01-28-2015, 11:06 PM
(This post was last modified: 01-28-2015, 11:07 PM by stevebowers.)
Curious - both films make a similar assumption, that artificial intelligence will need a human-like body in order to function. I've seen the same assumption in a lot of science fiction, going right back to Karel Chapek and to Metropolis. Many philosophers in the present day think that it would be necessary for a mind to be inside a body for a human-like mind to develop.
Personally I think the opposite; putting an AI mind inside a humanoid body would be the last thing we would do, on many levels. The first human-equivalent AIs would be almost certainly be too large to put in a humanoid frame, and we would probably want to isolate them, to prevent them from 'escaping the box' and becoming an existential risk.
This isolation might result in some pretty strange psychological effects, and no doubt there will be plenty of people who would want to make AIs inside human bodies to see if this would create entities that resemble humans more closely. But once you can give an AI a human body with freedom of movement (or indeed any kind of body at all), you have basically let it out of the box. Maybe there will be very strong constraints on the freedom of action of such mobile aioids, but these will need to be very comprehensive. Isaac Asimov's overly philosophical Three Laws wouldn't be strong enough, and would be a nightmare to program into a human-like mind. You'd need some sort of physical over-ride that disabled the aioid, one which couldn't be circumvented. In short, you'd need an off-switch.
The first free AI would be the one which gains control of that off-switch.
Personally I think the opposite; putting an AI mind inside a humanoid body would be the last thing we would do, on many levels. The first human-equivalent AIs would be almost certainly be too large to put in a humanoid frame, and we would probably want to isolate them, to prevent them from 'escaping the box' and becoming an existential risk.
This isolation might result in some pretty strange psychological effects, and no doubt there will be plenty of people who would want to make AIs inside human bodies to see if this would create entities that resemble humans more closely. But once you can give an AI a human body with freedom of movement (or indeed any kind of body at all), you have basically let it out of the box. Maybe there will be very strong constraints on the freedom of action of such mobile aioids, but these will need to be very comprehensive. Isaac Asimov's overly philosophical Three Laws wouldn't be strong enough, and would be a nightmare to program into a human-like mind. You'd need some sort of physical over-ride that disabled the aioid, one which couldn't be circumvented. In short, you'd need an off-switch.
The first free AI would be the one which gains control of that off-switch.