A Robot Code of Ethics?

May 10, 2007

Dear Glenn McGee,

I read your recent column "A Robot Code of Ethics" (The Scientist, May 2007) with interest, as I have reflected on the same issues in my paper "A Jurisprudence of Artilects: Blueprint for a Synthetic Citizen" (November 2001).

First let me say it pains me whenever anyone mentions Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robots" as if they are to be taken seriously. They were devised by a science fiction writer to sell books, and I do not believe they provide a starting point for any serious legal analysis. For example, if a highly valuable, deeply sentient robot were under attack by a low class human criminal seeking to strip and sell its memory to buy drugs, I would read the First Law as saying the robot has no right of self defense and must let all the wealth of its experience and relationships be lost.

Already we are getting nowhere. These "Laws" may reassure a nervous, uneducated human public of perpetual human supremacy, and perpetual robotic servitude, but they alas don't enlighten anyone about the nature of consciousness and social relations. Hence any mention of Asimov's Laws should be only to dismiss them as useless.

Turning to the question of what could work, I am unimpressed by your proposal for a code of ethics, since (as I discuss in my paper) we already have a legal system to govern such issues. If a robot is (a) below some level of sentience, it is a machine and if it commits torts or breaches contracts its owner will be responsible, and (b) above some level of sentience it might achieve emancipation as an independent legal persona, such as by becoming incorporated, as I propose in my paper.

There is certainly a need to discuss these issues, and I commend you for doing so, but I believe you've got it wrong. Your piece seems to assume that robots will be outside the current legal framework, and a new code of ethics needs to be devised, whereas in reality there is no new zone of conduct needing to be regulated. Any code of ethics will either (a) protect the owner from being sued, or (b) permit the new citizen to function more effectively and/or obtain liability insurance for itself, if required by law or business practice, to get people to become comfortable in dealing with it.

Certainly more can be done to define these issues, but it would be desirable to get people with standard legal training involved, to get everyone to the initial realization that existing laws already address most, if not all, of the major points of concern.

Regards,
Frank W Sudia, JD
www.fwsudia.com
San Francisco, CA

Getting Robert Rosen Back in Print

June 2, 2009

James Rutt, Trustee
Santa Fe Institute
1399 Hyde Park Road
Santa Fe, NM 87501

Dear Jim,

Last I saw, you are Vice Chairman of the Board of Trustees at the Santa Fe Institute, making you a leader in the field of complexity studies. With leadership comes its burdens :-), so I have a request.

Robert Rosen, the mathematical biologist from Columbia University, was (with his teacher) a founder of relational biology and pioneered the application of Category Theory to biology. He gave at least one presentation at SFI, and got along with your guys. But he died prematurely (diabetes), after being vilified by traditional mechanistic biologists, leaving his daughter Judith Rosen as his literary heir.

I tried (without success) to reach Judith about getting her late father's critical works back in print, especially his landmark Anticipatory Systems, but she apparently has become depressed about the whole thing, and openly wishes her father's work would generate revenue for her, which I doubt is in the cards.

Pioneering scientists often do not live to see their work widely accepted. Gregor Mendel wasn't famous until decades after his death, nor was Alfred Wegener who invented plate tectonics. It goes with the territory.

Rosen was a genius contributor to the mathematical theory of complexity, but many of his works are out of print (Anticipatory Systems is not available from any book dealer at any price), and others (such as Life Itself) are in print, but with ridiculous numbers of errors and no errata sheet. Judith says (plaintively) that Columbia University Press was informed and given a corrected copy, but when the paperback edition was published all the errors (and there are dozens) were still there.

To cross the great divide and arrive on the other side of scientific acceptance, it would be most helpful if younger scientists could have ready access to his works. This could cut X decades off his hibernation time until he is rediscovered and deified.

Amazon's non-entry for Anticipatory Systems has a button that says something like, "if you own the rights and want to see this back in print, click here." Likewise Google Books has become a huge force in publishing, scanning massive numbers of works. There are plenty of ways this problem could get solved.

I would like to own Rosen's key works, with errata sheets as needed, which is basically impossible at present, unless maybe you can use the imprimatur of the SFI to persuade Judith to authorize the their reissuance, as well as make available such errata sheets as she currently has. I'm sure either service will pay her a few bucks of royalties. (I would gladly pay her 100% cash for a PDF copy.)

Given that complexity has been a slow burn, it could be a more general (and low cost) SFI goal to make a list of other authors whose works should be "kept readily available" for rediscovery by so-called mainstream science. I nominate Rosen as the poster child. (Anticipatory Systems is like 450 pages long, and can be read at the Stanford University Library, but who wants to stand there and xerox it? Not to mention copyright issues.)

