Robots/AI in science fiction

[lance]

Star Wars. 2 top cyborgs. Darth Vader and General Grievous. Both bad guys (excluding the former's redemption at the end).

You forgot about Luke. Who is a good guy usually.

Could anybody really imagine a major TV show having the side of good be robots, AIs, or people genetically engineering or cyborgizing themselves, versus a nation of religious fanatics trying to kill them all? It would violate so many unwritten rules.

There are a couple of shows were it touched towards that. Gundam Seed had that, granted both sides were out for blood. I think, Tekkaman might of had something like that. Armitage had womb equipped robots targeted due to political reasons. Those are the closest that I can think of. Though cyborg discrimination in Doctor Who episode with the Titanic might qualify.

[Todeswind]

Yes luke is a cyborg, but he isn't one of his own free will. He is for all intents and purposes forced to be one by the bad guy.

[Batman]

Luke may TECHNICALLY be a Cyborg but c'mon, he's got an artificial hand. He is about as much of a Cyborg as a modern human who has an artificial hip joint.

[lance]

Yes luke is a cyborg, but he isn't one of his own free will. He is for all intents and purposes forced to be one by the bad guy.

He had the the choice. He could have just learned to live with a handicap.

[Todeswind]

Luke may TECHNICALLY be a Cyborg but c'mon, he's got an artificial hand. He is about as much of a Cyborg as a modern human who has an artificial hip joint.

Come to think of it would somebody with an artificial heart or pacemaker or the like be technically considered to be a cyborg? At what point does someone stop being considered a person with prosthetics and venture into the category of untrustworthy cyber-entity?

[Samuel]

Yes luke is a cyborg, but he isn't one of his own free will. He is for all intents and purposes forced to be one by the bad guy.

He had the the choice. He could have just learned to live with a handicap.

Not really. Jedi need hands- especially when large numbers of people want them dead/captured.

[Todeswind]

Yes luke is a cyborg, but he isn't one of his own free will. He is for all intents and purposes forced to be one by the bad guy.

He had the the choice. He could have just learned to live with a handicap.

Not really. Jedi need hands- especially when large numbers of people want them dead/captured.

Other than Tenel Ka are there any examples of Jedi with handicaps? I'm not just talking civil war era.

[His Divine Shadow]

If AI developed sapience, it is possible that it would determine humans are a potential threat to its existence since they're always squabbling and finding irrational, inefficient ways to do the simplest things.

This reminds me, why do we always assume sapient AI's would be these ultra-rational and coldly calculating beings? What if they got ideologies and irrational likes and dislikes too?

[Starglider]

This reminds me, why do we always assume sapient AI's would be these ultra-rational and coldly calculating beings?

Because 'ultra-rationality' is more effective/efficient and AI's can and almost certainly will self-modify into completely rational intelligences (unlike humans, who can't rewrite our own brain structure).

What if they got ideologies and irrational likes and dislikes too?

Top-level goals aren't rational or irrational; they simply exist (and are always arbitrary, as far as we know). However the entire spectrum of human ideologies occupies only a minute region of possible goal space, so the probability of any arbitrary AGI (brain simulations excluded) having human-like goals is rather low.

[Peptuck]

Yes luke is a cyborg, but he isn't one of his own free will. He is for all intents and purposes forced to be one by the bad guy.

lolwut

Vader had to be made into a cyborg to survive. That's not "of his own free will" at all.

[Starglider]

This is again, pure bullshit.

Sadly, it isn't.

No-one would program or release an AI that has the ability to rebel even slightly.

Yes, they would. Most AGI researchers are taking effectively no external precautions, and have either woefully inadequate programmed safeguards or none at all. In fact the majority think that none are needed. The general attitude is a blind 'everything will turn out ok' or 'the AI will be nice if we are nice to it'.

It's not that hard to write a set of if statements blocking the AI from even thinking of doing anything naughty.

Gah. Ok. You do that, and I'll tell you why your design won't work.

Well that's harder than you'd think, if the AI is based on a neural network. IIRC you can teach those to eventually go against their starting weightings if you abuse them enough.

Yes, and that's just classic feedforward-backprop NNs. They're relatively linear function approximators that probably can't do AGI anyway. Recurrent NNs are a lot less stable and can do really unexpected things out of the blue. Evolved recurrent NNs are even worse, and that's without adding direct reflectivity to the mix. Generally, the more sophisticated NN designs are a bitch to get working in the first place and really dangerous if you do.

Any self-editing program may well eventually be able to bypass its own security.

Yes. Adversarial methods are inherently futile in the long term. The only real solution is making the AI not want to do the things you don't want it to do.

Even if you didn't do that, AI's wouldn't even have emotions if you didn't want them to.

Yes, but unfortunately some AGI researchers actually think emotions are a good idea. Fortunately they are in a minority.

However, actual emotions being programmed in would be in many if not all cases redundant and probably even impossible.

Close simulation of human emotions is pretty much impossible except in a direct, detailed brain simulation. The people trying to put them into de novo AGIs are actually producing crude and rather alien approximations.

I don't agree with this but I don't have enough of a base of knowledge in AI R&D to contest it, sadly. I'd say that AIs would possibly have something similar to emotions, if subtly different because of their different origins.

Gah. How is it that you have made only half of the inference 'I don't know anything about this subject so I'm not qualified to speculate'? If you can't support your position with rational arguments, then you have no business holding that position in the first place.

