Chaos Program

A little while ago I saw a TV commercial that offered to pay people to make themselves targets for identity theft.

Oh, that wasn’t the intention. It was more a side effect of the campaign, which offered to pay people for referring friends to use the service. The part that made me start thinking about ID theft was the line that advised that, in order for you and your friend both to receive the cash the program offers, your friend must use your account number to sign up.

Have you seen the one? Sounds enticing, doesn’t it? It’s like free money!

Just as long as you trust your friends with access to your account. I have nightmares (well, not really, but play along with me on this) of greedy people putting their account number on a business card, or in an ad on Craig’s List, to get others to help them cash in on this program. So what if a complete stranger then hijacks their account? In a way, anyone that stupid deserves what happens to them.

I have an even worse nightmare that the company that ran the ad would say that their security is too good for someone to misuse an account just by knowing the account number. They have to also know something else, like a social security number! (For those folks who came in in the middle, SS number should never be used as a customer identifier because every use exposes it to possible theft).
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Robots are in the future. They are in the present, of course, but most people today don’t consider some preprogrammed floating arm on an assembly line to be a true “robot.” We learned what a robot is from science fiction and that’s what we’re all waiting for, often with dread (Don’t think so? Try googling “robot apocalypse.” Wait, let me try it first. 139,000 results. Hey, cool! T-shirts!)

Anyway, in anticipation of the day when robots are the smart, helpful servants/terminators of science fiction fame, lots of people have tried to come up with rules that robots could be programmed to follow to make everything better. Obviously the trend began with Isaac Asimov’s infamous 3 laws of robotics (Follow the link. I’m not going to repeat them here).

Asimov’s laws were pretty good, though his own stories involving them pointed out some flaws at least in potential implementations. Speaking as a programmer, believe me that implementation is an important point with any software. Give 2 programmers the same 3 rules to implement in a very complex system and you will find the two systems do not act quite the same. One programmer checks for compliance at the beginning of a decision, the other checks afterwards. Maybe they have different ways of checking, besides. The outcomes are often the same but there may be huge differences in some situations.

That different people approach the same problem in different ways is just a fact of life that may result in great differences between robot behavior, too. Anyway, because of these and other considerations there have been numerous attempts to update Asimov’s laws. For example a hliarious one I found a few years ago (and can’t seem to find the link for anymore) expanded the 3 laws to 10 (I think) and claimed to have patented them – thus ensuring no one would ever have the slightest interest in using them, even if they turned out to be perfect.

No set of robotics laws could possibly be perfect (see above) and personally I question whether such laws, themeslves are even possible. But it’s an important exercise to try to figure out how to make robots safe and controllable, you know, to avoid the robot apocalypse. An interesting attempt to update Asimov’s laws came out of Ohio State University recently, where some researchers reformulated the laws to make less sense and have even more loopholes than in the original version.

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