There are thousands of sci-fi novels where sentient robots are treated terribly by humans and apparently the people at Boston Dynamics have read absolutely zero of them as they spend all day finding new ways to torment their creations.
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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but you need to hit it with a hockey stick otherwise the science doesn't happen
Do you get more science or less if you use a baseball bat?
only one way to find out!
that's the magic of science 🌈🏏🤖
Since when were Boston Dynamics robots sentient?
People think I’m crazy for apologising to my roomba when I trip on it and for saying please and thank you to Alexa and Siri, but I won’t be surprised at all when the robots rise up, considering how our scientists are treating them. I’ll have a track record of being nice, and that has to count for something, right?
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This is superficially funny, of course. But I've seen it before and after thinking about it for a while I find myself coming to the defense of the Torment Nexus and the tech company that brought it into reality.
Science fiction authors are not necessarily the best authorities when it comes to evaluating the ethical or real-world implications of the technologies they dream up. Indeed, I think they are often particularly bad at that sort of thing. Their primary goal is to craft captivating narratives that engage readers by introducing conflicts and dilemmas that make for compelling stories. When they imagine a new technology they aren't going to get paid unless they come up with a story in which that new technology poses some kind of threat that the heroes need to overcome. The dark side of these technologies is deliberately emphasized by the authors to create tension and drama in their stories.
Tech companies, on the other hand, have an entirely different set of considerations. Their goal isn't just to recreate something from a sci-fi novel for the sake of it; rather, they are motivated by solving real-world problems. They wouldn't build the Torment Nexus unless they figured that they could sell it to someone, and that they wouldn't get shut down for doing something society would reject. There are regulatory frameworks around this kind of thing.
If you look back through older science fiction you can find all sorts of "cautionary tales" against technologies that have turned out to be just fine. "Fahrenheit 451" warned against the proliferation of television entertainment, but there's been plenty of rich culture developed for that medium. "Brave New World" warned against genetic engineering, but that's turned out to be a great technology for curing diseases and improving crop yields. The submarine in "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" was seen as unstoppable and disruptive, but nowadays submersibles have plenty of nonmilitary applications.
I'd want to know more about what exactly the Torment Nexus is before I automatically assume it's a bad idea just because some sci-fi writer claimed it was.
"Brave New World" warned against genetic engineering, but that's turned out to be a great technology for curing diseases and improving crop yields.
I was still a teen when I read the book, but that wasn't really my take from it when I read it. We are still far away from genetically designing human babies. And you also overlooked the part about oppression/control via distractions such as drugs and entertainment.
I haven't read it in a while, but I kind of took the genetic engineering as a metaphor for being forced into the role/ class the ruling body wants you to be in
Gattaca is a good movie about that
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Just because some tech bros can make money from the Torment Nexus it does not become a good idea. Profit is not a great judge of ethics and value.
And just because a sci-fi writer can make up a horrifying story of the Torment Nexus gone wrong doesn't make it a bad idea. Making up horrifying stories of things going wrong is their job. They've make up stories of how things go horrifyingly wrong while doing research into a cure for Alzheimer's disease, doesn't mean curing Alzheimer's disease is a bad thing.
Television and increasingly digestible media is turning our brains to mush. If someone had the imagination to write a sci-fi novel about Fox news and the rise of Trump, they would have.
Genetic engineering is enabling us to harvest monocultures that completely fuck up the ecosystem, in the long run not only underlining important dynamics such as species needed for polluting plants, but also the very soil on which they grow.
It's been a while since I read Brave New World, but that also didn't stand out to me as the most central part of his critique to me. In my reading it was about how modern society was going to turn us into essentially pacified consumer slaves going from one artificial hormonal kick to the other, which seems to be what social media is for these days.
Things that seem like short term good ideas, and certainly great business ideas, might fuck things up big time in the long run. That's why it's useful to have some people doing the one things humans are good at - thinking creatively - involved in processes of change, and not just leave it to the short term interests of capital.
If someone had the imagination to write a sci-fi novel about Fox news and the rise of Trump, they would have.
You kidding, right? Those stories have been dime a dozen since the late 90s at least.
24 warned us about having an evil, terrorist US president. As have done a few movies in the past. Streaming platforms were pretty much masturbating themselves over "Confederate US AU" script offerings as early as 2014. Not to mention the nowadays trite trodden trope of "Nazi US AU".
Heck, you don't even need fiction. Chile's cup in 1973 was paid for by the CIA as a social experiment to produce the rising and establishment of a dictatorship.
I was referring more to the plot of brain-dead cable and social media algorithms fuelling the death of democracy. But you're right, it's probably been written many times - I'm not very knowledgeable of sci-fi, and there's a lot of brilliant work out there. :)
When they imagine a new technology they aren't going to get paid unless they come up with a story in which that new technology poses some kind of threat that the heroes need to overcome.
You don't read much sci fi, do you?
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Maybe I read things too literally, but I thought "Fahrenheit 451" was about a governing class controlling the masses by limiting which ideas, emotions, and information were available.
