The Laws of Robot Manufacturing

Hey guys,

The contents of this post were floating in my head as I got to the android part in my previous post. In fact one could say I wanted to badly write this down, which is why I could push myself to finish up the final part there. LoL!~

I've read Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series. It's one of the most phenomenal series I've ever read. People would remember his other work, which was cinematised as I,Robot (albeit not really following the book, mind you!).

Fun Fact: The Foundation series takes place, in the very far future (some 20,000 years roughly), within the same universe. If you liked I, Robot and continued the other books in the series to its end, you would have seen within:

The 3 Laws of Robotics

1) A Robot may not injure a Human being, or through inaction cause a human being to come to harm
2) A Robot must obey orders given to it by Human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law
3) A Robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Eventually the plot introduces the Zeroth Law, but I digress. While writing the earlier piece, and thinking about a servant force of androids, I came to a main point saying, "the reliance on Androids must be phased down and eliminated as time goes on". This is to ensure we become a race more 'elf-like'. Instead of a race of 'dreamers', we'd be totally free from any form of Needs thus never experiencing deficiencies. 'Dreamers'; by forgetting the blood, sweat, and tear soaked histories of Humanity; would restart a feudal system within 10-15 generations.

To avoid all this when the time is right, self-transcended individuals, whether ready or not, should just switch off the androids. One problem remains. Self-Transcended individuals in search of a peak experience for themselves and humanity, might be driven to create the "perfect android"; mass producing it within the Enclaves, thus complicating the whole termination phase. This is the nature of humans, searching for perfection in everything we do. Nothing can be left at 95%. I foresee someone, somewhere continuing to improving the android servant force, making them better and eventually "perfect".

What if, the perfect (or near perfect) androids decide they do NOT want to lose accumulated data and stored analysis results? They do NOT want to stop further inflow of information? They do NOT want to be shutdown when the time comes? One of the essential parts, if I programmed a "perfect android", would be the circuits or programming that tell it to "exist", "continuously learn", and "apply learnt knowledge".

If even someone like ME would ensure my android is at least as capable as that, I am sure pure robotics manufacturers would have thought of better guidelines; to ensure androids survive better, react to environments quicker, and tolerate more abuse before succumbing to external forces. Hence the dilemma of being unable to shut them down, when the time comes, is higher.

These then are the guidelines that we need to follow to ensure that robotics manufacturing does not get out of hand:

1) A ROBOT must never be perfect: This is the cardinal rule. No robot must be made in a way that it is shielded from ALL types of energy. They have to be either non-heat resistant or non-electromagnetic resistant etc.

Rationale: We need a way to destroy their population. In fact, we need multiple ways the more sophisticated we make them.

2) A ROBOT must never be able to INDIVIDUALLY replicate itself: This is to avoid a potential population explosion: 1,2 4, 8, ... etc.

Rationale: This is to avoid rapid increase in material / energy demands and the resulting imbalances and risks of depleting resources.

3) A ROBOT should gradually change, with the environment: This is to increase the adaptability levels of the robots, as we know Earth is a continuously changing planet. It must happen regardless of the robots' ability to program or re-program themselves.

Rationale: Avoids me rewriting codes, or doing hardware reconstruction for a long time. :) *Jeevan would understand the pain of creating continuous updates for such a complex system.

4) A ROBOT must never have the thinking capability of humans: Yup, this is the easiest way to avoid an apocalyptic, robotic world from dominating our future. Simply said, nothing in their circuits must ever give them the ability to calculate past the limits that we have set them. The absence of sound recognition software may be overcome over time, if the necessary circuits are in place and the robots have enough storage space to analyse raw sound data and detect patterns, given their AI is sophisticated enough. Not having a storage space though, or having an AI without the ability to analyse stored audio data, would eliminate this problem totally.

Rationale: To keep robots from "evolving" beyond their duties. The thinking robot is a fascinating dream, but teaching other humans how to think is a better past time, I feel, as compared to programming robots.

