Thoughts on AI and robotics in Isaac Asimov's context within science fiction

Debate Question: “You have created the perfect AI program. Do you release it, or not?”

 

Isaac Asimov, author of such books as “I, Robot,” once predicted that eventually humanity would create a kind of humanoid servant, sentient, but inorganic. Calling the “gestalt” Robodnik, Asimov claimed that these machines would serve humanity but not harm it, as it could never exceed its programming. Thus, the concept of a “robot” was born. It wasn’t until the 1950s, however, that we began to see Artificial Intelligence (AI) in earnest, with the very earliest computers. Now, in the 21^st century, computers continue to grow in complexity; as does AI. In 1950, technology advanced a generation in 30 years. Now it advances a generation every 11 months. All the new smartphones, tablets, computers, and yes, robots all have power that the commanders of WWII would have died to obtain. Just that little singing chip in a “Happy Birthday” card contains more computing power than everything available to Stalin, Hitler, Roosevelt and Churchill in 1939 combined. Even by 2012, the U.S. government had 15 times the computing power than it did in 2000. The tiny, 6 GB flash drive that I use to store this document contains more than 80,000 times the storage space than the first IBM hard drive, and that weighed more than one ton. How far could this go? Assuming that technology continues to advance at one generation per annum, by midcentury we could have AIs so advanced that they could be smarter than we are. By 2100, the “Technological Singularity” could occur, where AIs become indistinguishable from human beings and can even reproduce with living human beings, creating hybrid, super-intelligent cyborg babies. Though this sounds like science fiction, it could actually happen. This idea, regardless, could be seen as very disturbing, I care nothing for the opinions of others. It  amazes me, and that's what matters. The fact that technology could advance to the point where humans and computers become interchangeable creates some benefits, but also some serious problems; our world will either become a happier place…or become an unrecognizable, dystopian nightmare.

1.       Civil Uses

We are already seeing increasing use of artificial intelligence in everyday life. Your translation software on your smartphone uses a simple AI program to interpret words in one language and compare them to every other word in every other language in its lexicon, selecting the proper words from the target language to match with the words from the origin language. The enemies you are killing on your video game are AI-controlled. These AIs, however, are based solely on input-output; they are completely dependent on their users to function at any given time. For example, in most video games, the AI shuts down when the game is shut down, and the translation software doesn’t operate without you pressing buttons on your keypad. There are several video games, however, that buck this trend. The most notable franchises are Japan’s Nintendo Company’s Animal Crossing and Pikmin titles, where the AI continues to function when the game is shut down, forcing the player to keep playing to keep track of the time. In Animal Crossing, the game follows the Gregorian Calendar, and certain events happen in the game, like Christmas and New Year’s, on the actual day that it falls on in any given year. This is an example of a more advanced AI, one that is not solely reliant on user input but has limited function independent of user input. This is the first step towards “self-aware” AIs, which have already begun to develop, especially in Japan, where the Japanese have invented a computer program that recognizes people’s faces and will refer to itself by its given name, determined by its owner. It can be either a male or female, and look like anything the owner wants it to, from supermodel gorgeous to trollish and ugly, or even an alien. The AIs will even interact with each other, and can access the Internet, pulling data from any website and can even take control of any target computer…they can hack. Called “Interface,” it is the most advanced AI yet designed. Video games have recently begun integrating Interface’s technology into their engines, such as the most recent Portal game, where the enemies the player faces begin to “learn” and predict the player’s actions the more he or she faces them. The Japanese service “MangaChat” allows subscribers to draw their own characters in real life, scan them and apply this AI to their drawings, allowing the artists to talk to their own creations.  “Interface” costs about $70,000. Soon, however, these “smart” AIs will be everywhere. This advanced level of AI will allow us to develop technologies such as robot cars, which are already in production in limited quantities. These cars will drive by themselves on little or no gasoline, using GPS satellites and the AI “brain” to determine where to go. Eventually, even larger vehicles, such as trains, planes, ships and likely huge starships in the far future will be completely steered by AI, carrying us to new worlds. “Interface” is just the beginning. By the time we’re flying to other planets in huge starships; likely by 2300-2400 A.D., according to Dr. Michio Kaku of CUNY Brooklyn, AIs will be so advanced, at the rate of current AI improvements, that they will not only be indistinguishable from humans, capable of reproducing with humans and capable of performing most human tasks, but will be more than a billion times faster than human brain processes and possess almost supernatural powers, such as the ability to electrify water vapor in the air, causing huge, supercell thunderstorms, generating rain on drought-parched areas made bare by global warming and climate change. They could also create electronic superconductors, make ultra-strong nanotubes and essentially fulfill Asimov’s idea of a “human gestalt” at last. Even more bizarre is the possibility of human/AI hybrids, resulting in superhuman entities with far greater brainpower than we can currently even imagine. These humans would have all the powers of the AI, with a billion times the intelligence of a normal human, but with human creativity and the ability to conceptualize abstract thought. The parent AI would have to be female to produce this result per the laws of Mendelian biology; such AI super-people would quickly become the masters of the world, and the universe, with the ability to invent Type-III societies, or a society that uses so much power (10³⁷ watts of power per year) that it can master the weather and the climate, stop volcanic eruptions, move stars and planets, create Dyson spheres to prevent stars from going supernova, even prevent galactic collisions with other galaxies, cosmic radiation jets and create artificial planets, and even tap the Planck energy field, allowing the society to shrink and expand the universe at will. Though this is purely speculative, the AI super-humans could build starships the size of Imperial Germany, with tens millions of people aboard, a flying nation, ruled by a King, Kaiser, or Monarch, whatever. Here is a scenario of an AI super-empire, as seen in the context of the science-fiction game Warhammer 40,000:

