Chaos Program

Tonight I watched the pilot of the Battlestar Galactica “prequel” (what language sadist invented that word?) Caprica. It seemed to start a little slow but eventually got going and had some interesting features. In no particular order, here are my thoughts (note: there are spoilers)

The terrorists are teenagers. Historically, it takes a little longer to become radicalized to the point of blowing yourself up. In the real world terrorists are more likely to be college age or older.  However, just as we’ve seen the average age of violent gang members decrease (and the sex of violent offenders widen to include a greater portion of females than used to be the case) in an advanced society where young people have access to sex and death clubs (albeit only as virtual reality) this is certainly possible. It is still different from reality at the current time.

The hedonistic virtual club shown a couple times in there, where bored teenagers (and presumably a lot of older people) went is not possible with current technology. In real life, clubs are not (to the best of my knowledge) this depraved. Close on the sex end maybe, but rarely if ever are there human sacrifices. But when technology makes this sort of thing possible, can anyone doubt they will come into existence? What kind of world will we have when teenager’s avatars lose their virginity before their physical selves do? This may not be more than a decade or two off.
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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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For some people, one of the things that makes science fiction interesting is the way it deals with ideas. I’m one of the old school that prefers the scientific and technological ideas over philosophical ones, as I find most philosophy (particularly when it’s in the context of science fiction) to be pretentious and illogical. Technology is a tool for building things and making people’s lives longer and more comfortable. It can’t change who we are (which could be a reference to the exceptional TV show Dollhouse or it could just be a segue into the discussion that follows. Don’t ask me which. I just write this stuff, I don’t analyze it).

Lately, due to the release of the new Terminator movie (Terminator: Salvation – a title apparently chosen more for dramatic impact than for anything that happens in the movie), there has been a slew of articles about how technology – especially robots – will shape the future of the human race. Usually the headline is something like, “Real life Terminators: How much time do we have?”

I’m not going to link to any of those articles because they are, almost without exception, not worth the paper that no one is bothering to print them out on (Sorry. This isn’t supposed to be a “what’s wrong with newspapers” post). For the moment it should be enough to say that the technology to build terminators doesn’t yet exist. Not the hardware and not the software. The robot apocalypse proposed by the Terminator movies is not just around the corner. Those movies came out of a different time and a different generation that grew up with the idea that some kind of apocalypse (probably a nuclear one) was always around the corner.
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