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Comment by Isamu | Hacker News Reader

>Being a young child, my imagination ran wild.

This is the source of much of our collective imagination about robots.

And all the dystopian movie plots about robots overthrowing humans and killing them all. I think that is completely projection - somebody is thinking "well, if I were a robot, I'd kill everybody." It really says a hell of a lot more about humans than robots.

For robots to take over the world or kill all humans, first they'd have to give a shit. They'd have to perceive themselves as oppressed or something. And have some motivations, akin to emotions, driving the behavior. Good luck on coding that up.

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> They'd have to perceive themselves as oppressed or something.

Not necessarily. All they need to have is a single minded goal of creating paperclips and optimizing for that.

> They'd have to perceive themselves as oppressed or something.

Those robots wouldn't have to search very much on the internet to find out what happened to that Microsoft AI Twitter bot when it started to misbehave

somebody is thinking "well, if I were a robot, I'd kill everybody."

Most of these, from the earliest, are various allegories about responses to exploitation and oppression not people thinking how they’d want to kill everybody if they were a robot.

IIRC, the word "Robot" itself comes from the Czech play "Rossum's Universal Robots[0]" and translates to slave, so the metaphor of class struggle was always there.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.

It doesn't quite translate to that but yeah, the theme of 'make a thing and it turns against you' itself is one of the oldest around.

It translates to 'worker', & the play came out shortly before the russian revolution, so it's clear that the subtext of the term in its original use is not merely a criticism of slavery but also a marxist criticism of the exploitation of the proletariat under industrial capitalism.

(Important to note that, just like in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep & Blade Runner, the 'robots' in R.U.R. are not mechanical devices but instead genetically engineered synthetic humans. That helps the metaphor a great deal: rather than being a pure 'other' whose behavior might be seen as a design error, it's simply a different breed or race of humans with different heredity that makes them convenient for othering, along with some argument about hereditary traits that supposedly make them more suited to hard labor.)

It translates to 'worker'

It's a made up word. If it translated to 'worker' he'd have just written 'worker' in Czech.

Let me rephrase:

In all slavic languages, 'robot' is the base of the verb 'to work'. So, by the same means by which some people have decided to translate 'robot' as 'slave', it would be more accurate to translate it as 'worker'.

Right, except for the part where that is 'more accurate' because it's not. Oh, and the play came out after the Russian revolution.

Asimov is robots done right.

Asimov's Three Laws don't even work in the fictional setting. A common theme of his robot stories is humans investigating strange or harmful behavior of robots, that ultimately turns out to be a consequence of the laws as the robot understood them. They're good storytelling, but bad real-life ethics.

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