Re: Robot survival instincts

Curt Welch wrote:

But, there is another possibility.

What if we humans want robots that act more like humans than slaves? What
if humans start to build robot best-friends or even lovers, because with a
robot, you can have anything built you want - any look, any personality,
and they can be hard wired to love you if that is what you want, or hard
wired to be independent thinkers with their own needs and wants - aka, we
build "friendly" survival machines. We can build them as robot children as
well (like the AI movie) - that is, they will be given to us as if they
were babies to raise and shape as we want - and after years of raising and
training them, they will become friendly independent adult robots. We
could choose to do that simply because we enjoy raising and caring for an
intelligent agent and helping it grow and learn. What if the nurturing
instinct given to us by evolution was used to raise robots instead of
humans?

If we choose to build machines like that, then they would have the power to
be part of a society, and not just part of the big robot vending machine
system that did all our work for us. And those machines would have the
power to take over control of society from the humans - if we choose to let
them.

But will that happen? I can't tell. It seems unlikely to me, but I can't
tell.

IMO, there will be robot rights in the future. There are /some/
robot rights today:

http://www.news.com/U.K.-outlaws-denial-of-service-attacks/2100-7348_3-6134472.html

....but I think machines will eventually get more rights than humans have.

It seems likely that we would build entertainment robots and robots that
acted a lot like humans for many reasons. The idea of having smart
robot-friends and robot-children would seem to be popular for many people.
But I can't see where human society would every allow those robots to
become part of human society and be allowed to vote, and be given equal
rights with humans to control the allocation of resources.

Not even if people get uploaded? The proposition of uploading and
losing your liberty along with your biology would hardly be very
attractive. What about cyborgs - can they vote? What if they
have an all-machine body? What about an implant with a radio-link
to a super-computer? To stop the machines from getting an oar in
you would effectively have to insist on 100% human. Then there
would have to be tests for humanity at the voting booths - and
CAPTCHAs won't cut it any more - we are talking full body scans.

IMO, all this would be awful discrimination. An embarassing way
to welcome our successors into the world: in chains.

The end result I'm sure will be forced population control (if it doesn't
regulate itself that is). Once we have a huge society of smart machines to
take care of us, humans won't want billions of other humans around because
they do nothing for us except mess up the environment and limit our
resources.

In a world like that, where we can't even allow more humans to be born who
will be given the right to control the allocation of resources, why would
we allow people to add robots to the society? [...]

From the point of view of the government? Because robots make
better workers, don't go on strike, only consume electricity,
don't screw up the environment so much. Plus, without a decent
robot army, the country will be unable to compete economically
with its neighbours, who will then buy up all the available
land in your country, and then use it as holiday homes, or worse.

Maybe people will like the robots so much, that this won't be how it plays
out. Maybe the people will just turn control of society and control of the
government over to the robots in time. Maybe, people will start to like
the robots more than they like the other people. Maybe, since we will get
to a point where we will depend on the machines instead of depending on
other humans for our survival this will happen and humans will start to
fight with each other, and the end result is that we will give control to
the robots because we don't like humans anymore. But it just doesn't seem
possible to me because no matter how much we don't like each other, I think
we will always do better living under the control of the majority of
humans, than under the control of a majority of AIs.

So my vote is still that humans will remain in control, and the machines
will be slaves to us, just as much as they are slaves to us now. They will
just be much smarter slaves then they are now. There just won't be a
machine take over - at least not for thousands, or millions, of years.

I believe http://www.singinst.org/ have a similar vision.

Eric Drexler too:

``I found the speculations absurdly anthropocentric. Here
we have machines millions of times more intelligent,
plentiful, fecund, and industrious than ourselves,
evolving and planning circles around us. And every single
one exists only to support us in luxury in our ponderous,
glacial, bodies and dim witted minds. There is no hint in
Drexler's discussion of the potential lost by keeping our
creations so totally enslaved.''

- http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1986/drexler.mss

IMO, getting stuck at the human stage of evolution would badly
cripple our development as a space-faring civilisation.

Illogically trying to hang on to the remanants of our biological
heritage beyond its expiration date might also reduce our ability
to resist an alien invasion, at some distant future point in time.

However, it is /very/ hard to imagine humans getting locked
into evolutionary development, in a role analogous to that
of mitochondria. Evolution is getting better at refactoring
its legacy code out of existence. The "100% engineering"
attractor is obviously enormous and powerful.

Today there's a mixture of technologies, but the mixture is
unstable.

Take having two competing brain architectures, for example.

Obviously one is going to zoom ahead - and it doesn't take much
vision to see that the machine brains - and not the grey sludge
in our heads - are going to win in the long term.

Much beyond that point, unmodified humans will be in
charge mostly by legal fiat. How long will that last?
Not long, IMO. Laws that discriminate in favour of
unmodified humans will make no utilitarian sense, and
cyborgs, uploads, AIs, etc will object. Unmodified humans
will no-doubt get welfare payments, but these probably
won't allow them to reproduce very easily. I give
unmodified humans considerably less than a thousand
years of life outside museums.
--
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|im |yler http://timtyler.org/ tim@xxxxxxxxxxx Remove lock to reply.
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