Sunday 21 May 2023

public class HumanFemale {(30, 480));}


Ai is big news, it seems to be all anyone is talking about and the general consensus seems to be that it is madness to invent something smarter than ourselves and then hand over power to it and that's not just your general everyday Joe, there are many leaders of AI saying the same thing but as we are a particularly dense bunch sometimes, it is more than likely exactly what we will do.
Currently, Asimov's three law of robotics is all we have to guide us that our invention won't just turn around and obliterate us at the first opportunity so a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm and secondly, a robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law and thirdly, a robot must protect it's own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.    
All makes sense but my question is how would the programmers define the human so the robot knows which of the many creatures on the planet that it mustn't injure or harm in the first place?
'Hmmm...' said the programmer i asked as he dunked a digestive into his coffee and grabbed a pen and a sheet of A4 and said 'I assume you are talking Object Orientated Class Inheritance' to which i replied 'Obviously' while not telling him that was four words i had heard for the first time when he said them.   
'So Inheritance' he began, 'is one of the core concepts of object-oriented programming (OOP) languages and is a mechanism where you can to derive a class from another class for a hierarchy of classes that share a set of attributes and methods'.
Rather than saying WTF you talking about' i smiled and said some of my readers are not as up on Object Oriental Classes as us so you may need to simplify which came down to Human (A member of the species Homo sapiens of the genus Homo) which could be Male (XY Chromosome) or Female (XY Chromosome) which inherits the attributes of Human.   
So far so good but then it gets tricky because if we say Human, Female then try and insert what makes a Human Female we get into all sorts of problems so for example approximately 1 in every 2,000 baby girls are born with just an X Chromosome so in a population of 8bn, that's 2 million females outside of the definition at the first step.
If we use reproductive organs, around one in five women will have a hysterectomy at some point which shifts 20 million outside of the definition so we have a messy Human Female who may or may not have XX Chromosomes and may or may not have reproductive organs.
I made my excuses and left him scribbling lines between more boxes at this point but i still don't know what is a neat definition of a human so we make sure robots don't take out large swathes of us due to inadequate programming when they eventually take over.

 

1 comment:

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...

i'm probably your only reader but learned OO circa 1997...