Lawless Robots

In all the talk about AI, I don’t read nearly as much about the advances in robotics. I find this interesting because AI, for the moment, is like having an “album” (choose digital or analog version of your choice to explain the concept) without any sort of player. Albums are nice. You can’t get any music out of them on their own, much like AI.  Robots, though, wow, these are getting impressive and adding their abilities to AI, well, some things are likely to get wacky.  

What’s funny with the robotics advances is that I’m under the impression we all think that the laws of robotics are something real, and not invented by Isaac Asimov. From Wikipedia;

The Three Laws, presented from the fictional “Handbook of Robotics, 56th Edition, 2058 A.D.”, are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

This is a writer just making things up, as we do. There are no rules. That should be worth a bit of reflection.

I’ve always been a person who looked to the past to find lessons for the future, but I don’t feel like this is helpful at the moment. I believe we are at the cusp of something entirely new and I don’t know how I feel about that. At best, when I feel good, it’s because I’ve been able to turn off my phone, ignore the news, and go into a bubble. I need these breaks from the relentless bad news and stupidity of the world, but coming back in is a bit like stepping into boiling water. And when I’m down on the world and myself, it’s possible to go into some pretty black places, like all the scariest episodes of Black Mirror converging into one very unpleasant reality.

Last weekend I was offline, though. I saw friends, went to a music festival, slept in a tent, climbed a new route and an old one, jumped in the lake, ate ice cream. Things couldn’t have been better. And then I scrolled through the news this morning, and jumped midstream back into the process of slowing freaking out.

Happily Foro is here with me. I think I might just crawl back into bed and stare into his eyes.