"Brave New World" struck me as also about controlling the masses through control of emotions, ideas, and information (and strict limits on social mobility).
It's been too long since I read "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", but I thought of it as a celebration of human ingenuity, with maybe a tinge of warning about powerful tools and the responsibility to use them wisely.
I don't see a lot of altruistic behaviour from those introducing new technologies. Yes, there is definitely some, but most of it strikes me as "neutral" demand creation for profit or extractive and exploitive in nature.
How about the following examples:
- Autonomous weaponized drones with automatic targeting (Terminator)
- Mass surveillance and voice recording (1984)
- Nuclear weapons (HG Wells, The World Set Free)
- Corporate controlled hypercommercialized microtransaction-filled metaverse (Snow Crash)
- Netflix to create real-life Squid Game (Squid Game (speedrun!))
- "MoviePass to track people's eyes through their phone's cameras to make sure they don't look away from ads" (Black Mirror)
- Soulless AI facsimile of dead relatives (Black Mirror)
We have all of those things and the dystopic predictions of the authors who predicted them haven't come remotely true. All of these examples prove my point.
We have autonomous weaponized drones and they aren't running around massacring humanity like the Terminator depicted. Frankly, I'd trust them to obey the Geneva Conventions more thoroughly than human soldiers usually do.
We have had mass surveillance for decades, Snowden revealed that, and there's no totalitarian global state as depicted in 1984.
We've had nuclear weapons for almost 80 years now and they were only used in anger twice, at the very beginning of that. A good case can be made that nuclear weapons kept the world at large-scale peace for much of that period.
Various companies have made attempts at "Corporate controlled hypercommercialized microtransaction-filled metaverses" over the years and they have generally failed because nobody wanted them and freer alternatives exist. No need to ban anything.
Netflix's Squid Game is not a "real-life" Squid Game. Did you watch Squid Game? That was a private spectacle for the benefit of ultra-wealthy elites and people died in them. Deliberately and in large quantities. Netflix is just making a dumb TV show. Do you really think they'd benefit from massacring the contestants?
"MoviePass to track people’s eyes through their phone’s cameras to make sure they don’t look away from ads” - ok, let's see how long that lasts when there are competitors that don't do that.
"Soulless AI facsimile of dead relatives" - firstly, please show me a method for determining the presence or absence of a soul. Secondly, show me why these facsimiles are inherently "bad" somehow. People keep photographs of their dead loved ones, if that makes you uncomfortable then don't keep one.
Each and every one of these technologies were depicted in fiction over-the-top unrealistic ways that emphasized their bad aspects. In reality none of them have matched those depictions to any significant degree. That's my whole point here.
So tell me, what part of their creation was "solving real-world problems" beyond playing to the desires of autocrats and control freaks? What part of their creation was a net positive to society? Or are you happy to live in a world of autonomous drone strikes on weddings and kindergartens, mass surveillance, a thermonuclear sword of damocles hanging over all of humanity, and so on?
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On the other other hand, maybe we only understand the dangers of the Torment Nexus and use it responsibly because science fiction authors warned techy people who are into that subject about how it could go wrong, and the people who grew up reading those books went out of their way to avoid those flaws. We do seem to have a lot more of the technologies that sci-fi didn't predict causing severe problems in our society.
But this is exactly contrary to my point, a science fiction author isn't qualified or motivated to give a realistic "understanding" of the Torment Nexus. His skillset is focused on writing stories and the stories he writes need to contain danger and conflict, so he's not necessarily going to interpret the idea of the Torment Nexus in a realistic way.
I think you don't understand what motivates a lot of science fiction authors. Sure, there are a lot of science fiction novels that are really just science themed fantasy, but there are also a lot of authors that love real science and are trying to make stories about realistic interpretations of its potential effects. To say that science fiction authors don't care about interpreting the Torment Nexus in a realistic way misses the entire point of a lot of really good science fiction.
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So Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert A. Heinlein aren't qualified to give understandings of the technologies they wrote about?
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Tech companies ... goal isn't just to recreate something from a sci-fi novel for the sake of it; rather, they are motivated by solving real-world problems.
This is so naively wrong it's laughable. Ever heard of profit motive?
"Not super rich enough" is a real world problem, smh my head.
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Speaking of Fahrenheit 451, weren't there seashells mentioned in that book? Little devices you could stuff in your ears to play music? And those ended up being uncannily similar to the wireless earbuds we have today?
Isn't that a part of the ai marketing though? That whole "this thing could destroy us" stuff?
Totally is. Because it makes the AI look and feel much better than the smoke-and-mirrors it actually is.
We thought we were getting Skynet but, instead we got Super Clippy and I Can't Believe It's Not Art Theft
I for one am grateful it's just super clippy (yet)
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My favorite are the developers who are developing AI to do development.
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Not very programmer humor, but horrifyingly accurate.
I was really struggling for the right place honestly, I didn't want to throw it in the generic "funny" pile - I figured you guys would get it.
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Why are we still posting screencaptures of stuff from Twitter/not-X/Twitter?
well if you can say something funnier, I'll post a screenshot of that
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