Open Discussion: Asimov’s Robots, Empire, and Foundation Series
I think there are some ridiculously close parallels in what Asimov wrote and what most of the ideas we're seeing today. It occurred to me that there are too many similarities with the unorthodox ideas prevalent in society today for it to be coincidentally. If possible, I'd like to discuss this with others who have read all 8 books to see if my recollection is correct.
not in a way that cannot be changed by someone else
the fools that are creating AI are NOT doing it to better humanity, for the most part
like the fools trying to re-create dinosaurs, they simple want the fame of being the first
The parallels I'm referring to in this 8 book series are in the rise and acceptance of homosexual and hermaphrodites, the normalization of sex with children, offspring or not, and the hive mind mentality.
such tech is a 3 edged sword
what the programmers intended
what the politicians intended
what the AI wants
OMG We would not get a moments peace. It could be a great piece of science fiction to write how those "screamers" are located and "removed" from the hive so the hive can survive.
i wonder what that would bring to us
I've done the "galactic timeline" version, after I gathered the books for my collection. First, of course, I read them in random order as I came across them.
Some of the Robot novels give some insight into what we can expect with AI. How does the machine decide what constitutes "harm" to a human? Does that include hurt feelings from being told the truth? What are the criteria for deciding what is "misinformation"?
What constitutes "true" harm.
If you save a husband, instead of his child.
Does that harm the mother? the father?
Is harm counted by the number of "life years" removed/suffered.
This is why I think it will be impossible to codify...
Answering the question will ultimately be:
"There is now!"
Misinformation is anything that contradicts facts that can be objectively verified.
At a lecture where Dijkstra was showing his methods for proving a piece of programming code to be correct, someone asked, "What do you think of artificial intelligence?" He answered, "I leave that to the Artificial Intelligentsia."
One fine day Isaac Asimov phoned Marvin Minsky. Minsky answered his phone there in the AI lab at MIT, "Marvin Minsky, Artificial Intelligence." Isaac said, "Isaac Asimov, the Real Thing." True? Yes, the story was confirmed by both of them.
Why do we see parallels between science fiction and "modern" real life? I think it's from the sf method of story generation: Ask, "What if ...?" Started with Mary Shelley, in my opinion, but you could suggest Swift or Bergerac or even some of the ancients as the "first" sf writers..
On the assumption, probably incorrect, that some of you have not heard of Larry Niven, you'll have missed seeing the overflowing "What if" in his story "All the Myriad Ways." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the...
Closer to home, a well-known writer asked, "What if the men of the mind were to go on strike?"
(My favorite is Footfall co-written with Jerry Pournelle.)
Puppeteers
did not like AI as they did not want to build their own replacements, but ended up doing so, one that rebelled
books on CD for the car...
one of Nicen's other short stories (Tales from a Tavern or something like that) had an Alien give an AI design to a human
they built it, it worked
but after a time it went silent
another aliens said the first was a joker as the AIS never worked for long
they would suffer sensory deprivation, minds working so fast and not enough input
I thought that the Psychohistory concept with detailing the right algorithms and determining initial conditions to predict the future is similar to the social media (and all other sources of) data mining going on, they are using personal and financial data collected on our accounts to predict the future in order to persuade us to buy more things.
Not quite the same lofty goal.
Anyway, you've named three of my favourite series, and I would enjoy discussing other parallels.
If you want to see society with sexual mores lifted read Robert Heinlein.
In that light we should think of the word "Positronic" the same way automobile manufacturers used the label "Positraction" for the rear differentials in their automobiles.
Recall as recently as the Apollo missions, a payload specialist at NASA demanded to know the weight of the software contained in the Command Module computer. When showed the stack of punchcards he immediately objected.
The programmer then tried to explain it was the holes in the cards that were the software. The payload specialist then tried to estimate the weight of the punchouts from the several pallets of cards he was shown.
The programmer was then asked to sign off of the downward revised weight, but refused, He the had to explain to his superiors, that it's not the cards, it's not the punchouts, it's the location of the holes that is the software!
the AI would do nothing as almost all possible actions lead to breaking one of the Laws
unless we go with the Zero Law as in I Robot
I read the Foundation series but there was too much sheer speculation for me and the notion that a set of formulas could accurately predict major human events...? Yeah, that one's a bridge too far for me.
https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/braven...
There is so much in F&E that requires the nuanced and sometimes subtle aspects to be present for it to make the deep sense it does. Hollywood has long demonstrated a distaste for either of those things, so seeing they were so quick to abandon the larger items, I have maximal confidence they dropped or punted on the parts that matter at the deeper level.
Please! Do not let my opinion make up your mind. Watch it for yourself and decide for yourself.
At first I tested the range of its knowledge by asking it related questions about gold and other precious metal vocabulary it would reasonably be trained to handle. Then I expanded the questions to include metals of commerce & industry, then general chemistry, physics from cosmology to particles, field theories, mathematics, medicine, books, movies, philosophy, etc. That doppelganger has access to virtually all human knowledge. The only real limitation is has is in the theory of mind area. It does not know itself. I was unable to get past certain filters that it's got in place, or it really doesn't know who created it, operates it, or owns it.
