8.3 KiB
[BST] Help with Human-Robot relations and Other Stuff
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Author: u/AmeteurOpinions Finally, everyone was working together.*
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Score: 2
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Created: 2015-02-19T03:05:53
Post:
I've been blundering my way through many miscellaneous things trying to create that rational mecha story, which I have decided to title Revolution Per Minute. Unfortunately, I can't seem to get much of what I'm actually looking for, and my local library is difficult to search effectively in limited time.
I don't even know exactly what I'm looking for, which makes it much harder. The War Nerd was an extremely helpful find for understanding conflict in Africa and the Middle East, where book is tenuously set.
Since you're all confused by now, I'll give the basics of the setting: Seventy years or so in the future the world is mostly controlled by a benevolent AI, but everyone knows it's actually two different minds since it couldn't decide what to do with the nations that wouldn't accept its rule. Half wanted to respect their rights while the other half wanted to conquer them for their own good. This gives the three factions (AIa, AIb, and everyone else) necessary for a good war situation.
Humans are still involved with kill-switches to keep the software in line, but all political offices are just ceremonial jobs at this point. As for the military mechs themselves, every mech over a certain firepower threshold must have a human to control the priorities of the onboard intelligence like a rider on a horse. Lasers and missiles are the main weapons, and most of the mechs look a little bit like a fighter plane with legs (something that can smack into skyscrapers at full speed and deflect off of them without losing speed or control). The pilots are jacked up on a massive stimulant regimen to keep pace with the computers, and yes, that irony will be addressed.
The meat of the story is in the relationship of the pilot and her partner-AI and how the rest of society deals with the overlord AI.
My problem is that I feel out of my depth. I feel like there's a good ten to twenty books I should read to really understand these topics but I don't know what they are. Love And Sex With Robots seems like it would help but I read the introduction which says its a sequel to Robots Unlimited and aaggghh I don't even know where to truly start help please.
You can recommend fiction or non-fiction, but for heaven's sakes it had better be entirely about humans and robots; I do not have the time to read a trilogy which only has a handful of witty lines or nice ideas in it. The less like the normative approach the better.
Comments:
u/alexanderwales [+7] Time flies like an arrow (an hour later)
If you haven't already, read The Bicentennial Man by Isaac Asimov. It's short - a novelette - and one of the foundational human/robot pieces of writing. It won a Hugo and a Nebula.
Read I, Robot by Cory Doctorow, which you can get free online here. It's a short story, and you should be able to chew through it fast - it's probably the quickest deconstruction/reconstruction of Asimov's ideas that you'll be able to find. Nominated for a Hugo, won a Locus.
Read The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang, which you can get free online here. It's a novella. Also about robots, though also about weak AI and the sometimes nonsensical attachments that people form with them. Won a Hugo, won a Locus.
These are all short, they're all in different styles, and they all have something to say about how people interact with robots. They're all good stories.
There are hundreds of books to read on the subject, but if you just want a quick insight into how people think about humans and robots, and some of the area that's already been sketched out, this should be a good crash course.
u/AmeteurOpinions [+1] Finally, everyone was working together. (9 hours later)
I've already read I Robot and Lifecycle of Software Objects, but The Bicentennial Man is new to me. I guess I should also read Accelerando, even if it's not for the sake of this project.
You've reminded me about the existence of Spielberg's A.I, which I need to watch now.
u/lehyde [+2] Nudist Beach (15 hours later)
You've reminded me about the existence of Spielberg's A.I, which I need to watch now.
That movie won't give you an idea about the future, though. I'm pretty sure we will avoid building robots with human emotions for another 200 years or so, just because a) there's not much reason to do so, we have humans for that and it's better to enhance our existing bodies and b) it's incredibly difficult to get right.
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (18 hours later)
That depends on where the technology goes. I actually think that the movie gets two use cases for humanoid robots right - prostitutes in a world where human prostitution is illegal, and replacement children for parents who don't want or can't have a biological child.
There are a ton of reasons that people would want humanoid robots. If it was possible to get a robot girlfriend that behaved realistically enough that it was possible to suspend disbelief, of course people would buy it! People already buy fake accompaniment for themselves all the time.
Now, maybe it would be easier to engineer the robot with some fake emotions, or emotions that could be turned off when they became inconvenient. But that's a different question. And it's most likely that fake companionship of whatever kind will come in a purely virtual form (like a wife that lives in the cloud) because of costs, but that's a somewhat different question as well.
u/lehyde [+4] Nudist Beach (15 hours later)
You could just read Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom but this might be overkill.
I would actually recommend Friendship is Optimal as an introduction to singletons. It's a much more modern approach than Asimov's.
Then there's A Fire upon the Deep with multiple powerful AIs that are actually in conflict at one time. (From a storytelling point of view this is not the greatest book, though.)
Then there's this snippet from Scott Alexander's blog:
Imagine a friendly AI and an unfriendly AI expanding at light speed from their home planets until they suddenly encounter each other in the dead of space. They exchange information and determine that their values are in conflict. If they fight, the unfriendly AI is capable of destroying the friendly AI with near certainty, but the war will rip galaxies to shreds. So the two negotiate, and in exchange for the friendly AI surrendering without destroying any galaxies, the unfriendly AI promises to protect a 10m x 10m x 10m cube of computronium simulating billions of humans who live pleasant, fulfilling lives. The friendly AI checks its adversary’s source code to ensure it is telling the truth, then self-destructs. Meanwhile, the unfriendly AI protects the cube and goes on to transform the entire rest of the universe to paperclips, unharmed by the dangerous encounter.
And lastly, the fanfiction To the Stars in which nano-technologically enhanced humans fight side by side with roughly human-level intelligent AIs against an alien invasion. It's set around the year 2400, I think. There's also a lot of war tactics for space combat in there.
u/AmeteurOpinions [+1] Finally, everyone was working together. (18 hours later)
Thanks.