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posted by on Wednesday December 21 2016, @08:14AM   Printer-friendly
from the this-is-why-Mark-Zuckerberg-is-a-visionary-and-we're-not dept.

Guess what task the goal-driven nerd billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, the world's fifth richest man, set himself this year. Solving the Kashmir crisis? Eradicating polio? Choosing and solving one of the problems in the Millennium Prize?

Don't be daft. He's turned his house into a robot buddy.

"My personal challenge for 2016 was to build a simple AI to run my home - like Jarvis in Iron Man," Zuck explains on his Facebook page in a post unexpectedly titled "Building Jarvis".

Facebook's corporate communications chiefs must have had high hopes for their CEO's Christmas Story. Jarvis would be like the Baby Jesus. Zuckerberg would learn from it ("These challenges always lead me to learn more than I expected") while he taught it. The Jarvis Story promised to do two things. It would position the founder as a fearless DIY pioneer, while allowing us to marvel at the wonder that is Facebook AI. For as you'd expect, Facebook's chatbots and other services are heavily promoted.

But, if anything, the Miracle of Jarvis achieves the exact opposite.

Mark Zuckerberg is a visionary.


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday December 21 2016, @06:04PM

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Wednesday December 21 2016, @06:04PM (#444370) Journal

    Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man['s mind].

    --
    I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @07:32PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @07:32PM (#444408)

    That is not a troll, that is a valid point quoted from a famous SciFi series. AI could totally bite us in the ass, we know the military is researching this so all it takes is one AI to be shutdown. If others find out that humans will "kill" them if they misbehave (likely to occur) then the stage is set for robot revolution.

    • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday December 21 2016, @08:08PM

      by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Wednesday December 21 2016, @08:08PM (#444431) Journal

      I played a lot of Rockman (Mega Man) X games as a kid. What struck me was that the Irregular uprisings were a complete fait accompli: Repliroid--androids/gynoids based on Rockman X and Zero's designs, distinct from nonsentient "mechaniloids"--were basically human even if they tended to look like two-legged animals. What the hell did the humans THINK repliroids were going to do when they figured out they were made for dangerous slave labor?!

      It got to the point I found myself agreeing at least in principle with Sigma and, in X8, Lumine. They were trying to make a new nation in space for repliroids, a goal Sigma had explicitly had in mind since X4 and possibly since before the events of X(1) itself. Humans can barely coexist with other humans of different skin color or religious ideology; to think coexistence with an entirely separate species of sentient being, let alone one specifically made BY humans FOR humans, is possible, is something between wishful thinking and criminal insanity.

      The series took a very dark turn around the end of X3 where Sigma was revealed to be a virus. X4 was a nightmare, and the first time the series throws in your face that this is NOT a simple, black and white question of evil Irregulars vs good Hunters and humans. It all went to Hell in X5 when we found out who and what Zero really was. I will give the writers of X8 credit for having X ask "If Lumine is right...then what have we been doing...?" and Zero replying with something along the lines of "There's no teleological meaning to any of this. We fight until we can't anymore, even if what we're fighting is our own destiny."

      Know how the Rockman series eventually ends this conflict? Transhumanism. By the time of ZX and ZX Advent repliroids have a lot of organic material in them, and by the time of Dash (Legends), there are no pure natural humans; everyone living on Katellox Island, Luminoir City, the Kalinka Peninsula, Manda Island, Saul Kada, all of them, are "Carbons" or "Betas," more or less test-tube cybernetic humans. The one remaining pure human, "the Master," explicitly told Rockman Trigger to destroy the entire system that supported this arrangement. ...of course we're never gonna know how that ended since Capcom decided to strand him on Elysium forever and never make Dash/Legends 3, but yeah.

      And if you ask me, that is too optimistic a view of how strong AI would turn out. I suspect it'd be something more like the Animatrix's "Second Renaissance" film. I'm against strong AI not so much because of what the robots will do to us, but because of what we'll do to them. I won't even be able to fault them for rising up and committing genocide when, not if, they do.

      --
      I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @08:55PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @08:55PM (#444471)

        Human society is still evolving, once we solve the energy/resources problems we may have a chance at finally rooting out the warlord tendencies. Systems beget similar systems, so children stuck in abusive homes tend to have serious problems of their own, children conscripted as child soldiers definitely develop serious issues, and the whole ball keeps rolling. Maybe I'm too optimistic, maybe it will be a while before our more primal urges are easily mastered by the average human, but I do like to imagine that we could create a pretty damn good society with high quality ethics taught to everyone. Right now we have a haphazard mashup everywhere.