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The God of dogs or how General Artificial Intelligence will affect Humankind

Asimov (1920-1992) wrote some of the best hard science fiction in the middle 20th century. His Foundation book series was / is brought to TV but lacks the colors my mind imagined it as a kid.

He wrote about robots and a multitude of other things, but he is most known for his 3 laws of robotics that he devised as part of his Human & Robots Syfy universe.

1 Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2 Law: A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3 Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

He wrote about robots and a multitude of other things, but he is most known for his 3 laws of robotics that he devised as part of his Human & Robots Syfy universe.

1 Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2 Law: A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3 Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Jef Hinton who is the discoverer of the Backpropagation algorithm which is the backbone of most if not all Artificial Neural Networks, has recently joined Elon Musk in voicing his fears from AGI (General Artificial Intelligence) to humankind. I’m attaching his interview to the MIT technology review.

To make a long story short he is proclaiming that LLM models are getting closer to human intelligence but are more efficient in the number of connections in the ANN (Artificial Neural Network) vs. the brain, as well as being identical and replicable so they can work on problems in parallel as well as communicate directly with no effort the is required for a biological NN to learn new subject. Also mentioning the ability to replace physical infrastructure of the network and thus achieve infinite lifespan.

LLM will be able to program themselves so protecting those three rules in a Unix “kernel” that is not approachable by the AGI, would be a fallacy just as the paradox: “Could God create a stone so heavy that even he could not lift it?” When dealing with deities, one must assume that they will be able to lift any stone that we create.

Asimov’s rules are just a work of fiction like his Syfy work. So where is our protection?

I’m not that worried. Mankind is already playing with its Genome and just like dogs which adapted from wolves to serve their human masters, we will adapt to do that, like we did over and over again with religions, since Stoneage.