I Robot and AI and will we follow the novel

On December 5th 1950...

…..Isaac Asimov’s book I Robot was published.

Wild that so early in modern technology that the author was seeing the evolution of the psychology of AI in robots, and how it would develop over time. The sub plot was the monetizing of it. Asimov down played somewhat the role making a profit from robots. In the story there was a resistance to robots replacing human workers. Thought the development of robots the goal was to aid humankind in our well being.

In our real world business sees the possibility of AI as a means to reduce human labor with AI to reduce labor costs to the bare minimum. AI is envisioned as an expectancy, with the goal of realizing the greatest profit. The greater good of humankind is not even a thought. An ideal left to the fiction books.

In I robot the book looked at how the brains and behavior of robots would face development challenges. They would learn to think. That thinking development had a frame work of three laws the robots would be programmed to follow. The three laws would govern robot behavior. But as AI is developed, will it also have the framework of three governing laws, or will there just be a race realize economic gain? Will our AI robots be just faster search engines and pattern matching, or will they think. And what will be their governing values?

If AI is to be developed and put into production, and if it is going to be more than a faster search engine, or, write code faster, the same issues of behavior will come into play. As in I robots That is if machines grow to think. We take for granted what this process is. In humans we take a long time to mature (if ever). Will our versions of robots face these learning issues? In our rush to gain completive advantages in markets, the behavior and development of robots is likely later down the road issue problem. We think, oh we can kick that can down the road. For now and the profit gains, is the first law. Not never harm a human (which was the first law governing AI in the Scifi novel) is a pre-step that is missing.

We still only have fussy knowledge how we think, how our human brains work. Taking that into account, how can we input information into AI? We kind of think it will work out. Maybe our robots will just be faster at specific things than humans. True, in things like tier one customer service and tech support, a faster machine (with learning) will replace humans who are not as fast or smart. Business is all for that. And maybe we all will benefit from that overall (discounting the replaced humans. We have never been good at helping the economically displaced humans. We can look to moving production off shore. The workers replaced by offshoring did not do so well. Yes, we benefited from the off shore of production with cheaper goods and services. Hello Walmart and Target. But the people who lost the jobs producing the goods, mostly never recovered. That is the real economics of it.

But back to AI and the development of the robots behaviors and emotions. That is a problem simple off shoring did not face. If machines can think like humans, and they have issues ( ready for that one HR?), do you just turn them off and call IT? If you think programming bugs cause issues not, wait for when the machines can think, and have dysfunctional issues. We sort of think the AI robots will just figure it all out and adjust. It likely will be a real problem; if robots do learn to think like humans.

There is a difference between just processing things faster and creative thinking.

In the end of I robot, the robots could would not answer the question what was best for humans and their future. In the book the robots started to factor that question into what actions, activities, and choices they did. If AI robots will learn to think like humans and be more than maximizing profit tools, will they be faced with what fate do we let the human face? Can robots decide? Maybe they will be like Skynet and have no moral issues, just blow us up!