I came across a very interesting article today: 3 Laws Don’t Quite Cut It, on the 3 Laws Unsafe website. This is a website spawned by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a non-profit organisation working on developing AI with greater than human intelligence. The website on the 3 Laws was created to study and discuss Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, which gained popularity in 2004 with the release of the movie “I, Robotâ€, which is based on Asimov’s theories concerning robotics. The article states that the three laws look sufficient in the world of a science fiction story, but then continues to ask whether they would work in the real world. The comments after the article offer good counter-arguments and the whole topic makes you wonder where the whole thing stands today… How close are we to achieving near human AI? … and if we’re close enough, can the Singularity Institute achieve their goal (i.e smarter than human AI)?
My opinion is that we’re not as close as one may think when reading the above articles and the institutes publications, but then again we’re not as far as some scepticists may tell you. There exist a great number of articles and publications on AI ethics or the rules that will someday govern robotic behaviour and, by reading them, you may feel that the robotic entities discussed are just around the corner and that all this discussion is on something about to be implemented. However, the theories of walking, talking, thinking robots and the fear that the day will come when they will take over have been around for more than 100 years (yes, even before the Wachowskis made the first Matrix movie) and now that some feel that we’re close to the birth of “true AIâ€, they find it necessary to deal with all the complications, before they arise.
So I wouldn’t worry that much. It seems that the closer we get to creating this technology the more aware we are of the dangers and the ways around them and the more prepaired we will be to make it as safe as possible…… either that or we’ll be artificially created and live in pods, jacked in to a worldwide MMORPG, in about two to three hundred years time. No biggie!