Who is a paranoid freak, now?
From the article:
Bringsjord acknowledges that the endeavor to create pure evil, even in a software program, does raise ethical questions, such as, how researchers could control an artificially intelligent character like E if "he" was placed in a virtual world such as Second Life, a Web-based program that allows people to create digital representations of themselves and have those avatars interact in a number of different ways.
"I wouldn't release E or anything like it, even in purely virtual environments, without engineered safeguards," Bringsjord says. These safeguards would be a set of ethics written into the software, something akin to author Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics" that prevent a robot from harming humans, requires a robot to obey humans, and instructs a robot to protect itself—as long as that does not violate either or both of the first two laws.
"Because I have a lot of faith in this approach," he says, "E will be controlled."
So, according Scientific American, someone has gotten funding to program evil into a computer. To top it off, there is no mention of Green Berets, Navy SEALs, a CIA counter-terrorist strike force, The Justice League, the X-Men, the Batman or Captain Caveman heading that way to crack some evil skulls. I suppose that could be because the forces of good don't want to tip their hand, even though hand-tipping is almost a trademark move on the part of the the forces of good.
I work with computers between fifty and sixty hours a week. When I go home, I spend more time with a computer.
Ask the shrink at Arkham Asylum if the Mad Hatter needs help being more crazy. Go ahead. I'll wait.
I can tell you for a fact that computers do not need help or special programming to make them more evil. Evil is hard-coded at the circuit level. Except in Apple products. Microsoft actually contains an Evil Accelerator which leverages unused CPU cycles to literally slap infants! Fortunately, Windows Vista uses so much processing power just running itself that this feature set is seldom used.
And using Linux is akin to voting for Ron Paul. It might be a good idea, but your effort is wasted.
No comments:
Post a Comment