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Comment by BetaCygni | Hacker News Reader

They reference Asimov. Good. His rules should provide enough inspiration and he explored them thoroughly.

For example: the zeroth law (preserve humanity) might help in deciding between a child and an adult. If the adult is beyond reproductive age (e.g. elderly) it may save the child. If the adult is still able to reproduce and the child would not survive on its own, save the adult. In case of doubt it should probably use quality adjusted life years, and that will probably cause it to save the child.

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I would be terrified by a machine that took those kind of decisions over human life without taking into consideration the specifics of each particular situation, merely from an abstract rule that some engineers thought of and derived from first principles in their laboratory, without input from the real world or from a limited sample of cases. In your hypothetical example, what if the elder was the only leader of a faction that could negotiate a tready and avoid a global war, but the robot has no built-in rules to detect such development and kills the elder anyway?

There's a reason why we keep judges around to interpret and implement the law, even if the rules are established by an independent body and are in theory are designed to maximize the common good. The moral of Asimov stories was that it is impossible to encode morality as a simple set of rules, as the complexity of real life will always produce unpredictable situations, and ethics will provide ambiguous answers depending on which principles are considered more important.

Have you even read I Robot? You now, the book in which the laws of robotics lead the robots to institute a robot ruled dictatorship, taking away human freedoms because they reasoned by by controlling our lives completely they could protect us from ourselves? The whole point of Asimov's laws was that naively encoded moral rules can have horrific consequences.

Exactly. It's surprising how Asimov's Laws became recognized in the popular culture as a well-thought-out solution to the morality issues of AIs, when their whole point was to be an example of how to not do things.

That was the movie version of I, Robot. In the book version, people handed control over to the Machines because they found that the Machines could plan economic and governmental matters better than people could. Also, in Asimov's literary canon, the robots ultimately destroy themselves on the reasoning that having them around was crippling humanity.

I Robot is a collection os short stories about a variety of themes, but the idea of the robots usurping human independence in order to protect them is there in "The Evitable Conflict", and in ".. That Thou Art Mindful Of Him" two robots explore the idea that the consequences of the laws are that they should take over the authority of humans. So it's definitely there, although Asimov never actually portrayed the revolution itself.

Asimov didn't portray any revolution because he was, in his day, a socialist. He simply assumed that clear-thinking human beings would deliberately employ the best planning instruments they had available for their governance, those being the robots.

I at least partially agree with him on this one! Mid-20th-century American "libertarianism" aside, working in government, and even political "freedom", is simply not the terminal goal of most real people! Yes, we want our Mind overlords (paging Ian Banks) to leave us our free choice in personally-important situations so we can have responsibilities and achievements, but when it comes to keeping the supermarkets stocked, the health clinics open, the data-centers buzzing, the budgets balanced, and the trains arriving on time, automate away!

It seems possible that when Asimov first conceived of the laws of robotics, he thought it would all work out very nicely and only realised the negative consequences later.

I've read quite a bit of Asimov, did you notice it's the same story over and over again?

I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.

But doesn't this miss the fact that "humanity" is emotionally driven and making decisions based on pure logic is un-human?

We also have a brain with multiple subsystems that can override each other, and we see this behaviour as "normal" (i.e we don't get confused and puzzled by a fat person eating, thinking to ourselves "I don't get it, they clearly don't need the food... ?" - Where as if someone stopped eating mid meal and said "I've reached sufficient caloric intake" we would be confused and puzzled).

Where as if someone stopped eating mid meal and said "I've reached sufficient caloric intake" we would be confused and puzzled.

You clearly don't live in San Francisco. Talking like an asocial robot is encouraged to be part of the in-crowd.

> making decisions based on pure logic is un-human?

It's not just un-human, it's impossible. Every logic decision ultimately depends on the axioms deciding what is a "good" and a "bad" decision, and the choice of axioms needs to be based on an emotion - as choosing one set of axioms over another is otherwise arbitrary.

This sounds very much like "The Abolition of Man" by C. S. Lewis.

I haven't read it, but didn't Lewis defend that there is one right set of axioms to choose, the one which is "objectively good"?

He defended that there is a universal set of values, which are generally in common across almost all ancient religions and philosophies.

But I don't think Lewis would be on board with the idea of "objectively good". For example, he said that "this will destroy mankind" can only lead to "don't do this" by way of "mankind should be preserved", which, while clearly common sense and agreed to by all ethical systems, is not necessarily something that you can say is "objectively good". You can't get there by pure reason, because pure reason gives you only an "is", and from an "is" you can't get to an "ought". The only way to the "ought" is what they used to call "practical reason", and that is inherently not just objective.

I may be mis-stating this slightly - it's been a while since I read "The Abolition of Man". But what I've said is more or less in the right direction.

Just suppose the adult say to the robot: I will give you this big check, with that money you can save the life of many thousand people that are starving from malnutrition, would the robot accept the check?

I doubt a machine making such simple evaluations would be able to make those kinds of decisions at all.

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