It’s not so much that robots are getting closer to human as that we are lowering our standards of comparison. So-called creative content is increasingly hackwork indistinguishable from the output of algorithms programmed to imitate prose, poetry, and pop songs. It is no wonder that AI is starting to look all-powerful and inevitable. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species’ bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good.”

We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans.

“People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. In a world increasingly controlled by smart machines, who will be master and who will be the slave? Are we entering a Golden Age that frees us all from mindless labor? Everything, it seems, depends on HMI, the Human-Machine Interface. This year’s art theme will focus on the many forms of artificial intelligence that permeate our lives from the humble algorithm and its subroutines that sift us, sort us and surveil us, to automated forms of labor that supplant us. This battle between the qualitative and the quantitative, between human consciousness and abstract calculation, isn’t easily resolved, but one thing does seem certain: nobody likes an angry robot. But a team of robot psychologists, engaged in what we would today call quality control, soon discover certain glitches that become quite sinister.Īsimov, like philosophers before him, naturally assumed that there could be no true morality without emotion. It is perhaps most famous for the three essential laws embedded deep in every robot’s positronic brain.Īt first glance, these ethical precepts seem simple enough they are really not much different from the Golden Rule. I, Robot, first published in 1950, is a collection of short science fiction stories by author Isaac Asimov. Isaac Asimov, I, Robot Becoming Human by Christian Ristow, Black Rock City 2015 (Photo by Playaman) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.ģ. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.Ģ.

I robot 1950