• ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca
    5·
    1 year ago

    There are thousands of sci-fi novels where sentient robots are treated terribly by humans and apparently the people at Boston Dynamics have read absolutely zero of them as they spend all day finding new ways to torment their creations.

    • LillyPip@lemmy.ca
      4·
      1 year ago

      People think I’m crazy for apologising to my roomba when I trip on it and for saying please and thank you to Alexa and Siri, but I won’t be surprised at all when the robots rise up, considering how our scientists are treating them. I’ll have a track record of being nice, and that has to count for something, right?

    • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      Those are just brainless bodies, currently. They don’t have sentience and have no ability to suffer. They’re nothing more than hydraulics, servos, and gyros. I’d be more concerned about mistreatment of advanced AI in disembodied form, something we’re dabbling potentially close to currently.

        • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ@lemmy.world
          1·
          1 year ago

          I disagree. I care greatly about not mistreating anything with consciousness and worry of where that line is and how we’ll even be able to tell that we’ve crossed it.

          I also recognized that a machinized body without a brain is exactly that - a cluster of unthinking matter. A true artificial intelligence wouldn’t be offended by the mistreatment of inanimate gears and servos any more than I would be. The mistreatment of an intelligent entity, however, is a different story.

      • LillyPip@lemmy.ca
        0·
        1 year ago

        Food for thought, though: we thought the same thing about all other animals until only a couple of decades ago, and are still struggling over the topic.

        • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ@lemmy.world
          1·
          1 year ago

          …Just no. Animals are complex organic beings. Of course, we don’t understand them. Machines, though? We built machines from the literal Earth. Their level of complexity is incomparable to that of anything made by nature.

          Now, take a sufficiently advanced neural network that’s essentially a black box that no human can possibly understand entirely and put it inside of that machine? Then you’re absolutely right. We’ll get there soon, I’m sure. For now, however, a physical robotic body is just a machine, no different than a car.

  • FaceDeer@kbin.social
    2·
    1 year ago

    This is superficially funny, of course. But I’ve seen it before and after thinking about it for a while I find myself coming to the defense of the Torment Nexus and the tech company that brought it into reality.

    Science fiction authors are not necessarily the best authorities when it comes to evaluating the ethical or real-world implications of the technologies they dream up. Indeed, I think they are often particularly bad at that sort of thing. Their primary goal is to craft captivating narratives that engage readers by introducing conflicts and dilemmas that make for compelling stories. When they imagine a new technology they aren’t going to get paid unless they come up with a story in which that new technology poses some kind of threat that the heroes need to overcome. The dark side of these technologies is deliberately emphasized by the authors to create tension and drama in their stories.

    Tech companies, on the other hand, have an entirely different set of considerations. Their goal isn’t just to recreate something from a sci-fi novel for the sake of it; rather, they are motivated by solving real-world problems. They wouldn’t build the Torment Nexus unless they figured that they could sell it to someone, and that they wouldn’t get shut down for doing something society would reject. There are regulatory frameworks around this kind of thing.

    If you look back through older science fiction you can find all sorts of “cautionary tales” against technologies that have turned out to be just fine. “Fahrenheit 451” warned against the proliferation of television entertainment, but there’s been plenty of rich culture developed for that medium. “Brave New World” warned against genetic engineering, but that’s turned out to be a great technology for curing diseases and improving crop yields. The submarine in “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” was seen as unstoppable and disruptive, but nowadays submersibles have plenty of nonmilitary applications.

    I’d want to know more about what exactly the Torment Nexus is before I automatically assume it’s a bad idea just because some sci-fi writer claimed it was.

    • Amaltheamannen@lemmy.ml
      2·
      1 year ago

      Just because some tech bros can make money from the Torment Nexus it does not become a good idea. Profit is not a great judge of ethics and value.

      • FaceDeer@kbin.social
        1·
        1 year ago

        And just because a sci-fi writer can make up a horrifying story of the Torment Nexus gone wrong doesn’t make it a bad idea. Making up horrifying stories of things going wrong is their job. They’ve make up stories of how things go horrifyingly wrong while doing research into a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, doesn’t mean curing Alzheimer’s disease is a bad thing.

    • RegularGoose@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      1 year ago

      I stopped reading when you said the goal of tech companies is to solve real world problems. The only goal of tech companies is to create products that will make them a profit. To believe anything else is delusional. That’s kind of why our society is crumbling and the planet is dying.

