Burnout: When the paying job doesn't pay enough

This week has become a stressful week for me at work.  I have come home so tired somedays that in the middle of doing something on the couch I will fall asleep for an hour.  This is not normal.  I think last night I got 12 hours of sleep and my body doesn't feel any worse from it.  Yikes.  It's a combination of the brain power, social interaction and physical exertion of this job.  Also dealing with interesting management and an understaffed office.

Mystic has had overtime at work too, so we unfortunately have to delay our podcast for a week.  However,  I'm hoping that soon I'll have tons of stuff to write and podcast about when I can recover.

In the meanitime I wanted to link you guys to a cracked article that shows my fears are about the be realized: 6 Shocking Ways Robots Are Already Becoming Human.

Nothing against robots, but if they become their own sentient race with their own rights that going to get messy.  Let's hope Asimov's 3 laws of robotics staves anything like that off.

And now I get ready to go to work, and then LARP, and then hopefully I will not pass out.  Later, readers!

The Argument Against AI: The Rights of the Sentient

I have been exposed to the idea of robots with Artificial Intelligence since I was young.  I was raised with Data on the television, realizing he wasn't a person but felt he was still an important figure.  I read the Positronic Man in 5th grade, and had a lot of people around me willing to discuss the philosophical implications of a lot of hypothetical situations, including when I was growing up.  And now it's something I think about because I'm reading The Naked Sun, a fantastic mystery.  AI is not a new concept.

Something that has bothered me of late is the future of robotics.  Not that I'm afraid of a robotic uprising.  That's not necessary.  Anyone who knows the three laws of robotics knows that's avoidable.  It's more the future of people, and how the past can easily predict the present.

To see the problems potentially with Artificial Intelligence, you also have to see the problems that humanity experience in history.  Particularly the need to find "the other", the need to find someone that is different enough.  Someone that needs to "oppose" everything a community holds dear, and to use that supposed opposition to reassert their own existence and culture.  This has manifested in many ways: racism, religious wars, political battles... and a lot of horrible things happen.  Including creating a second-class citizen.

I'm sure that many of you are either descended from or familiar with a second-class citizen group.  In America we've had a lot that trend, involving indentured servitude, slavery, accusations of unethical acts,  biased laws, and other horrendous traditions.  It's a habit that prevents man from ignoring his violent instincts.  Not to say this is the only reason progress is stifled, but it's a huge one.

Now imagine if we had an entire race of sentient beings that can easily be programmed to be the other to hate?  Something that can be programmed to not fight back if persecuted and killed?

I fear what the future will be when we do have AI abundant on earth.  They'll be sentient beings that can be easily prejudiced against, and would be the only one known to have no urge to fight back.  That doesn't make oppressing robots with AI right, it merely makes it easy.  Considering how hard it has been to let people who fight for their rights get accepted in the mainstream , and how easy it is to fall backward after moving forward, how long would it take for a group who can't stand up for itself to be treated equally?  Years?  Decades?  A millenia?

I think it is better for the rights of all sentient beings to respect those rights, and although this may make me a cynic, I don't think humanity would be able to do this with any AI it creates. It saddens me to say it,  but the easiest solution at this point is prevention.  The easiest prevention is to not develop AI.

Wow, that was a depressing essay.   Something more uplifting next time, guys.

Capek is why Data exists

We all know Roddenberry isn't the inventor of robots, nor Asimov.  But who is you may ask?  My friend the other night informed me that we should all be thanking Karel Capek for robots, or at least for the term.  

Capek was writing science fiction before it was an official genre, including themes like alien slavery, mass production, and atomic weapons.  He dealt with a lot of social ideas, which was probably partly due to the fact he was living in Austria-Hungry/Czechoslovakia in the early 20th century.  He also gets extra points for writing anti-nazi plays before it was cool.

So how did he invent the word robot?  Well Capek was writing this play about mechanical men that were built for service

 reasons initially, but before the play even gets to the final act they end up killing all the humans and taking over the world.  The question was what to call these things?  Capek credits his brother for thinking of the word robot, which is derived from the word robota in Czech, Slovak and Polish.  Robota literally means "serf labor".  

So how does this play, titled Rossum's Universal Robots or R.U.R., end?  I'm not giving away the ending here, you greedy readers!  You'll just have to read the play yourself.

Or look it up on wikipedia.