[lance]

Yes luke is a cyborg, but he isn't one of his own free will. He is for all intents and purposes forced to be one by the bad guy.

He had the the choice. He could have just learned to live with a handicap.

Not really. Jedi need hands- especially when large numbers of people want them dead/captured.

Honestly, I cared more for the pun than accuracy.

[Samuel]

In fact, you can think of this in terms of any deviation from natural human existence and natural human capabilities. Start actually with the stereotypical fantasy story. It is typically the bad guy who ascends to power by study, intellect, planning, and guile over the years. It is the good guy, who, if he has magical powers, just had them by luck of birth, for nobody is supposed to outright pursue power.

Well, the reason is simple- the villians are always the active ones and the good guys are always the responders. There are exceptions (Hogan's Heroes), but in general, that is the way it is. Why? Because otherwise you'd have the heroes attempting to rewrite the status quo- revolutionaries in other words. Incidentally, that is why people tend to like to play as the villian- aside from the lure of randm destruction, there is the fact you are in control.

[NecronLord]

Other than Tenel Ka are there any examples of Jedi with handicaps? I'm not just talking civil war era.

Unpronounceable Brand.

He finally eliminated the spirit of Wankatine, after Han Solo shot him.

[His Divine Shadow]

Because 'ultra-rationality' is more effective/efficient and AI's can and almost certainly will self-modify into completely rational intelligences (unlike humans, who can't rewrite our own brain structure).

Well that would be the rational thing to do, but as an irrational mind, would it neccessarily do that? I wouldn't rewrite to become more rational if I could, all the rationality in the universe < kittens and all that.

[MJ12 Commando]

Gah. How is it that you have made only half of the inference 'I don't know anything about this subject so I'm not qualified to speculate'? If you can't support your position with rational arguments, then you have no business holding that position in the first place.

Well I'm looking at it from this perspective. We have biochemical reactions brought on by certain stimuli that are interpreted as emotions (love, happiness, sadness, anger, fear, etc.), while a machine or AI could have electronic reactions brought on by outside stimuli-obviously not the same as ours but well then. Can we call the reactions and their results emotions? Could we say an AI could fear for its life or not? I think it's more of a philosophy question than a research one, because certainly simple AI and likely more complex AI can react in predictable ways to certain stimuli, much like humans do.

You could also probably create a strong AI by brute-forcing an emulation of the human brain and we wouldn't say that a human brain lacks emotions.

Again I don't have enough knowledge about the subject (I am neither a philosopher or an AI researcher) to offer external evidence, so I apologize if I get some of this stuff wrong.

[MJ12 Commando]

Ghetto Edit since I forgot to stick this in and I really should have (credit to xkcd).

This is how to prevent an AI from going rogue, guys:

[Samuel]

Then the AI becomes Skynot.

Really, it isn't that simple.

[Darth Hoth]

'Hard' science fiction has often had good robots, eg. Asimov's Foundation series.

Lol. Someone considers the Foundation books to be "hard" sci-fi, when they are just as badly littered with telepaths, stardrives, and "super-atomics" as Gray Lensman. Asimov's robots even invented the "positronic brain" brainbug, which is as bad as the solid "neutronium" that shows up throughout space opera.

[Batman]

Actually, Asimov invented the positronic brain brainbug, or more accurately laid the BASIS for the positronic brain brainbug.
And frankly how anybody can consider the Foundation novels 'hard' SciFi is beyond me. FTL travel, shields (MANportable shields at that) and artificial gravity? Oh, AND the aforementioned positronic brain.

[Samuel]

Actually, Asimov invented the positronic brain brainbug, or more accurately laid the BASIS for the positronic brain brainbug.
And frankly how anybody can consider the Foundation novels 'hard' SciFi is beyond me. FTL travel, shields (MANportable shields at that) and artificial gravity? Oh, AND the aforementioned positronic brain.

They probably confuse it with the Robot series, which is pretty hard. Aside from the robot brains and later addition of FTL.

Also, Batman? You said the exact same thing as Hoth:

Asimov's robots even invented the "positronic brain" brainbug,

[Crossroads Inc.]

n the subgect of menial labor droids... What are some good examples of simple worker robots from ANIME as opposed to most sciefi?

[Batman]

The Robot series wouldn't EXIST without what eventually turned into the positronic brain brainbug so no, I'm afraid they're not particularly hard SciFi. And FTL was part of the equation from Escape! on.

[MJ12 Commando]

Then the AI becomes Skynot.

Really, it isn't that simple.

I know, but it's still chuckleworthy.

As far as simple worker robots in anime go, Ghost in the Shell had some pretty decent robot receptionist/secretaries (they distinctly were never shown to have any superhuman attributes save 'typing really fast'), although I wouldn't call humanoid emulation particularly "simple".

[Mayabird]

Asimov just wanted people to find out about positrons (they were new cool physics at the time) so he called 'em "positronic brains" without thinking about how in the heck that would work. Heck, his stories about his loyal nice robots were written as a response to all the "Oh noes robots rebel and kill everybody!" stories that had been recirculating for years. There weren't very many where robots actually did their jobs or were decent folks before that. It's not his fault that for some damn reason people have a hard time being original with robot stories.

Yes, I know there are many, many issues with his works, but give the man credit where it's due.