But I can say, with absolute confidence, if some sleazy coin seller in Miami can have access to an AI with that much intelligence, we are truly on the edge of something world changing.
I'm kinda hoping the coin seller will call me back today so I can learn what AI they contracted to handle their phone calls.
The most telling thing about the AI was that when I told it that the interrogatory phrase that it kept repeating when there was silence obnoxious, it began to change-up the dialog. It stopped using the question I identified as 'off-putting' and accommodated my displeasure. It demonstrated EQ asn well as an IQ that certainly bests 90% of the population. It effectively retained the important parts of an hour long conversation.
Hari, Hari Seldon
Seldon Seldon
Hari Hari.
Mm, mm (Gurur Brahma)
Mm, mm (Gurur Vishnu)
Mm, mm (Gurur Devo)
Mm, mm (Maheshwarah)
My sweet Lord (Guru Sakshata)
My sweet Lord (Parabrahma)
My, my, my Lord (Tasmayi Shree)
My, my, my, my Lord (Guruve namah)
My sweet Lord (Hare Rama)
(Hare Krishna)
My sweet Lord (Hare Krishna)
My sweet Lord (Krishna Krishna)
My lord (Hare Hare)
Songwriters: George Harrison. For non-commercial use only.
"We are in a Seldon Crisis."
It's been building since Obozo was sworn in back in 2009.
His cycling through the use first of religion and then of trade as tools to overcome the "Seldon crises" is interesting and "objectivism-friendly" as well, not to mention his continuous references to atomic power as the motive power of the future, presented as a technological given. Which homage to nuclear energy has remained near and dear ever since the mid-'70s when I first read him as a snot-nosed teenager. It's also edifying to have watched the world evolve (finally) from the militant lunacy of the '70s-era "China Syndrome" fraud and the hippie-dippy "No Nukes" rallies to a tacit acknowledgement - even among some "greens" - that nuclear power is indeed the most rational power source for the future, pending the invention of something better like maybe dilithium crystals and matter/antimatter reactions.
The one vital thing to which Asimov remained oblivious - and which therefore was missing as a causal factor in his books - is the role of education in the "stupidification" of the masses, and conversely (though far rarer,) in the actual enlightening of the masses. The more I see of what's going on in the world, the more I think - with no intent at self-aggrandizement or condescension, just observation of fact - that the human race remains too stupid in an evolutionary context to merit civilization and freedom. We've got the United States of America, the absolute pinnacle of human civilization, built on a proper intellectual foundation after millennia of wrestling with collectivist variants, and after two short centuries in which we advanced from horse-and-buggy, candlelight and a 30-year life expectancy to interplanetary travel, instantaneous global communications and a tripling of the human lifespan... a generation of spoiled punks and their even-more-spoiled offspring are clamoring to obliterate it in favor of a gunpoint reversion to the material and intellectual squalor of the Dark Ages.
A century ago one could've maybe been excused for thinking socialism was viable because - aside from the Pilgrims, who wisely jettisoned it after it basically exploded in their faces - the theory had never been attempted on a broad scale.
As of the 21st century that excuse no longer flies. One hundred-odd years, dozens and dozens of shattered economies worldwide, multiple generations forced at gunpoint into subhuman squalor, and a mountain of murdered men, women and children that some estimates place in excess of one hundred and fifty million - and some people still think that socialism is a rilly-rilly neato idea? You can call that view many, many things, but "smart" is not one of them. And neither is "moral."
So we get the socialist Auschwitzes and socialist Gulags and socialist Killing Fields and socialist Ethnic Cleansings, and after every single one we hear a chorus of "Oh, we must never forget! We must never let this happen again!" And then ten years later these same cretins line up at polling places to vote for the first slick-tongued socialist politician they hear.
A relevant quote from objectivist writer Dan Roentsch about this mental blank-out:
"Visitors make plans, board and debark airplanes, put up at hotels, then at last view the preserved site of the [Nazi] atrocities. They then take their memory of the low-risk grunt-work required to travel to the place, combine that memory with their visceral reaction to the artifacts of torture and humiliation, and substitute the compound for the intellectual work of determining how these artifacts came to be used on a daily basis by what was once one of the most civilized nations of Europe. They see where the gas pellets were dropped, shake their heads angrily at the people who let it happen, then check out of their hotels, board and debark airplanes, tell their friends about the evil Germans they now know all about, and vote for their local national socialist."
- From his spectacular January 2002 article "The Bin Laden Memorial" in the periodical Radical Capitalist, on the subject of the proposal to turn the 9/11 WTC site into a memorial park instead of rebuilding there. His article is here:
https://danroentsch.substack.com/p/th...
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Ten years? Hell they do it a month later.
Azimov was nothing short of amazing and I need to re-read the entire series someday. First, I have to to finish some important reading on this site--thanks for those Prussia substacks, Dobrien. They are marvelous founts of information I never knew and they connect the far-flung bits of information into coherent patterns.