Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

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  > Asimov laid the groundwork for ethical AI way back in the 1940s with his Three Laws.

I'm a big Asimov fan and kinda shocked by this statement.

His robot stories constantly highlight the difficulties related to alignment. How the 3 laws always have unintended consequences. So they write the 0th, add a 4th, remove the 3rd, and other such things.

I loved them as a kid because they highlighted how immense complexity hides in plain sight. It always looked like magic, and that's what made me so interested in science in the first place. To start unraveling these hidden complexities that lay all around us.

If anything, I think Asimov was trying to encourage us to start thinking about these tough questions. To bring them to wider audiences. Because frankly, many of the answers will not be possible to answer in a lab, but need be answered through a society.

I think we’re actually saying the same thing.

I believe Asimov did set the groundwork, not with perfect laws, but by showing how their flaws exposed the real complexities that sparked important conversations.

He didn’t give us answers, he got us asking better questions. That’s what makes his work still resonate.

Can entropy not be reversed?

Ahh, The Last Question. This has a special place in my heart :)

Asimov needed a plot device to serve as the inciting incident for mystery stories with robots, and parables about human hubris. That's all his Three Laws were. He was a pulp fiction writer, not a philosopher. He wasn't concerned with bringing abstract questions about AI alignment to a wider audience, he was concerned with selling stories and making a paycheck.

I like Asimov but I also think he's treated with a reverence he doesn't deserve.

He definitely was a philosopher. Here's some of his meta science work [0]. I mean it shouldn't be surprising, he had a PhD in chemistry and was a professor at Boston university. He wrote a lot more than science fiction.

I'm not calling him a god or anything. But I don't think it's surprising that someone that writes stories includes philosophy into it. I really don't think it's surprising a PhD educated writer is thinking about not that complicated of things.

The concept of understanding the limitations of your metrics and measures is a pretty basic science skill. Using this as a driver of some of his plots doesn't seem surprising. It's something he was doing in his daily life.

Forgive me if thinking of him as at least a university professor is reverence.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Relativity_of_Wrong

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