Will Asimov fix my doorbell? There should be a law about this Greetings from civilisation, for one more day at least. After tonight, I will no longer be a European citizen but an immigrant of indeterminate status. Don't worry, this won't be a Brexit diatribe. I resigned myself to belonging to a pariah nation long ago, a realisation born from half a lifetime's accumulation of World Cup …
Asimov's "The Feeling of Power" where the rediscovery of how humans can perform mental arithmetic which had been lost due to the reliance on computers leads the military to the idea of manned missiles
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/notes/asimov.html
"
"And I see something even beyond this. It may be fantastic now, a mere dream; but in the future I see the manned missile!"
There was an instant murmur from the audience. The general drove on. "At the present time, our chief bottleneck is the fact that missiles are limited in intelligence. The computer controlling them can only be so large, and for that reason they can meet the changing nature of anti-missile defences in an unsatisfactory way. Few missiles, if any, accomplish their goal and missle warfare is coming to a dead end; for the enemy, fortunately, as well as for ourselves.
"On the other hand, a missile with a man or two within, controlling flight by graphitics, would be lighter, more mobile, more intelligent. It would give us a lead that might well mean the margin of victory. Besides which, gentlemen, the exigencies of war compel us to remember one thing. A man is much more dispensable than a computer. Manned missiles could be launched in numbers and under circumstances that no good general would care to undertake as far as computer-directed missiles are concerned"
"
It's also worth keeping in mind the various risks of such an absolute law. A robot using these laws and intelligent enough to know these things would probably refuse to do most things on the basis that it wants to dedicate itself to preventing harm to humans, and if it isn't doing so, it is by inaction allowing them to come to harm. That would probably be a good thing for a while, but after about a week of this, the manufacturers would realize the problems in the business model of making robots who can and do decide to abandon their original tasks and try to form a volunteer harm-reduction squad. And that's only if you can find a perfect way of implementing these laws in software or hardware, if you have very clear definitions of "harm", and if the robots are capable of making the connections between possible actions and probable results. If you don't obtain perfection in any of those aspects, you have many more problems.
And don't forget RoboCop's Directive 4:
AIs will do whatever their masters direct them to do;... .... alain williams
That has AI masters ruling both the physical and geopolitical landscapes, ..... or destroying them both as the case can so easily be.
And that extraordinarily renders them heap powerful medicine, kemosabe. Or renders it so, depending on you understanding and gender choice preference for dealing with AI.
Why are you assuming it's a rubber duck? Not that I'm suggesting that flushing live ducks down the toilet on the train is the sort of thing that might happen in rural France or anything...........
However if it is meant to be une canard artificiel, it may be suggesting that the "bathroom" is not really intended for bathing.
"Not that I'm suggesting that flushing live ducks down the toilet on the train is the sort of thing that might happen in rural France or anything"
LeavesNumber 2s on the line in the UK, until 2023
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/nov/03/uk-railway-firms-faiil-to-clean-up-waste-dumping-act
Still, best not try dispose a rubber duck...
"After tonight, I will no longer be a European citizen"
Actually, you will. You will no longer be an EU citizen.
It's the same confusion that causes the pro-EU camp to call the critics of the EU "europhobes".
I am not afraid of Europe, I deeply love Europe (including the UK).
And because I love Europe so much, I want a better EU.
And it is concerning that even the departure of the UK does not cause alarm in Brussels and makes them consider listening and changing.
If the reason for the departure of the UK was due to actual EU policies, that would have some relevance.
BoJo, and others from the Murdoch/Barclay press (let's be fair), have spent the last 20-30 years publishing outright lies about the EU though. Various anti-EU Conservatives have repeated those. Not too unreasonably, a lot of people think those lies are true because they're published in national newspapers.
As for a "better EU", it's important to remember that the EU, in its autocratic style, had the indignity to impose equal rights for older people, equal rights for gay people, equal rights for non-white people, equal rights for non-Christian people, equal rights for Christian people (in NI), equal rights for men to parental responsibility, equal rights for men to parental leave, equal rights for women pensioners, a national minimum wage... and I think I'll stop there. As those radical concepts (if you can describe "treat people properly" as that) were introduced, every Conservative party in government or opposition attempted to derail every single one. Several were opposed by the Blair/Brown governments too. The EU imposed them on the country, in direct opposition from the UK governments, because the EU considered them to be the correct thing to do. So which of those do you think shouldn't have happened? Which of those groups do you think should not have human rights?
Holocaust Remembrance Day was the other week, and one of the key peints was that people should learn how to prevent it happening again. The EU is, directly, a force to stop that happening again, because "other countries should not meddle in our internal affairs" leads *directly* to Kristallnacht, ghettos and gas chambers. It really is that simple - and the horrific part is that it's already started.
As far as I know, equal rights are guaranteed in national constitutions. No EU needed for that.
" because "other countries should not meddle in our internal affairs" leads *directly* to Kristallnacht, ghettos and gas chambers. "
Yes, I remember all the gas chambers I saw on my holidays in Iceland and Switzerland, and I hear Norway is terrible too.
But concentration camps are a British invention
Nope. Cuban, actually. Tried out by General Valeriano Weyler in an attempt to stop guerrilleros mixing with non-combatants, and considered so successful that General Roberts deployed that tactic in the Boer wars a couple of years later.
No - concentration camps as used in the Boer War were brought over from the US by a soldier who had served during the Trail of Tears where 60,000 native Americans were ethnically cleansed from their homelands to the west. For some reason the US have pushed to get it called a British invention.
No, they are cognitive dissonance sufferers who haven't noticed how much smaller is the EU bureaucracy than the equivalent staffs of all the member countries that it replaced, and how much it has actually reduced corruption.
There are plenty of ERGites that wanted out because of (a) the new opportunities for profitable corruption and (b) the creation of new Civil Service posts into which their friends and relatives can be catapulted. One imagines Private Eye will be reporting on it soon.
I really, really do not understand the mental gymnastics that lead from "Here is someone who wants an EU with more transparency and democracy (even proponents of the EU acknowledge the EU has a democratic deficit) and oh, I don't know, a budget that gets approved by the Auditing Committee for a change" to "Therefore, clearly, this person must be a racist who hates foreigners."
(I must have been so afraid at my wedding, with twelve nationalities present)
And you know what, I even think it is this attitude that caused Brexit to happen.
"And because I love Europe so much, I want a better EU."
So on balance it would probably have been better to remain and work harder to change it for the better. Leaving it is certainly not going to enable whatever flavour of 'better' you think it ought to be.
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