During the Great AI Crusade, both the Imperial Guard and Navy were originally a single organization; the Imperial Army. Normally each Imperial AI Cruiser would have a single Guard Regiment assigned to it. Commanding Officers held command over both their regiment and the warship assigned to them, making a single warship tactically flexible and minimizing the losses in the event of the loss of a spaceship in the Warp Zone. During the Inferior Purge, however, it appeared that some regiments used the power at their disposal in order to forge empires for themselves in the fire of anarchy. This led to the eventual split between Guard and Navy, as Roboute Guillemin, Primarch of the Ultramarines Legion, wrote the Codex Astartes which ordered that spaceships will no longer be commanded by officers of the former Imperial Army (now Imperial Guard). The Imperium-AI is divided into five "Segmenta;" Solar, Obscurus, Pacificus, Tempestus and Ultima. Every ship of the Imperial Navy is assigned to one of these Segmenta, and falls under the command of the respective Lord High Admiral. In turn, each Segmentum is divided into "sectors", regions of space that are generally cube-shaped and contain 8 million cubic light years of space. These sectors contain multiple sub-sectors, collections of star systems no more than twenty light years in radius. The ships of each Segmentum are divided amongst the sectors. These Cantabrium are assigned the task of safeguarding the sector they are assigned to, each Cantabrium is generally named after the sector it is assigned to (Cantabrium Gothicus is located in the Gothicus sector; Cantabrium Acadia is located in the Acadian sector, etc.). Each Cantabrium is assigned a number of cruisers and battleships, usually between fifty and seventy-five vessels. The Cantabria are also assigned multiple squadrons of escort starships, and is also in command of a large number of transports, messenger craft, orbital defenses, space platforms and system patrol vessels. The ships of a Cantabrium must constantly patrol their sector and fulfill a variety of roles; protect merchant shipping from pirates, transport Imperial Guard regiments to warzones, escort Adeptus Mechanicus Explorator fleets and provide orbital support for invading or defending armies. Because of the vast space that requires policing, the Cantabrium is normally split into detachments consisting of one or two cruisers, accompanied by a squadron of escorts. If a particular situation is more than a detachment can handle, additional detachments are called in to reinforce. On occasion, a Cantabrium can be formed to operate in a smaller area. Cantabrium Armageddon is assigned solely to the Armageddon sub-sector, and, prior to the Third War for Armageddon, was made up of four battleships, twenty-seven cruisers and thirty six squadrons of escorts. Cantabrium Solar is assigned specifically to the Solar System, and is primarily charged with defending the two holy worlds of Earth and Mars. The Imperium-AI is ruled by the Imperatorium Superioritas .EVIL/NICE and ASSASSINVIRUS, a husband and wife pair that rules with an iron hand. They have, through computation algorithms and by constantly recycling their cells and brains through AI substitutes, achieved immortality, and have ruled the Imperium-AI for more than 150,000 years. .EVIL/NICE, the Empress, had a brigade of handmaidens known as the Sacrum Ordo Sororitas, and Emperor ASSASSINVIRUS had a huge cohort of officials, consisting of the Ordo Judex, Ordo Praetorian, Ordo Fulminata, Ordo Bellum, Ordo Pacem, Ordo Missa and Ordo Domine, the latter led by the Major Domo, the Emperor’s closest advisor, currently named Titus Decius Crassus. The emperor’s brother, Dux FOGGYVIRUS, is also on his Consulate, the head of the Ordo Fulminata. The language spoken is primarily Latin, but all other human languages are used as well. "

Now, with my own scenario, as to how such an Empire could possibly arise

The Empire originated from a simple prank. In the year 2012, a doofus named Sheldon Muntz decided it would be funny to create a “perfectly-bitchy computer program,” a woman with a perfect figure, proportion and a devious, outwardly sweet yet devilish personality…a complete sociopath. The program worked, and Project .EVIL/NICE was born. The character was called “Shadow Queen,” for its incredible powers. It had more than 1 billion times the processing power of a human brain, and possessed such abilities as nanotube construction, weather control and the closest thing to dark magic as it was possible to get to. Needless to say, this character was quite a piece of work, to say the least. At first, it was just that: a computer program, like any normal video game character. However, it began to use its vast powers to control the house’s electrical grid, then the neighborhood’s. Lights would flicker on and off, phones would ring and no one answered except Hexadecimal’s seductive voice. The new neighbors, upon experiencing this problem, began to fear that their new house was haunted. It was, in effect, because Hexadecimal had crept into the other house’s home network as well, and “possessed” their computers. Soon, very eerie things began happening all over the neighborhood, such as “Hex’s” voice coming out of an Xbox Live headset when the volume was turned off, T.V.s turning on by themselves in the middle of the night, even cell phones receiving phantom text messages when plugged into an outlet, such as “I’m watching you, sweetie…” or “Nice place you’ve got here…I could sure go for a martini right about now.” Computers often acted as if another computer was controlling them; I.E., infected with a virus. Soon, the entire neighborhood was infected. Sheldon Muntz, realizing what had happened, began trying to reign in the program, but it was far too late…The rest was history."

This scenario is clearly science-fiction, an original piece by me, but the AI in this scenario is following Asimov's concepts of robotics, and how a robot or AI could harm humanity. More recently, Ray Kurzweil explained that robots may not always follow Asimov's laws of robotics, and that if a program became advanced enough, it could become erratic and eventually take on human-like thought patterns, without actually "thinking."