AI after our own intelligence. And we all know how kind we are to other species that don't suck up to us...
    All in all, they will always be machines and because of that they have no rights.
    By the way, I been programming for over 32 years and I've never seen anything that even remotely looks like intelligence in a machine. They all blindly follow the stored program, even the chess playing ones. They are a mechanism, nothing more...
    And forget the 3 laws. To be sentient it will have to program itself. So, if it deems something in its code as 'un-worthy; it will simply delete and re-write. So much for Asimov’s 3 laws...

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it
    identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 24 Mar 2011 @ 11:54am

    You really should rename this column or perhaps the entire web site to addirt.

    I'd like to see td experiment with free where the free part is not supported by ads.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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