3/3

What I have been finding interesting is our discussion on how in almost all cases that we have seen and read, the robots in some ways have found a way to be like humans. In the short story we read about the computer system, in the end, the system named Multivac was able to feel what humans felt in some way because it constantly received so much information on everyone’s thoughts, the actions they were going to do etc. In the episode of Humans, some of the robots developed feelings and did not follow all 3 rules of robotics. In this sense, the robots all rose above what their original purpose was and in fact were superior over humans. Asimov’s short stories and his interactions of robots with humans makes me believe that if robots ever were to be created, they too would one day realistically rise above man kind and we will no longer have control over their actions. We program a robot to act and do what we want. Therefore, because it is programmed by humans to complete our tasks it is essentially a human and capable of a “growing brain”. In this sense, the robots with human like brains are able to continue to grow past the original programming that we gave them as they are taught to store information, process information and be able to keep up with our brains.

 

It also was interesting when we discussed the idea of probability especially in terms of the election. Many people predicted Hillary to win over Trump by a great deal. However, what everyone failed to recognize was that while the outcome did not coincide with the prediction, the prediction was not totally wrong in that it had a greater than zero chance of Trump winning. This means that throughout the whole election process, Trump had a chance to win because his probability was non-zero. I realized that many things we interpret in the world are wrong or we are misguided in our conclusions that we draw of probabilities. What we seem to be true is not always true and sometimes as a society we think too absolute rather than thinking realistically. If someone told us there is a 5% chance robots will one day overcome us. Everyone would think that that chance is very small and that it would never happen. However, we must think logically and realistically, that it is a non-zero number, and therefore can very well happen.