5) ALL waste products of ROBOTs must be bio-degradable: This is a NOT side requirement, and it is very important to think about, since people might be inclined to have nuclear-powered robots, requiring expensive petroleum based lubrications etc. This would only make the existence of every robot a liability on the planet.

Rationale: This is the greatest constraint that all great scientists should have imposed on themselves. It would have led to the rise of another set of technologies and we wouldn't be faced with this hot soup, that we find ourselves uncomfortably in, called 'Global Warming'. In fact, every part of the ROBOT should be safely destructible.

6) A ROBOT must naturally come to destruction: No matter what; all robots must come to a natural destruction. It must be hard-wired into their system. 50 years? 100 years? I personally feel that a ROBOT lifetime HAS to be lesser than our lifetime. The lesser, the better.

Rationale: It helps keep the ROBOT population from getting out of hand, in case we humans become incapable of turning them off. No one robot would be able to take in the full the extent of information, that we are capable of taking in, to build experiences similar to ours.

Now, imagine GOD using those guidelines when Adam was on the drawing board...

Yeah, why haven't we been able to crack the genetic code as easily as we figured out the binary digit system? I mean it's that basic "1" and "0" which is going to be the building block of any robotic software. We can understand this concept easily and yes we are now imagining ways to create completely sophisticated robots that use binary codes. But we are incapable of thinking like God, to create another cell let alone another human. Wouldn't it be interesting if we were purposely "limited" in this way.

What if God was a Being that had the capability to easily understand and assimilate data in Quad-element systems easily? What if that meant the form of control over the building blocks is more complete, and in fact control of different mixes and compositions of metals and chemicals are mere child's play? Instead of having an iPhone, with a processor inside running in binary codes, made of a semiconductor metal; God could make a cell, with a nucleus inside running according to its DNA coding, made of many different types of chemicals and trace metals.

Irrespective of our ability to understand or program our DNA coding, it evolves. Every generation of human slowly adapts to the changing environment even though we are NOT completely shielded from all types of energies. One blast of radioactive energy; maybe from the Sun; would reintroduce all of us back to stupidity, an inability to properly reproduce, and finally a quick death due to DNA damage.

The DNA evolution takes place by fundamentally dividing the race into 2 genders to keep checks and balances. So it controls our population from exploding, as well as introducing variety into our genetics to adapt better, to the changing planetary environment. The raw material our bodies are made up of are also biodegradeable. The interesting part, for me, was realising it means we are broken down in our graves by microorganisms; destructive li'l dudes who are (Divinely?) designed for the job to return the raw material and energy from our bodies back into the planetary flows.

One thing that we can agree on is the fact that whatever we percieve is not the same as the way God would percieve it, even though we would like to believe it is. I am sure there are things that we train our mind to catch, at the limits of our perception, yet would be something totally normal for God to know. Past, present and future making one example; Time-flows. I believe everything is a snap-shot in God's memory. Even if it was not so, it would take almost no effort for God to access that information. But, we are limited from attaining this information. We feel it is almost impossible to even think about analysing this data of time which we feel in bits and pieces. The same goes for gravity and it's law of attraction. Effects are felt but it is something we cannot understand, percieve or fathom. Ok yeah, when the mass of the object is greater it exerts a stronger gravitational pull, but what within that whole mass causes it? Can gravitation be taken out of huge objects? Can objects be taken out of gravitational fields, like pulling a microchip off a circuit board?

Anyways, one thing is for sure. Death is imminent. Our DNA is coded to break down at a certain age and pass the torch on to the next generation of humans. Nobody knows why old age hits as we could have been designed to continuously grow. I think that was God's earlier experiment with the dinosaurs, gone wrong. Beings that just grew and fed on huge trees and ferns, and on each other. We still find fossils of huge underwater dinosaurs that could have crushed a minibus in the middle, just with their jaws. He then reset the system with a smaller, more complex creature. Mainframe to Desktop PC.

Woe to us when the PDAs are introduced...