The Robots Have Spoken: Humans Taste Like Pigs
A slightly unnerving article on Good Morning Silicon Valley tonight:
Doesn’t this violate one of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics?
The news comes from Japan, where a robot built to detect smell and taste also evaluated the taste of the reporters covering the story. Apparently the writer “tasted” like prosciutto and the cameraman like bacon.
It is going to be very interesting over the next twenty years as we learn to view humanity through the eyes of our non-human creations. Despite Asimov’s best intention, they will likely not be bound by our explicit or implicit moral codes or societal norms. At least, not completely. We are are immensely biased and subjective when evaluating ourselves – it will likely be quite illuminating to start learning about ourselves from non-human sources.
Then again, maybe it’s just because I saw this news on Friday, the night Battlestar Galactica airs, and I’m a little sensitive to the idea that machines might decide that they like the taste of bacon. BTW If you are not watching Battlestar Galactica, you are missing one of the best shows on television.
Certainly agree that Battlestar is one of the best currently on the tube. As far as Asimov goes, his robots all had the advantage of a positronic brain, something I don’t think is going to be invented in the near future, so we will probably not be blessed with such an impartial external viewpoint of the human race from that corner. In fact, true AI still looks like it’s a long way off, regardless if today’s computers can beat the World Chess Champion.
I figured we tasted like swine. I bet we are tasty. Makes sense to me.