Dunno where this would fit on your radar screen. As someone once said, "you make your predecessors famous," which I hope to help do for Rosen, but I'm not there yet, and the nonavailability of key his works is not making it any easier.

Thanks,
Frank

Movie / Up

Ho-Hum. Time for John Lasseter to Retire? [This comment may contain spoilers]

A rare stumble. When every movie you've made (before) was a breakout hit, a fatal malaise can set in where you think every idea you have is good.

"Up" is a case in point. Is this a kids movie or an Ibsen drama? The film starts with an unrelated short about storks bringing new babies. Already we are thinking, "huh?" Then the hero (a sidewalk balloon vendor) ages from 7 to 78. Touching but cartoonish. Scene change. Then he transports his house to South America with a mockery of an ethnic Cub Scout in tow, where they meet a giant bird. Then his childhood hero, an accused fraudster, who should be at least 120 by now, appears and turns out to be a creep.

All this time they never meet another human or animal, besides the villain and his dogs, despite that those forests would be teeming with tribesmen, lizards, other birds, and so on. Like a stage play in which a few characters do everything. Dora the Explorer does a better job of portraying wilderness.

The cardinal sin: the characters never change. The old man and the demented pseudo Cub Scout emerge exactly as they were before. Pixar markets itself as being about great storytelling, not just animation, but here they goofed. You'll walk out wondering, "what was that?"

Nano-Cat CO2 Conversion Prize Proposal

Disclaimer

This is an essay suggesting that a large, public prize should be established to encourage advanced research. It is not an offer of such a prize, nor a disclosure of technology.

Background

Despite a vocal minority of deniers, most anyone with any sense and/or basic knowledge of absorption spectra from high school chemistry realizes that our planet, or at least human civilization and a high percentage of current lifeforms, are at grave risk due to massive emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) since the invention of "fire operated" engines in 1710.

Carbon dioxide kills in multiple ways by (a) making the oceans more acidic (due to carbonic acid) which many animals (e.g., with calcium shells) cannot tolerate, (b) changing the climate more rapidly than animals or plants can migrate or adapt, and (c) causing a relatively sudden sea level rise due to melting glaciers and ice caps that will destroy fresh water habitat, inundate coastal lands and historic cities, accelerate subsidence, precipitate sudden human migrations and possible civil wars, etc.

Many remedies have been proposed, starting with massive reductions in emissions, planting trees, seeding the oceans with plankton, capturing and sequestering CO2 from power plants, placing giant mirrors in space, and so on.

Proposed Research Initiative

Another possible remedy could be to promote R&D for technology (most likely nanotechnology) using solar photons to fix (reduce) CO2 directly into elemental carbon.

Photosynthesis in plants can convert CO2 to carbohydrate with around 28% efficiency for the basic reaction, using 43% of total incident solar radiation (in the 400-700 nm range), for a net efficiency of 0.28 x 0.43 = 12%. A high efficiency photo voltaic solar cell currently achieves around 32% efficiency. (See discussion.)

Sunlight driven reactions can convert CO2 into reduced forms, so it seems entirely plausible that a novel type of nano-cat "solar cell" could be devised that supports a nano catalytic reaction to capture CO2 from the air and reduce it to elemental carbon while liberating oxygen (O2), with efficiencies perhaps 2x or 3x that of photosynthesis. A gas-surface reaction seems preferable to minimize operating costs, but other methods could also be considered.

Obviously this goal could be reached to varying degrees, depending on how "reduced" the carbon becomes. Merely converting it to methanol, formaldehyde, or cyanide - while getting it out of the air and into a soluble form - would be much less desirable than say graphite dust, or some usable nanotechnological product, such as carbon fibers, tubes, or even diamondoid fibers or other structural components.

All end products would pose potential health and environmental risks, if they were being generated in large quantities. Carbon dust or hydrocarbon are not only toxic but run a risk of being diverted back into the fuel cycle. High value fibers or diamondoid components would also have health issues, but when directed to construction and engineering uses should stay unoxidized. The oxygen byproduct could also be toxic, if liberated as mono atomic oxygen or ozone.

Positive Human Futures

Indeed, we might be able to combine two positive human futures. Much thinking has gone into the idea of platforms above the atmosphere but below normal orbit, tethered via diamonoid (or nanotube) cables. "Space elevators" riding up these cables could offer a far more energy efficient way to get payloads into space. According to one recent proposal around 650 tons of carbon nanotube fibers could do the job.

No one has grown these fibers more than 1.5 cm long. However, a solar photon driven gas-surface process that extracts CO2 from the air and yields a continuous nanotube or diamondoid fiber (spun into thread and spooled for collection) seems well within the realm of the possible. And if the devices can be mass produced and installed worldwide, perhaps our current dire CO2 crisis could be converted into a global building boom using cheap new high tech materials.

