...initially unrelated to the (adopted) subject at hand, but:
You seem to have good memory, atm I can't seem to recall a single thing about asimov books not a book title, not character name, not even plot point. Maybe someone can come up with an AI that can help find that string of memory you can latch on to unravel stuff.
It is said that as well as intelligence (which is by far not unique to humans), and the basic shared intelligence of society (which apes and corvids and cetaceans and others demonstrably have), through the development of writing (and now other media) we have
extelligence. A store of knowledge that does not necessarily rely even on being in the presence of others in the same time and place.
(So can we say that a "prompter" AI that whispers unsought facts can be yet another layer?,Or indeed does the collective virtual presence available through the intenet already do this, but maybe of a different degree of usefulness, given how wrong some such sources can be. As can all other layers of intelligence, but now somewhat lessening the consequences in the event of deliberate or accidental misinformation[1], the come-back being pretty much non-existent (or the point). And once we start to rely on the little AI daemon whispering in our ears, telling us what to believe... Well, maybe that's when we start to lose intelligence and they can be truly said to be the thinkers on the planet.)
As for my knowledge of Asimov, call me a past afficionado. It helped that Asimov was near the start of the SF shelves of the local library, when I was both young and rigidly methodical. Plenty of Asimov, Bradbury and Clarke. Not quite as much Verne, Wyndham and Zelazny, in comparison, except that Wells somehow got fairly well read despite this.
(To clue you in, the "very near future" Robot-era books tends to be short stories that often feature Susan Calvin, robot 'psychiatrist' (very serious, more empathic with robots than people; except for telepathic robots!), or sometimes Powell and Donova (engineers, more comic relief to them). The stories in this area deal a lot with "This robot isn't doing what it ought to be doing. Why?", and the answer often being some inadvertent (or sometimes deliberately invoked, but still not intentional) edge-case where the robot is doing
exactly what it should do, given the Three Laws being in the (mostly)
proper order. The solutions tend to vary from "deal with it" to "do something about it, or you'll be sorry", with the occasional self-solving issue that still needed an explanation. The Zeroth Law comes into play as of the slightly later Spacer-era section (Novels) of the in-universe chronology and goes all the way to the far-future Foundation setting as a major background plot-point, it turns out, even though there are
are no obvious robots...)
[1] Showing the young hunter the
wrong way to hunt a mammoth isn't going to help the elder hunter much when all he's reliant upon the next generation or two when he isn't there to do the right things. A book that's not fit for reading can become firelighters or be hung up in the privvy and let it be useful in other ways (if the material paper is worth saving at all).
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Topic: Reactions to Chinese White Balloon of AI Awareness (Read 24954 times)