Through the eyes of a Robot

My first blog…. Through the eyes of a robot. The 3 laws of Asimov

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the 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.

The first law, never allow a human being to come to harm. Does not this rule out the use of robots for the Defense sector (until n unless our government thinks we might be attacked by aliens some day). A robot has a vision just like we human beings. It sees the things through sensors known as camera, it hears the things through the sensors known as microphone, it can feel things through touch sensors, it can even smell gases & can even find out the taste of any object by finding the chemical compound in the material. And it thinks through a similar manner as that of us through a system known as our brain for a robot which is the micro-controller. The basics used to control a robot. A robot has many parts, but the main parts required for a robot to make a decision are its sensors which act similarly as that of the 5 senses in a human being. The decision that our brain takes for the whole body is mainly based on the response of our 5 sense organs which is similar as that of in a robot. The difference comes here that a robot does not have a sub conscious mind as that of a human being. The sub conscious mind which helps us make a decision through something known as intelligence. A human being is not programmed and the decisions of a human being do not depend in a fixed manner. A humans decision changes on the basis of a situation. It can be argued that a decision of a robot also changes on the basis of a situation. But the difference that will be created in a situation when the decision to be taken is not mentioned in the rewritten program of the robot it will not take a decision out of the set of commands or programs.

But in case of a human being, a human being analyses a situation and tries to do it in the best possible manner it can. It can even figure out ways in which he/she must not have ever done it. But due to the subconscious a human brain is capable of making decisions not been ever done before. For a robot this case will never arrive. For example it was recently tested “In an experiment, Winfield and his colleagues programmed a robot to prevent other automatons – acting as proxies for humans – from falling into a hole. This is a simplified version of Isaac Asimov’s fictional First Law of Robotics – a robot must not allow a human being to come to harm” At first, the robot was successful in its task. As a human proxy moved towards the hole, the robot rushed in to push it out of the path of danger. But when the team added a second human proxy rolling toward the hole at the same time, the robot was forced to choose. Sometimes, it managed to save one human while letting the other perish, a few times it even managed to save both. But in 14 out of 33 trials, the robot wasted so much time fretting over its decision that both humans fell into the hole. If a human was in place, he/she would have saved both the humans simultaneously.

The very few times the robot managed to save both the humans would always be less than that of what a human would be capable of doing. A robot can only be given a set of commands as to how to save the human. Now whether it has to save a single human being or 2, if this information is not fed inside the Processor of the robot it will disobey the first law of robots. As it is letting a human come in harm when saving the other. So if the information is not fed in, it will not be in accordance with the first law. The robot can think using its predefined set of functions and commands. It does not have the capability to outperform its command, until and unless something known as artificial intelligence is fed inside robot. This would mean that a robot would learn from its performing of its mistakes while it disobeys the first law. This kind of a robot can be made when one sets up a learning system in a robot, where the robot would learn and store the data whenever it would make a mistake (again the mistakes have to be predefined by the human or the programmer) if the set is not defined in the mistakes, and even if the robot is making a mistake it will keep following its fed in command. Hence in the end it is like even if we are able to make a self learning robot, it is again learning using the set of commands we have fed inside its system. It will never learn things out of the box of the commands even after we have fed in a self learning system. The self learning will always be according to the set of programs for which the robot will store in the data for analysis. The analysis of the situation will always be in terms of the rules set for the robot. So we are not making a self learning robot. We are making a robot with a fixed set of probables out of which the robot has to choose the option depending upon the combination we would give to the robot to choose from, from the set of commands to perform.

A human being is not such, it learns and adds data to its memory beyond the set of commands. If we are able to get this done inside the robot, that day we will mark the start of The end of the human civilization. If robots develop a self learning capability as that of a human, even after the 3 laws of robot being fed in, it will harm the humans. An excerpt of this has been shown in the movie “iRobot” . Where the robots even after following the 3 laws are able to harm the humans. And if things go worse they will be nothing less than an alien species which are a lot superior to us and with a lot of power. Which is again a threat to the human civilization. Because any superior civilization wants it’s safety from the species below it. For example- every human wants to be protected from animals, where animals being the inferior species. We even kill the animals for our safety and our daily use as food and other daily usage items. We might just end up being in the same situation as that of the animals.

So a robot should never attain the sub conscious mind a human being has, that is again only if we want our human race to live longer. With the anomaly of the universe it is being even said that the earth is nothing but a set of programs controlled by a highly intelligent biological computer. If this is true then even we end up becoming nothing but a set of programs performing a set of functions, and the better decision that we take due to our subconscious mind may not actually be a subconscious mind, but actually a set of program fed inside our biological processor which is nothing but the brain. Somewhere this appears to be seem at a very big level, but if we bring it to a micro level, we are actually in a situation of a technology where we are seeing something like happen, or lets say we humans ourselves have created this kind of a situation in games such as Grand Theft Auto (GTA Series) ..Warcraft … Counterstrike series.. or any game that has computer player playing in it.

The theme of some games are actually so similar to our real life. For example games like the GTA Series. Seems like a small place only with people around. I am sure people who have played the game will be able to relate to this. Something like the people inside the game being us. The processor that is controlling the game is nothing but the big super biological computer that we referred to it as the system controlling us whom we call our God, the creator and the controller, might nothing be but a super biological computer.

If this anomaly turns out to be true, we can say that as Neil Bohr said, ‘If we are made up of atoms, then a scientist studying atoms is nothing but a group of atoms studying itself’.