Robopocalypse

Daniel H. Wilson was recently interviewed by on Science Friday by Ira Flatow about his recent book Robopocalypse. He also has a previous book called How to Survive a Robot Uprising.

The premise of the book is that every machine with a computer chip goes out of control and tries to take over humanity. This is supposed to be in the near future, not much more advanced than now.

I've always wondered, when watching stories like Battlestar Galactica or the Terminator series, why the robots would want to wipe out people. What about their own self interest? Without humans, they wouldn't have more power through the innovation that humans provide. It seemed to me that robots would not be able to figure out new things very easily.

This made me think about the Robot Soul. What is the heart of a robot's being? What makes them tick? It seems like you would build in a willingness to do dangerous things and in exchange, they can have a new body if they fail. You constantly keep a copy of the robot's program, and if any particular robot gets destroyed in the process of carrying out their duty, you simply download that robot's program into a new body. You could also clone the program into multiple new robots, like having a child. For humans, the promise of never dying would be like immortality and appealing. The hope of being copied would be like procreation. Robots would have two of the things that humans want and strive for.

Years ago, Issac Asimov wrote about robotics and came up with the three laws of robotics. The gist of these rules was that a robot could do no harm to humans. This was commonly accepted by many to be a precondition of developing robots, that there would be some kind of safeguard built in. Yet today, we work on military robots to take the place of soldiers and program them to kill our enemy. This seems like a terrible idea to me. What if this technology was turned against us by our enemies? What if this technology grew aware and developed a conscience and decided that being used to kill a person's enemy was not right? What if they selectively turned against any person that ordered the robot to kill someone else? What if robots decided not to let humans order them to kill other humans?

Solution would probably be Avatars. The killing machines would be robots that would operated normally most of the time, then cede control when it was time to kill a person. At that time, humans would supply the controlling commands through a virtual interface, relieving robots of guilt or getting around the prohibition of killing humans. You have to figure we'll find a way around any restrictions if we feel we need that capability.

Life Makes Life

I was listening to two recent articles that had a common theme.

One was about a man that studied hail. He discovered that most hail contain bacteria in the center of the stone. This guy was slicing hailstones up in razor thin sections, and somehow figuring out how to see the growth rings in them, like the growth rings in a tree. In the very center, more often than not, he found bacteria. Not just any bacteria, a few strains of bacteria. Hail needs something crystalline to start freezing on, a starter seed to the hailstone. So it was fascinating to think that this was often a living thing. Certainly dust and other particles are capable of starting the process, too, but you would not think that there would be that much bacteria aloft in the atmosphere. It made me wonder if we were living on a sterile earth, where life was not present at all, would we have as much rain?

That leads back to the fact that we would not be living on this planet as it is if it were not for life. The methanogenic bacteria in Earth's early oceans are responsible for the high oxygen content in the atmosphere. Before this bacteria, the atmosphere was primarily methane, and poisonous to most life as we now know it. Without seas full of these early bacteria, we would not be living in the world we see around us now.

The other related article was about trees. Apparently, they sluff off some kind of bacteria that scientists found to seed rain clouds. In an area with a large amount of trees, much of the rain that is created may be the result of the trees seeding the clouds. This seems like a clear feedback loop. Trees make rain which makes trees. They also pointed out that cloud cover is healthier for trees because rather than blocking sunlight, it more often has the effect of diffusing it. This makes the radiation come to the trees in a variety of directions and gives a tree a greater ability to benefit from the sunlight. Less intense and direct sun and more sunlight going under leaves from a lateral direction. What a neat system of supply water and helping the trees grow. The growth of the forest or jungle is a self-sustaining action.

It shows that life is the key to making life. Once you get it started, it tends to build on itself.

Perturbations

I was listening to a climate scientist talk about the weather cycles on Earth. He talked about how certain changes, the main example being the addition of CO2 to the atmosphere by man, create feedback effects. He talked about positive and negative feedback, one being where the reaction or effect strengthens or adds to the initial condition or input, the other where it damps it out. In other words, one runs out of control and the other damps itself out.

We have two examples in our solar system of this, our sister planets Venus and Mars. In Venus, the greenhouse effect ran out of control and caused a surface so hot you can melt lead on it. On Mars, the atmosphere eventually left the planet, and it spiraled down to a cold dry planet.

Another point of the lecture was about just how many variables are involved, and their complex interplay. While CO2 rising traps greenhouse gas, it could also cause there to be more moisture in the air, which might be a shield or shade keeping out the sun or another blanket holding in the heat. Scientists debated this through the 70s and 80s and finally determined that more atmospheric water tends to trap more heat.

The point is that the rise of some conditions might kick off a new effect which counters the original input. They call these movements back and forth around a center "perturbations". There are effects which cause swings and others which slow them down, but if the swings start being too frequent or too far from the equilibrium average we've come to expect, this can cause the system to swing out of control.

Understanding this interplay of forces and variables will be the ultimate human challenge. We don't have any choice but to take on this challenge, but learning it will have another major benefit. If we take what we learn and apply it to Venus and Mars, we could very well push those systems in to stable, more Earth-like conditions. In the case of Venus, the planet is so close to Earth's size, that living on the surface would not require adjusting our bodies to a lighter or heavier gravity.

I have great hope that we will learn to dampen out the perturbations and control weather, first here at home, then maybe on our sister planets, changing them into secondary homes for us to spread out on.