Life Imitates 'Star Trek' -- Artificial Intelligence is Real

in my opinion, perhaps life should imitate star trek a little more closely. instead of having the lofty goal of "To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before", according to the head of NASA, their foremost mission is to,"Make the Muslim world feel good about their historic contributions to math and science". I guess after letting the shuttle program go by the wayside so that we now have to depend on our friends for rides into space, the cancellation of project constellation ; a return to the moon, they really don't have much else going on.

If a robot kills, who is the blame? His owner? The manufacturer? A programmer? A criminal organization? Asminov's 3 laws are somewhat essential but having laws on hand in the event of robots coming to production makes things clear from the start. Mind you Blade Runner (Phillip K. Dick novel Do androids dream mechanical sheep) look at the question of creating human androids but restricting them to off Earth activities and explores the problems when they attempt to matriculate into earth society and find a cure that will extend their lives.

Pretty heavy stuff. Heck, we still haven't properly dealt with clones and creating twins and multiple children by splitting invitro cells

When I read this story, I had a vision of an anime movie called Ghost In The Shell, and it's TV series Ghost In The Shell:Stand Alone Complex, where humanity has grown to the point where humans are routinely "enhanced" with cybernetic implants, and where the main character, Major Motoko Kusinagi, is a female mind implanted into a full cybernetic combat chassis body. Also, there are tanks called Tachikomas which have artificial intelligence computer cores. One of the funniest episodes of this series I've seen is where the Tachikomas are debating the nature of humanity and free will amongst themselves. Very interesting commentary.

The strange thing is, look how far our knowledge and ingenuity have come. Now we have to really, honestly start to consider The Three Laws of Robotics mentioned in several books by Issac Asimov. Do we start thinking about implement these restrictions to these next generation robots? If we do, who is tasked to monitor these procedures? How will unscrupulous scientists try to circumvent the intent of the Three Laws? If these new robots are built, will they be used as soldiers? There are a universe of new ethics questions to be considered. It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out.