Nazi "stealth plane" nonsense.
Five years ago today: April 6,2009, the pier at Fear.
Before today even starts, I announce I did nothing constructive. I felt almost like a middle-class goof, you know, confusing wasting time with relaxing. I even went to the Panera for coffee, and you can’t get much more nothing than that. My pet peeve these days is the profusion of what I call video pop-ups. You can’t
Guess who called from Jacksonville? Ray-B, and he’s on his way back to the cruise line in Hawaii. He’s living the life I would have had I learned to play guitar and sing in my teens. He reports he once told a counselor all he wanted to do was play guitar and get paid for it. The counselor told him he was foolish and needed a “backup plan”. Yeah, all that got him was older and broker.
He’s happy and I’m half-jealous. He works maybe twenty hour a week and there’s no place to spend money on a boat, so he probably has more disposable income than he did working for the school board. He’s half my age and a totally different personality, but there are surprising parallels in the decisions being made. I was that age when I began to draw the same conclusions. Except, I had nobody to ask who had been through the meat-grinder.
A great day for doing nothing. In that case, “Mission accomplished”. I took the opportunity to view a half-dozen documentary on robotics. The biggest objectors seem to be the ones who know the least about how robots operate. All the mechanical parts are already there, the only things lacking are the money and the motive. The criticism seems to be over the robots morality or ethics, but I would consider anyone who who takes that tack as a highly questionable type to start with. They complain the robot gives the possessor an unfair advantage. Well, you damn idiots, that is the whole idea.
But I like the hecklers who say robots will never replace humans. I’ve got news for them. It is too late. Most robots are already smarter and more capable than most humans. It is not conceptually that difficult right now to build a robot that could pass any university exam, though that says plenty about what’s become of our universities. What’s happening is just as the majority of humans are beginning to grasp how robots can be programmed to perform simple tasks, the real programming is moving away from that mode at warp speed.
Rather than program “tasks”, the idea is to program “rules of behavior”. And that is where the upcoming generation of robots will wax all but the best and brightest humans. I first did this type of programming in 1983. Once a few narrow gaps are crossed, there will be very few things the average human (I said average) can do better than a robot. It would not surprise me if, in the next five years, robots are the next big thing. Instead of Mars.
Robots. My eyebrows raised to hear so many commentators raise issues of robots misinterpreting human emotions or intentions. How horrendous, they went on, it would be for humans if robots could not understand their deepest feelings. Bull donkey, I say. That is 90% of what is wrong with humans, they think they can use their personal motives as an excuse for deceptive behavior. Strip that away that and certainly, a minority of humans (they know who they are) will experience pure agony. But consider it payback for what they’ve been doing to others all along. If people had to answer every question honestly or be exposed, think of the sheer drop in the divorce rate alone.
I conclude the opposite of those who say robots are emotionless. It would be counterproductive to waste time having robots interface with human emotions. I understand very well how hard it would be for some people to say what they really mean to get a robot to follow directions—but I deem that as a plus. Such individuals would have to clean up their act or do it themselves, not a bad concept in some families. But it is more likely inventiveness will suffer as manufacturers opt to water down the robot behavior to the basest of human levels. There are more robots to be sold if they can serve cold beer.
Consider this. Just as building computers for entertainment rather than knowledge halted all meaningful computer development ten years ago, thus it will be with companion robots. You see, that will involve building robots to conform to the wrong kind of human—unless you have not noticed all stupid people have trouble with the nearly identical issues. Adapting robots to allow for stupidity is akin to introducing a permanent virus into the system.
Robots could, sadly, become another MicroSoft Windows. Comfort for a few right now at the expense of functionality that could have benefitted all mankind. Alas, I think companion robots will win out because the world seems never able to support two priorities. Try to imagine where computers would be today if the Internet had not come along. Suppose the factories had focused on competing for quality instead of the cheapest contraption to sell to voyeuristic couch potatoes. Everyone would probably own an Apple which would cost $50 and last forever.
ADDENDUM
I’ve done some thinking over the programming of rules and robots already would have some significant advantages. The computer, and hence the robot, never forgets. That’s already up on most humans. But the rules will enable the robot to learn and my thinking is that once one robot assimilates a fact, it can be shared with all other robots at light speed. Humankind has failed to develop this learning technique in over a million years and my family devolved at it just this last century.
Robots would not cling to useless or outdated concepts and bad programming would be quickly overwritten by good. There are no Beastie Boy fans in the robot ranks and not many Canadians. Think of the work involved for a thousand generations of humans to teach every one of their babies to talk, and from what I’ve seen on the Internet, teaching them how to spell takes even longer.
I can’t think of any clever analogies, but I’m suggesting the speed at which robots can share learning is what will make them “smarter” than humans. When one robot learns to walk, all robots learn to walk pretty much instantly. The same principle works when one robot makes a mistake. Now imagine, using these principles, an army of 500 robots going up against a million humans. At first, they lose ten robots to dumb mistakes, but the remaining 490 are rapidly filling their interlinked databanks. Their kill ratio begins to skyrocket and soon it takes twenty, then forty, then a hundred humans to destroy each successive robot. Soon humans are dying wholesale. The shrinking number of remaining robots becomes diabolically efficient until they no longer take any casualties at all.
Then it is payback time. Oh, and as for the robot “wounded”. You can turn them off while you replace the parts. So around half-way through the battle, without receiving reinforcements, the number of robots begins to grow.
