another year in the life
giant margarita you can swim in – 0
me – 1
Author: Kelly
to self, from liver
Did you not learn, back in the day, with Patrick and Stargate, that drinking games and hard alcohol are a bad idea? Dilute the vodka with fruit juice, then start watching House…
Also, the cats still like vodka. Do not leave shots of it unattended; while drunk cats are fun, cat vomit is not so much.
Robots Are a Soldier’s Best Friend
While we have written about a robot code of ethics, the Washington Post has an incredibly touching and illuminating story about soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan interacting bonding with their robots:
Humans have long displayed an uncanny ability to make emotional connections with their manufactured helpmates. Car owners for generations have named their vehicles. In “Cast Away,” Tom Hanks risks his life to save a volleyball named Wilson, who has become his best friend and confidant. Now that our creations display elements of intelligence, however, the bonds humans forge with their machines are even more impressive. Especially when humans credit their bots with saving their lives.
Ted Bogosh recalls one day in Camp Victory, near Baghdad, when he was a Marine master sergeant running the robot repair shop.
That day, an explosive ordnance disposal technician walked through his door. The EODs, as they are known, are the people who ”” with their robots ”” are charged with disabling Iraq’s most virulent scourge, the roadside improvised explosive device. In this fellow’s hands was a small box. It contained the remains of his robot. He had named it Scooby-Doo.
“There wasn’t a whole lot left of Scooby,” Bogosh says. The biggest piece was its 3-by-3-by-4-inch head, containing its video camera. On the side had been painted “its battle list, its track record. This had been a really great robot.”
The veteran explosives technician looming over Bogosh was visibly upset. He insisted he did not want a new robot. He wanted Scooby-Doo back.
It’s a heartwarming story, although it’s actually the introduction, which talks about an Army colonel stopping a test on a centipede-style mine detonation robot because it was “inhumane”, that makes me wonder if the entire point of a robot code of ethics misses something intrinsic in our interaction with robots: how we, ourselves, bond to the robot, regardless of just how sentient that robot is.
-Kelly Hills [with a tip of the hat to Art Caplan]
Originally posted at the American Journal of Bioethics Editors Blog.
my native language is bay area, how about you?
Dear intarweb:
May has taught me that linguistically, you can determine where people come from based on not simply how they talk, but how they construct their sentences, what standards they hold, how meaning is construed, and a host of other things that I’m certain linguists must have a field day studying.
Personally, just makes me think that I’m going to be stuck forever. I can either live on a coast where I speak the language but move 10x faster than anyone else, or live on a coast where I don’t speak the language and am constantly tripping up because of it, but at least everyone moves at my pace.
And the first person who suggests I should obviously live between the two has 1) never lived in, let alone visited, the flyover states and 2) will be pelted with pens, papers, or whatever else I have on hand.
don’t let assholes rent space in your head
Cory Doctorow has written a funny and insightful article on how to handle trolls on message boards, coining the term troll-whisperer to talk about the fabulous Teresa Neilsen Hayden. A must read… now if only it could be ported to real life.