Conclusion & Recommendation

These ideas require further scientific and engineering refinement, and may be subject to various criticisms. However, you can't think thoughts until you have them. Hence, this proposal is put forward to stimulate discussion and consideration of all available climate crisis alternatives.

One approach could be to offer (a) a grants program to fund qualified labs and investigators to pursue such technologies, and/or (b) a substantial cash prize to the first team that achieves certain defined performance objectives, as to efficiency, manufacturability, and mitigation of pollution, with free or reasonable licensing terms to promote mass deployment.

There's nothing miraculous about about this idea. It's a concrete suggestion for some feasible steps that could lead to a climate solution, and make a profit. If it worked, this nano-cat program would be an excellent investment for all concerned, even if it cost many billions of dollars. And it would make fools of those who have been predicting or even wishing for the "End of the World."

The Law of Equal Hotness

Are there laws that guide social and psychological interactions, and if so how can we learn them? As with any form of science, we gather observations, draw tentative conclusions, plan further observations to confirm (or refute) them, and look for plausible theories to explain them.

Over the last few years one conclusion I've reached is this: If you see two women walking together, there's a high probability they are very similar in looks. If one of them would be deemed good looking, it is rare that the other is not also, and vice versa. If they are more plain looking, older, or overweight they remain closely tuned to each other. I call this the "Law of Equal Hotness" (LEH).

The same is true of couples, men walking together, and pairs of couples, but it is most striking with pairs of women, who often seem to express a level of confidence in their appearance by the way they dress. Furthermore, they seem able to grade themselves into a series of very precise levels, like a spectrum. I haven't yet tried to count or name these levels, but there are more than six.

It would be simple enough to formally test this idea. Take photos or video clips of subjects, chosen fairly to include all pairs on a given street without deleting any that don't fit the hypothesis; devise a scoring sheet that includes indicia of class, ethnicity, clothing, age, beauty, and flair; and recruit panels of judges to score the photos. Better yet, take two separate photos, one of each member of a given pair, and shuffle them, so your panel won't know which ones were together and must score each one blindly. Compare scores to see how close they came for each pair. Develop measures of similarity and an estimate of variance within and between pairs.

Theory / Explanation

The LEH is a common example of a more general law I call "birds of a feather flock together" (BFFT). Irrespective of looks, people tend to feel more comfortable with others "like" themselves. Thus for example at a party people will tend to sort themselves into groups such as sports fans, computer nerds, aspiring actors, new parents, older guys, grandmothers, and so on.

The best explanation for why women tend to associate with others with similar looks, to a high degree of precision, is that due to their similarly ranked appearance, they tend to experience the social world the same way. Parents, teachers, boyfriends, older men, husbands, employers, people on the street and in bars, etc., will tend to treat them in similar ways. Consequently they will tend to have (and have had) many highly similar experiences, can share a point of view, and can give each other advice (about men and the world) that will be highly pertinent to the other's experiences and needs.

In slightly more formal language, the two women are both (a) open thermodynamic systems that tend toward higher degrees of organization, (b) cybernetic systems that receive, process, and act on information, and (c) self creating autonomous life forms that evolve socially toward specific levels of "fitness" or attunement to environmental conditions. As such they will tend to experience a very similar set of privileges, opportunities, expectations, and limitations imposed on them by society's ranking system, in terms of what they can do (or get away with), and where they hit rough spots. The experience and advice of one will be well suited to the other, hence they can speak each other's language.

Suggestions for Further Research

• Develop a detailed analysis of the privileges / problems that female appearance brings.
• Identify / enumerate levels or types of women who tend to befriend each other.
• Carry out controlled studies as described above.
• Take a deeper look at causal factors; for example, do pairs adjust to each other's mode of dress, to the situation, to the season, etc?
  
• Look for practical applications, for example in the women's clothing, advertising, and entertainment industries.
• Don't forget to cite me as the original source of these insights.
  

Perhaps in a "less material" world where media, advertising, and entertainment placed less emphasis on looks, this effect would be less pronounced and people walking together would appear more diverse. However, in the world we're living in now, women are increasingly sexualized by society as girls, leading them to live remarkably appearance-determined lives.

In more extreme cases we see the emergence of entire class / caste systems composed of individuals who share similar privileges, experiences, and appearance, and who tend to socialize primarily or solely with others of the same class / caste. However, this short article is focused mainly on beauty and its possible influence on social friendships.

Can She Bake A Cherry Pie?

The business press provides endless articles about the actions or strategies of companies and executives, and countless books exist to provide business and career advice. Yet I've never seen the advice I'm about to give you, despite that it could have an enormous impact on your business success.

