We have to start imagining a world in which sentient robots exist.
We’ve had I, Robot and R. Daneel Olivaw. We now have Annie Bot. Lots of others in between. I read about a smart spaceship not long ago (We Are Legion). The main issue I have with all these books is that the robots are really immortal humans with some computer assistance.
Sierra Greer asks the question – what will a sentient robot be first used for? There are two obvious answers, weapons and sex toys. She starts her exploration with the unlikely choice. Annie Bot is a sentient sex toy. What happens is as likely as the movies with highly intelligent dogs. A sentient robot will not be that. However, an imprisoned human in a robot body can be that. We’ve had enough Mechanical Turks already – androids being remotely controlled by humans – to make that theory likely.
So is Annie Bot a a sentient robot or a human, imprisoned in a robot body? Sierra Greer leaves that question open to interpretation.
I give a 5*/5. The book is disturbing, it’s terrifying that this could be done one day.
I find it funny that every time a very clear statement is explained or exaggerated with an adverb, the explanation is a hint that the opposite is present or the statement is not entirely true.
He absolutely doesn’t drink alcohol. I will totally buy a ticket for the next Taylor Swift concert. The students will use ChatGPT entirely for research purposes.
ChatGPT and “(Ethically)!” in one sentence, in a paid ad.
The first time I encountered the moral dilemma around the use of AI was in the Robots series by Isaac Asimov. I read that long before I owned a computer and totally bought the idea of a positronic brain. Asimov saw that robots if allowed to do whatever they wanted would just start killing. He envisioned a set of forced limitations that AI never hurts humans (the full list of 3+1 laws is here) as the only way for robots to be useful. Asimov noticed in his books that robots would replace human labor and eventually cause stagnation but that was only partially addressed in his series after centuries of expansion.
Who could’ve imagined that the first appearance of any resemblance of AI would need a very different set of laws than Asimov’s first 3? The present-day AI already appears in multiple forms, each of which has its own ethical challenges. The prompt-based tools tend to use human content and present it as their own with no citation or link to the author. They’re awesome for faking homework. The image generation tools copy artists’ work and make it semi-unique, filling the need for cheap illustrations on spam websites that would slip undetected by Googlebot. The chatbots and robocalls automate tasks that were once reserved for humans, causing unemployment. There has to be a fine line between what’s okay and what isn’t.
Any statement by AI should cite the sources of information and provide links
AI should not present slight modifications of human content as its own
AI should not use the prompts of one human outside of the context of the interaction with that human.
But after writing this, I had a lightbulb moment. If anyone put a thought on this, it has to be the EU administration. And yes, the EU agreed on a much longer document, where Generative AI is just one type of risk and contains an Asimov-like masterpiece:
Generative AI, like ChatGPT, would have to comply with transparency requirements:
Disclosing that the content was generated by AI
Designing the model to prevent it from generating illegal content
Publishing summaries of copyrighted data used for training
Generative AI is not even considered a high-risk type of tool. EU considers AI tools as high-risk if they classify humans, analyze emotions, collect faces, provide advice on health or legal matters, talk to children, and so on. How didn’t Asimov think about that? The existential dangers of a toy that can explain dangerous activities to children.
Overall, the definition of an ethical use of AI is taking some shape but I wonder how much damage will be caused to human content creation and creativity until any of that’s adopted.
At least, none of these risks is Skynet and Asimov’s laws are not yet relevant.
When I was a child in the 80s and early 90s, computers were rare. Computer games were a scent from another world you could see and enjoy briefly, if a kid whose parents had an 8-bit computer, would invite you home and let you play when their parents were not watching. I used books to fill my curious brain with data. I liked them very much and I wanted to be a writer when I grew up.
It was 1991-2 when some clever folks started translating non-linear books with choices. There are two doors in front of you. The left one is small, with an iron frame, and the right one is large and barely hanging. Which one would you open? If you choose the iron door, go to 185, and the broken door is at 195. Reading these felt challenging and great. The best from that time was the series Blood Sword.
I couldn’t buy it at that time because they were expensive. A friend let me read his. And decades later, I saw someone sell the first 3 books on Facebook, in pretty bad shape. The seller was apologetic. “You know they’re kind of cut, and have handwriting inside and so on. Are you sure?”. Not a problem, it’s actually better that way. Which modern-day book gets to that shape from being read a hundred times? Can we find a Hobbit read more than 2-3 times? Or a Game of Thrones?
These are the first 3 books from the series, and book 4 is on its way to me. I’ll figure out the missing book 5 sooner or later.
The books that chose me this year were almost entirely light reads – Fantasy, Sci-fi, and a variety of Crime/Thriller.
The highlights of the year for me are:
Jonathan Moore – Noir/Thriller author who captivated me with a gothic atmosphere and romantic characters (4 books read, all of them in Bulgarian).
Two Years Before the Mast – a biography from 1840, written with such a strange and infectious optimism that springs out of the pages almost 200 years later.
10% Happier by Dan Harris – quite a personal journey into the world of spirituality and meditation with a personal message: “You can scratch your nose as well”.
The Three-body Problem by Liu Cixin – is a good reminder that Sci-Fi exists and is still fantastic, well at least until you reach the 1000-page third part.
Veselin.blog 