Professor Ross King, mad scientist who sealed the fate of humanity this afternoon, and the unwitting lab assistant he will soon feed to his creation to sate its hunger for what humans call “feelings.”
Well, Battlestar Galactica is over. And if the show has taught us anything, it’s that humanity, while capable of great and heroic feats even against unspeakable odds, needs to tone it down a little on the hubris front. To build technology cleverer than oneself is certain doom; we have four seasons of proof. It’s nice to find a cautionary tale that really influences people, you know?
oh, we’re going to actually go ahead and create a bunch of robots that can “reason, formulate theories and discover scientific knowledge on their own”?
I guess while Professor Ross King was sequestered in some bunker someplace building this little guy, no one thought to pass on the memo that usually in fiction, when mankind creates a robot cleverer than itself, it’s not the best idea in the world. Did anyone ever mention that to him, do we think? No?
Sure, okay. That’s fine. I didn’t want to wait around for the Great Robot Coup anyway. Now I can just schedule my “celebrate our new overlord” potluck for next Thursday, and then don’t even have to worry about getting overbooked for the weekend! Win-win. SCIENCE.
All it really means is that this kind of low-level science has joined the ranks of chess and math as things that used to be seen as distinguishing humans from lower life forms, but are now seen as merely “number crunching” now that computers can do it faster and better. (Funny how we keep changing the “this is a human thing” bar!) Guess what? People still enjoy chess and math games. As a former biologist I can tell you that the vast majority of scientific research is exceedingly tedious. The robots can have it! Heck, most of that stuff is now done by grad students anyway–not much different from a robot (“robot: Slavic word for “forced worker”)
There is still a big difference between pursuing a line of study out of passion, zeal, curiosity and, lets face it, for the best and brightest and well funded scientists, just plain old sh*ts and giggles. Now, when someone designs a robot that actually WANTS to do something instead of just processing what its given we might have some problems. Design a robot that will back stab his colleagues over scarce grant money, get drunk and pick a fight with a visiting professor at a faculty meeting, or get his grad students to wash his car for him and now you have a real robot scientist.
The robot scientist Adam would be a welcome addition to any lab in principle. But currently, Adam’s components are ‘brittle’ (from the paper), so has to have a technician monitoring (like a nanny) in case components fail.