Paranormal phenomena remain at the frontier (or outland) of science, not due (in my opinion) to lack of data, but rather due to the lack of (a) any coherent explanatory theory and hence (b) any ability to make controlled predictions. However many such phenomena have been studied in sufficient detail to qualify as descriptive sciences, and they are more accepted in India where they go by the term "siddhis" (perfections, powers).

One such phenomenon is clairvoyance, including an ability to "read" or intuit the thoughts and intentions of others. While still unexplained, this has been extensively documented in "ganzfeld" experiments and there is little doubt as to its existence.

As anyone with significant business experience can tell you, this would be extremely desirable, since the business world contains a large number of deeply unethical people. Bernard L. Madoff and Marc Drier are only the tip of the iceberg. Some psychiatrists place the number of persons with sociopathic "character disorder" as high as five percent (5%) of the general population. (See "The Sociopath Next Door," by Martha Stout, Harvard University.) And in my experience, although you won't read this in the media, at the higher levels of business the percentage is much higher, i.e., this issue is really life or death.

Some select people do seem to have clairvoyant abilities.

For example, the reign of Charlemagne is celebrated as a bright spot in French history and early medieval European civilization. According to one story I heard from a history professor, King Charlemagne had a person in his court "who could tell him the true intentions of anyone standing before him." However, when that guy died, things went to hell, darkness fell again, and the ensuing rulers resumed murdering each other. (B. Frischer, personal communication.)

In a recent example, the famous entrepreneur Nolan Bushnell (Atari, Chuck E. Cheese, uWink) was asked "Who gives you the best advice about your business?" He replied, "... my wife Nancy ... can ferret out frauds and phonies better than anyone else I've ever seen." (Inc Magazine, April 2009, page 115).

How can this knowledge help your business career?

As a young man or woman focusing on a career in business, or graduating from business school, you could (following Bushnell) put this ability on your checklist of desiderata for a potential mate. Places to look include yoga or meditation classes, spiritual bookstores, or possibly your local church. If you wanted to be sure, you could introduce your date to someone known to be a pathological liar (such people are not rare) and see whether they can spot them.

Some men or women of a spiritual bent may consider this idea overly materialistic but spiritual people need financial support and the prospect of being well cared for by a successful, ethical business person could be a positive life choice for many of them.

Virgin Birth or Parlor Trick?

Paranormal phenomena remain at the frontier (or outland) of science, not due (in my opinion) to lack of data, but rather due to the lack of (a) any coherent explanatory theory and hence (b) any ability to make controlled predictions. However many such phenomena have been studied in sufficient detail to qualify as descriptive sciences, and they are more accepted in India where they go by the term "siddhis" (perfections, powers).

One such phenomenon is the alleged psychokinetic (PK) ability to teleport small objects.

I've never seen any discussion of this, but it seems obvious that for anyone having the ability to teleport small amounts of matter to a chosen location, getting a virgin pregnant could be a simple parlor trick, like bending a spoon. Of course you could get any woman (in the right age range, on the right day) pregnant, by any man, but if she also happens to be a virgin (and gives birth to a male child), it makes a better magic trick [1], since you have ruled out the two most obvious counter explanations, ordinary sex and parthenogenesis (self-cloning).

This raises an assortment of potential moral and ethical issues --

On the moral front, certain religions have made a big deal about virgin births. Jesus of Nazareth (Yeshua) is said to have been the result of an "immaculate conception" and many churches, cathedrals, and schools bear these doctrinal words in their names. And in Islam, Jesus and his mother Mary are BOTH said to have been virgin births.

If we introduce a competing hypothesis of "telekinetic conception," in which normal sperm are introduced via a psychokinetic method, yielding in fact an "ordinary" birth, then under the principle of "inference to the best explanation" this new hypothesis, possessing a (somewhat) more coherent (and less mysterious) causal story, wins the competition by providing a "better" explanation than the one given in the Holy Scriptures. And it changes the debate from "did this really happen?" to "okay, so how important was this really?"

On the ethical front, as human abilities increase, and research into those abilities continues, we face new dilemmas and perils. Modern women are already uneasy about the personal, medical, and political struggles over their reproductive abilities, the outcomes of which determine whose genes will populate the next generation. Hence they may become even more uneasy about yet another potential attack on their bodily integrity.

Nevertheless despite the potential uneasiness of some readers (and I'm sure very few people read this blog), on balance it seemed worthwhile to make these points, which appear obvious in hindsight, and publish them for your further consideration and discussion.

Notes: [1] Indeed, depending on her attire and the skills of the paranormal adept, it could also be unnecessary to cause this bit of matter to pass "through" anything, such as her abdomen and internal organs, since the mere ability to make it levitate and move about could be sufficient to impregnate her. That is, not teleportation but mere telekinesis could be enough.