Edmund Storms <[email protected]> wrote: Now Jed, you are agreeing with my conclusion. Should I take the opposite > view as you normally do? >
The difference is this. You think these things are increasingly likely and we should worry about them. I think that in general the world is getting better, less dangerous and more stable. So, while I acknowledge there are scary possibilities, I don't worry about them much. For example, I expect we will find a way to control small killer robots. If a cold fusion bomb is possible, all bets are off, but I doubt it is possible, and I am not going to worry about it. Things like wars are actually becoming less common. The number of people killed in wars as a fraction of the population has been going down since the Middle Ages. People did dreadful things in ancient times with hand-held weapons and fire. They wiped out cities and killed hundreds of thousands of people. You mentioned people massacring children in schools. That happens infrequently in the U.S. It does not happen in other countries at all. If they can prevent it, we can too. We need to adjust gun control laws. Sooner or later we will. At present there is a lot of talk about Second Amendment rights, but that is a fairly recent trend in U.S. history and I doubt it will last for long. In the 1950s, for example. Pres. Eisenhower's brother was in charge of a panel on gun control. It recommended that handguns be made illegal in the U.S. The recommendation did not go through, but it did not cause much of a dispute either. People in those days gave the government more power over our lives than we do now. That has been the norm throughout most U.S. history. In the 19th century and most of the 20th, the police could arrest you on a whim, or -- for example -- force you to get your hair cut, and hold you in jail if you refused. I doubt we will return to that. I hope we do not. But I expect we will again impose more restrictions on deadly weapons, and probably more involuntary commitments for dangerous mentally ill people. I predict that 50 to 100 years from now, small robots, smart guns, extensive surveillance cameras, databases and whatnot will go a long way to preventing crime. Cell phone technology already exists that recognize people by their face in a matter of seconds, from Facebook. This was demonstrated on NHK the other night. Not only does the web software recognize you, it pulls up your Social Security Number in a flash. So there is no question that robots will recognize people by their face or voice, just as humans do. It will not be possible for you to commit an anonymous crime in public such as robbery. Every person will have something like a cell phone with camera, and if you attack that person, the police will know you did it a moment later. They will have a video of you committing the crime. Every robot in the world will be looking for you. In a world where robots are everywhere and they outnumber people by a wide margin, you will have no place to run. Or, if you step out of the house with an assault weapon, your car robot and every other robot on the block will see you and report you. Privacy as we know it will not exist. - Jed