    • UlrikHD@programming.dev
      1·
      1 year ago

      “Brave New World” warned against genetic engineering, but that’s turned out to be a great technology for curing diseases and improving crop yields.

      I was still a teen when I read the book, but that wasn’t really my take from it when I read it. We are still far away from genetically designing human babies. And you also overlooked the part about oppression/control via distractions such as drugs and entertainment.

      • papalonian@kbin.social
        1·
        1 year ago

        I haven’t read it in a while, but I kind of took the genetic engineering as a metaphor for being forced into the role/ class the ruling body wants you to be in

    • XYZinferno@lemmy.basedcount.com
      1·
      1 year ago

      Speaking of Fahrenheit 451, weren’t there seashells mentioned in that book? Little devices you could stuff in your ears to play music? And those ended up being uncannily similar to the wireless earbuds we have today?

    • jadero@programming.dev
      0·
      1 year ago

      Maybe I read things too literally, but I thought “Fahrenheit 451” was about a governing class controlling the masses by limiting which ideas, emotions, and information were available.

      “Brave New World” struck me as also about controlling the masses through control of emotions, ideas, and information (and strict limits on social mobility).

      It’s been too long since I read “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”, but I thought of it as a celebration of human ingenuity, with maybe a tinge of warning about powerful tools and the responsibility to use them wisely.

      I don’t see a lot of altruistic behaviour from those introducing new technologies. Yes, there is definitely some, but most of it strikes me as “neutral” demand creation for profit or extractive and exploitive in nature.

      • johnrobbespiere@lemmygrad.ml
        01·
        1 year ago

        This guy just read all classic sci fi in a very tilted manner to justify his tech company doing stuff for the market that is actually good.

  • sleepy@reddthat.com
    1·
    1 year ago

    Isn’t that a part of the ai marketing though? That whole “this thing could destroy us” stuff?

      • visak@lemmy.world
        0·
        1 year ago

        The current stuff is smoke and mirrors and not intelligent in any meaningful sense, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous. It doesn’t have to be robots with guns to screw over people. Just imagine trying to get PharmaGPT to let you refill your meds, or having to deal with BankGPT trying to figure out why it transfered your rent payment twice. And companies are sure as hell thinking about using this stuff to get rid of human decisionmakers.

        • Square Singer@feddit.de
          0·
          1 year ago

          That is totally true but that’s a different direction than the danger in the marketing as discussed above.

          The media is full of “AI is so amazingly great, we are all going to lose our jobs and it will take over the world.”

          That’s a quite different message than what’s really the case, which is “AI is so shitty, that it will literaly kill people with bad advice when given the chance. And business leaders are so shit that they willingly trust AI, just because it’s cheaper.”

          • Baylahoo@sh.itjust.works
            0·
            1 year ago

            This is my biggest concern. I’m in a position where (potentially in the near future) I see AI being used as an excuse to do work quicker so we can focus on other things more but still have to review the AI response before agreeing/signing off. Reviewing for accuracy takes just as long as doing it yourself when it’s strongly regulated and it comes down to revisions and document numbers. Much less making a sound argument that actually is up to date with that documentation. So either I trust the AI short cut and open myself up to errors, or redo all the work for them. No gain in time efficiency with shorter timelines. I’d rather make something and have it flag things that I can check so I’m more sure of my own work. What I do shouldn’t be faster, but it can be more error free. It would take a lot of training and updating of training with each iteration of documentation change. I could be the slave of change, with more expectations, with no actual improvement of the tools I have (in fact more risk of issues with the tools being used).

            • psud@aussie.zone
              0·
              1 year ago

              I’m in agile development, in a reasonably safe-from-AI position (scrum master).

              There has already been a trial of software development by AI, with different generative AIs in each agile role; and it worked.

              Bard claims to be able to write unit tests

              I can imagine many IT jobs becoming less skilled

              • Baylahoo@sh.itjust.works
                1·
                8 months ago

                Sorry this is months after, but it’s cool to see it worked. I use a software called XXX Agile and it’s not the worst I work with but when ported to my company has some flaws. There’s a long project to switch somewhere else for document control and people who should know much better than me are worried it will fill some gaps but open us up to way more.