Holding Back the Unholdable

Conditions: Warm, stormy

The Unreasonable

An amusing article from the BBC explores the uncanny valley - that weird disconnect humans get when robots are almost but not quite human-looking. In it various propeller-heads explain how stupid it is to fear the upcoming robot apocalypse.

"The problem with tools - which is what robots are - is that we become dependent on them," says Wilson, whose new novel Robopocalypse is being made into a film directed by Steven Spielberg.

"That's scary, so we contemplate the disaster scenarios that could come from being over-dependent on tools.

"It's true - our tools could fail someday - but it doesn't mean they're malevolent or immoral or have an ethical bias."

Well that's kind of the point, isn't it. Robots don't feel pity, remorse or fear, which makes them ideally suited to taking out mankind once and for all, after we stupidly give them the tools to do it, of course. There will be nothing in them to stop it. There's no sense in being afraid of your toaster when all it can do is make toast. There's perfect sense in being afraid of your toaster once you've engineered it to be able to kill you, as well as make toast.

Theme parks can be scary places when robots get involved. The 1973 film Westworld depicts a fictional robotic tourist destination where, after a safety malfunction, the robots go on a killing spree.

In reality, statistics from the International Association of Amusement Park and Attractions show that there is a general trend towards increased safety as technology improves.

Similarly, automated public transport systems are believed to be a third more reliable than those in human control and robot-assisted surgery is more precise, with patients recovering quicker with fewer complications.

Removing humans from the process removes, by definition, human error.

No, No NO NO NO!!! Removing humans from the process does NOT remove human error. If anything, it simply elevates human error to a whole new level of potential chaos and destruction. Nothing can error as fast or as catastrophically as a computer can. We desperately need to understand this if we are going to have any chance at all.

But with robots becoming increasingly advanced, is there a line where an error could become a malicious attack?

"Robots are just a bunch of metal and silicon," says Prof Dautenhahn.

"They have no agenda - this is what's different from the movies. They have no hideous plan.

"You should not be scared of robots. If you are scared, then you are scared of the people building them."

Yes!! In fact, you should be afraid of both the robot (which can do anything) and the person who built it (who can make it do anything). Fear doesn't have to be rationed out like soup: there's enough to go around!

Its theory goes that "the small size, portability, and rapid potential for proliferation will make nano-built weaponry difficult to control and hard to keep out of the hands of terrorists".

And this is a view that is shared by at least one artificial intelligence expert.

"I'm more afraid of things that can be manipulated that I cannot see," says Prof Dautenhahn.

"With robots, it is something I can see so, if it malfunctions, you can unplug it and shut it down. If you have billions of nano-particles, there is no way you can do the same thing."

- news.bbc.co.uk/

..."you can unplug it and shut it down." This, ladies and gentleman, if nothing else, should be enough to send you out to your back yards to commence digging your World War 3 bunker. If our smartest minds on the front lines of the coming robot apocalypse are still thinking that a future robot would just be able to be unplugged, then we are doomed. Doomed!!



Film Review: In Time

There are two kinds of science fiction movies. The bad kind and the good kind. The bad kind usually involve robots punching each other, and terrible plots. In Time is one of the "good" kinds of science fiction films, using the genre to explore humanity. Director Andrew Niccol is the guy who did Gattaca, so that kind of tone and form is what you should be expecting. It tells the story of a world where everyone is genetically engineered to stop aging at 25. However they also will die at 26, unless they earn enough credits, or time, to keep living. Time has literally become the new money, with every person's wealth printed as a countdown clock on their left wrist. Time can be bought, sold, earned, traded and even stolen. All goods and services are now purchased from the time on your wrist. And when your time is up, so are you (to steal a phrase). In this world lives Will (Justin Timberlake), a working class schmoe, one of the millions who literally live day by day, earning just enough at his factory job to make it through the night. But his eyes are opened the night he meets a wealthy guy who has 105 years on his wrist, and has already lived a century, and tells Jim about how the rich are effectively immortal. They live carefully, as all immortals must, surrounded by bodyguards and sycophants, away from the rabble who fight for each second. But he's tired of living, so he gives his time to Will.

Now Will sees how unfair society is, and so he goes to the wealthy cities, to see for himself how the rich live. And in so doing breaks all the rules of society that have been so carefully constructed. The timekeepers are sort of like the IRS and the FBI rolled into one, and it's basically their job to keep the rich rich, and the poor poor. And if that isn't enough of a challenge for Will, he antagonsies one of the richest guys around by stealing off with his daughter. The two of them become a sort of bloodless Bonnie and Clyde, robbing various Timekeeper buildings to steal time that they then give away to the people. A class war begins to break out as people begin to have time on their hands, giving them a chance to think how unfair the system is, and whether it's time for a change.

Having set all this up, the movie starts to run out of steam. Our two heroes can't bring down the entire system on their own, eventually the authorities are going to catch up with them, but until then they can cause some chaos and mayhem to the established order. Of course there's a bigger lesson being preached, about how we're all so wealthy with so much time on our hands, the only true wealth that they can't take away from us. While that's all very noble, it does present the question of how such a society could even be set up in the first place: who would vote for such a thing? I guess that's not the point. In Time is a pretty well made film, that presents a pretty interesting idea. Justin Timberlake does a pretty good job with the character he's given, the problem is in the film struggling to deliver up a satisfying conclusion to the complicated scenario it has mapped out for itself. In the end all the momentum and intrigue kind of fizzles away. Just like real life, I suppose. Three and a half ticks out of Five.



- Peace out