Julian Pistorius - Old Site

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(Update, 18 April 2011: Fixed links to point to The Wayback Machine versions, as the original ones are no longer visible.)

In the future, would your robots demand individual rights, and freedom from slavery? It is a real possibility, according to a research paper commissioned by The UK Office of Science and Innovation. (Why on earth do you need an office for that? Why the hell are you forced to pay for somebody to sit around and come up with this stuff? Never mind...)

According to the article on PhysOrg:

Among the warnings: a "monumental shift" could occur if robots were developed to the point where they could reproduce, improve or think for themselves.

"Correctly managed, there is a very real possibility for increased labor output and greater intelligence to be provided by robots that will ultimate lead to greater human prosperity and an improvement of the human condition," it said.

However, it warned that robots could sue for their rights if these were denied to them.

Should they prove successful, the paper said, "states will be obligated to provide full social benefits to them including income support, housing and possibly robo-healthcare to fix the machines over time."

(They got freedom and individual rights wrong. The right to a house? The right to have healthcare provided for you? Who pays for it? Whose rights are being violated by forced appropriation of money? Anyway...)

An interesting thought, but as the authors note, not something likely to become an issue in the next couple of decades. :)

Hopefully, your robot children will know what freedom really means.

Now all I want for Christmas is an intelligent robot. I promise to be nice to it - err, him/her. :)

Links:
PhysOrg: UK Government Study: Freedom for Robots?
http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20070103065714/http://www.physorg.com/news85851230.html

Ipsos MORI: Robo-rights: Utopian dream or rise of the machines?
http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20070207230831/http://www.sigmascan.org/ViewIssue.aspx?IssueId=53

Ipsos MORI: A Droid for all Seasons: Robots become more versatile
http://www.sigmascan.org//ViewIssue.aspx?IssueId=302 (Link broken, can't find archived version)

Not PC: Cue Card Libertarianism -- Freedom (Liberty)
http://pc.blogspot.com/2005/06/cue-card-libertarianism-freedom.html

Sorry, just a quick a service message. I accidentally deleted a few comments while overzealously killing some spam a few days ago. In particular, a woman (I think) had written a message starting with something like "Thanks for exposing this issue...". If you could please resubmit your comment, I promise not to delete it again. :)

This morning I was reading a thread on PC's blog about bloggers and mainstream media, when this comment by sagenz caught my attention:
http://pc.blogspot.com/2006/02/holmes-home-on-blogs.html#113965632406090705

"jude - you need to use bloglines. you can cover a far greater number of blogs. "

Bloglines eh... Hmmm... I've been having trouble staying abreast of all that's newsworthy on the web. I used to use Sage (no relation to sagenz) for my RSS aggregation. It's a Firefox plugin. I thought it was pretty good, but I wanted something web-based. So this comment spurred me into trying it out.

Well, sagenz is right, it was pretty good. On one of the first blogs that I added to Bloglines, I noticed an item about Google Reader, Google's own online RSS aggregator, which has just been released. "Wow," I thought, "I've gotta check this out!" And so I did.

I quickly exported all my Sage RSS feeds and my newly-created Bloglines feeds, and imported them into Google Reader. Wow. Google Reader is amazing! I thought Bloglines was shiny, but Google Reader is in a different class altogether. It is very easy to use, and unlike Bloglines and Sage, has almost instantaneous response, thanks to Google's great AJAX interface. If you've used GMail, you'll know what I mean.

I can heartily recommend it.

Here's how to export RSS feeds from Bloglines:
http://www.bloglines.com/help/faq#export

Links:
Bloglines:
http://www.bloglines.com/

Sage:
http://sage.mozdev.org/

Google Reader:
http://www.google.com/reader/