Chaos Program

I’ve discovered a new science. I’d like to say I founded it or invented it but there are already brilliant people doing interesting work in the field. They just don’t know they share a common field.

To begin, consider this story from Wired about a bizarre scientific paper on the development of a zombie plague. The paper itself (link) is a little dry, though it’s interesting if you can wade through the math. If not, read the Wired story. The basic idea is this: Some mathematicians (with quite a bit of time on their hands, apparently) developed the math to model the spread of a zombie infection. They concluded that, unless humans respond quickly with extremely large amounts of violence, the zombies win, civilization collapses and the human race is ultimately annihilated.

The paper assumes slow zombies, not fast or smart ones. It seems reasonable that both of those situations would make things harder for humanity, most likely. It also assumes that normal human replacement (birth and death) does not take place, since newborns eventually die and the newly dead are a perpetual source of zombies, which means the zombies win. The paper models multiple scenarios, including medical treatment for zombieism and the effect of quarantine procedures on the spread. Factors considered in developing their solutions include rates of transmission, the outcome of encounters (fights) and the effect on the spread of destroying zombies so that they can no longer spread the infection. In other words, despite the seemingly whimsical nature of the subject, this is real science.

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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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