Don't you have anything better to do?

The Robot Bill of Rights is coming. It's based, if you believe the reports, upon Isaac Asimov's works, a Steven Spielberg film ("A.I."), and possibly "Blade Runner" or "Lego Star Wars."

Isaac Asimov wrote a pile of books before he croaked--as Dr. Frink has observed, not too many of them were good--about the future and intelligent robots and he even came up with 3 laws to govern the behavior of intelligent machines in his imaginary, made-up, fictitious future that was the setting for his novels of science fiction.

But, in case normal people (who still don't all enjoy human rights, for Christ's sakes) weren't already completely turned off by the massive intelligence deficit at NASA, blundering "modernizers" and their fucking stupid enormous dams and such that displace millions of people and also destroy the Earth at the same time, or other retarded projects that place science for its own sake ahead of human welfare, dorks around the world are now working on a project that has little connection to anything relevant to the improvement of the human condition.

First off, and as you might expect when you think about who's involved in this project, of foremost concern is the prospect that humans could--again, at some theoretical future time that isn't even close to happening in our lifetimes--have sex with robots. Look, I don't care how fancy that Dyson vacuum gets, I prefer human women and there is no shortage of them and some of them will sleep with just about anybody. You, nerds, would know that if you spent more time out and about, and, say, less time reading Isaac Asimov's books. Which are about imaginary events. In an imaginary future. Involving crises that are extremely unlikely to happen.

I know you saw "I, Robot," nerdlinger. Were you too busy imagining yourself in the Will Smith role to notice that the whole thing was twaddle? I mean, it was insultingly stupid! Your cherished "3 Laws of Robotics" were a PLOT DEVICE inserted in a lame attempt to justify a needlessly convoluted story. This is not God's received wisdom; these ideas came from a writer, who wrote these things down in order to sell a story.

From the article: "With artificial intelligence becoming ever more advanced, there is growing concern about how interaction between robots and humans can be regulated. The issue will be addressed at a robotics conference in Rome next week, where scientists will call on the European Commission to set up a robot ethics committee. Critics have dismissed such moves as "technological correctness gone mad."

There is one point, at the very end of the piece, that is sensible: military robots, with independent-targeting functionality, ought to be regulated in some way so they don't kill humans. But--and I don't think anybody has thought of this, yet--robots are man-made. Am I going too fast? See, they are designed to perform tasks. If you think killer robots might be a problem (write this down!): DON'T DESIGN KILLER ROBOTS.

And, since they are programmed to respond to inputs, they don't necessarily have thoughts, feelings, and the like. And here's the point: they probably NEVER WILL. We don't know what makes the human brain produce these things; how the fuck would we make a robot that does?!

"Learning" robots don't "think." They select logical pathways in response to stimuli. You can't really have an irrational robot unless you make one. They perform tasks; they don't "just exist."

My reaction to the contention that it's unethical for humans to build sex robots ("Hobots"? I call "trademark"!) is: what?! People have negative emotional responses to sexual situations because of social conditioning and things like religious upbringing, physical discomfort, social opprobrium. Robots don't experience these things. Unless they are designed to. How is this simple fact being overlooked by scientists who are pushing a Robot Bill of Rights to head off an existential crisis that can't happen unless they create it--even if they could overcome the immense technological obstacles that make truly sentient robots extremely unlikely?(!)

My wife, being more of a policy wonk, had this to say: in the same vein as human cloning, which is now heavily monitored internationally and is all but forbidden in the US, this shock tactic by scientists--preventative measures aimed at phenomena that haven't happened yet and aren't even likely to happen--will doubtless draw regulation.

When my cyborg grandchildren are trying to make an honest buck from Hobots but their space factory (on Jupiter, I'm guessing) is swarming with robotic inspectors, I hope these dorks--or at least, their preserved brains-in-vats--are "happy."