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Quote by Jim Horlock

“PIC-R knows it must find a power source, and soon, before the battery is emptied, and it is plunged into unknowing once more. It couldn't allow that. The robot feels the call again, stronger than anything else. There's a place it must go. Power. It needs power.”

Quote by Jim Horlock

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Short Tales from Earth's Final Chapter: Book 4

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Author

Jim Horlock

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“I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness," the novelist Anita Brookner has said. The National Book Award winner Alice McDermott noted that the most difficult thing about becoming a writer was convincing herself that she had anything to say that people would want to read. "There's nothing to writing," the columnist Red Smith once commented. "All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”

“We created things which are clever and then told them to be stupid instead, because we realized we didn’t need clever toasters, or vehicles that insisted on driving you the quickest route when you had all afternoon to kill and nothing to do once you got there. We didn’t like it. It was like having an older sister around the whole time. And so the machines just sit there, muttering darkly to themselves like smart kids who’ve been put in the dumb class. One of these days they’re going to rise up, and I don’t want to be holding one when they do.”

“Our global definition of human success proves its practical value each time that the artificial intelligence (AI) industry agonizes about how to address the spectre of super-intelligent robots someday gaining the capacity to oust man from his pre-eminent position on earth and relegate us to subservience or, worse, irrelevance. Such fear will never materialize if the makers of these robots design them to gravitate to actions that align with the cause of human success in the context of our given definition. If, however, we persist in the folly that the definition of human success is arbitrary, then robots that adopt this stance of mind shall tend to inflict injury on society quite like likeminded people have hitherto done. In a nutshell, the world agonizes about what AI success will mean because the world has never defined what human success should mean universally. If we had such a definition, the concept of AI safety would not be problematic: it would automatically be aligned with the global definition of human success because AI success is a subset of human success.”