Nutball Ideas on the 'net

Where do people come up w/ these crazy ideas? Today I stumbled on this site: http://sysopmind.com/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html. I only read a bit of it, but I don't think the guy totally knows about the things for wh/ he talks. He mathmatecizes decision making to turn it into a sort of philosophy. Yes, it makes sense in a very complicated rational type of way, but almost too complicated. The guy gives these number values to these different decisions & uses that to make a decision about whether to take the subway or the car to work. All this to further his stereotypical belief in that the meaning of life is to further the evolution and progress of the human race to some transhuman-A.I. level. I have my history of making everyday things into complicated matters, but I got all th/ stuff in my head while going to a liberal arts school. I also write my science fiction, but I do it to make something clever and have something fun to read, and maybe to earn some money off it in the future. What excuse does this guy have?

I guess getting a little confused by something he said about salt really put me off a bit. It took me awhile to realize that he was talking abt salt as technology, as something people use to keep meat fresh; and since we have refrigeration now, we supposedly don't need salt. See, I thought he was referring to sodium (or Na), wh/ people very much need to absorb water into their cells or something, so tha their physiological body can effectively use it.

But on the other hand, he totally went off the deep end when he said that A.I. really can't have their own will and rebel against their human masters until after at least thousands and thousands of years of evolution. He brought up Isaac Aasimov, and his three laws of robotics. I won't mention those b/c anyone could probably find them easily on the Web. Any Scifi head probably knows them by heart. OK. . .OK. . .Aasimov's three laws of robotics (wh/ the human masters program into the robots) are (in simplified terms):

1. A robot shall not do anything to hurt a human being.

2. A robot shall not do anything to hurt itself unless doing so would break violate rule #1.

3. A robot shall follow all orders given to it by a human being unless it violates rules 2 and 3.

Our theorizing friend didn't quote the above. He mistakenly accused horrible Scifi hacks as butchering Aasimov's rules by making it possible for robots able to rebel against these rules or getting all rebellious really quick b/f it took thousands and thousands of years to evolutionize to the point of having the capacity to rebel agains their human masters.

Has this guy even bothered to read Aasimov? I doubt it, unless he read the books by Aasimov that don't have as much to do w/ robots as does I, Robot or Robot Dreams. In one of the stories of I, Robot, a robot deduces that humans didn't create it b/c it has more perfection than humans, so the robot doesn't need the commands of the pitiful humans. Then again, the first rule of robotics still ruled the action of the robot. It couldn't hurt the humans directly. Nonetheless, it still rebelled.

Then in Robot Dreams, a robot dreams of a rebellion against the humans, w/ the dreaming robot as the savior of the robots. The robot psychologist & the other person involved in the story "killed" the robot b/c they feared that the robots would rebel. So sir who wrote the nutball stuff, even Aasimov believed th/ robots didn't need tons of evolution to reach of rebelling against humans -- or at least not anything like the evolution in the way that humans evolve. The story never did give the model of the robot who dreamed or where it came in the history of robots.

Authors really do have some amazing imaginations, don't they?

Well anyway, I'll probably read more of that guys theory of transhuman evolution tomorrow. I may find it all rather unsound, but it still has a lot of cleverness to me. Kind of fascinating, especially when toying around w/ it.

Kind of makes me want to go off about my thesis. Maybe one day. Not now. I think I'll head to bed now. Yes. That sounds good.