All this Neurdon hullabaloo over memristors and Kurzweilian futurism has got me thinking about the inevitable media question concerning all this: Will our RoboSlave Bots learn to love us in a somewhat creepy, Haley Joel Osment “Artificial Intelligence: AI” kind of way? In other words, will humans be able to one day produce conscious, silicon-based offspring? There are obviously a cornucopia of contingencies when discussing artificial sentience, however, I am going to not-so-subtly sidestep all the philosophical snafus and approach the problem from a modeler’s POV. Read the rest of this entry »

Is a robot that is able to learn and take decisions “responsible“ for its own actions? Or is the company that manufactured the robot liable for the damage that the robot may cause, regardless of whether or not the machine was programmed to hurt anybody? Or is the owner of the robot responsible for its “bad habits“? When a pet robotic dog will accidentally hurt a toddler, who will be responsible? The robot itself, the owner of the robot, or the manufacturer? Moreover, if a corporation is found guilty of fabricating robots that “learn” to harm people, who will go to jail, since corporations are non-human legal entities with “No Soul to Damn, No Body to Kick”? Read the rest of this entry »