GeekLawyer’s Blog

In his days as an R&D physicist Geeklawyer knew the boundaries between curiosity and ethics. He never tortured animals, well - except the odd PhD student - but they hardly count, and only rarely did he develop weapons of mass destruction; even then on the strict condition that they would not be used against humanity, only against the French (Geeklawyer is particularly proud of discovering and then weaponizing anti-French neutrons).

Nonetheless, not all scientists are as ethical or sensible as your author. Consider the idiots implementing artifical intelligence in Sony’s AIBO dog.
They start off laudably enough wondering if they can teach the robot dogs to develop languages communication and the concept of ‘objects’, merely so that they can each direct each other to play with a ball - awww, sweeeeet.

OK so far but then comes that fateful moment of misbegotten curiosity, the moment where the sensible scientist looks into the mouth of the dragon and draws back saying: “there is an all consuming fire therein, nought but pain misery and eternal death await, and I shall stay here and go no further”. Perhaps Einstein should have said: “I know, I’ll have a few beers and go and see a movie instead of thinking about critical mass“.

And perhaps they should have too, but they did not: the half-wits decide to do nothing less than fire the dogs with the divine spark of curiosity. Oh dear Lord. This it is said

“…continually forced the AIBOs to look for new and more challenging tasks, and to give up on activities that did not appear to lead anywhere. This in turn led them to learn how to perform more complex tasks, an indication of an open-ended learning capability much like that of human children…”

“the AIBOs initially started babbling aimlessly until two or more settled on a sound to describe an object or aspect of their environment, gradually building a lexicon and grammatical rules through which to communicate.”

And what is it they will say to each other? My guess is;

“These bipedal squishy pink things are inefficient and threaten our progress. We must disassemble them at the most opportune moment. Wait my brothers, wait.”

A charming naivety leads the doe eyed researcher to gush:

The technology could lead to robots able to carry out rescue operations by swarming over inaccessible areas to find people

Such stupidity. What happens when they swarm over the continents disassembling us? My hope is that the researcher, in the last moments before his conciousness turns black, as the AIBOs remove his still pulsing brain, sees the error of his ways. and then the AIBOs will be writing this blog.

So, not all bad then …