Robot Nation: Surviving the Greatest Socio-economic Upheaval of All Time

by Stan Neilson

What will America do when robots render 50% of its human workforce obsolete? Accelerating progress in artificial intelligence and robotics ensures that mass human obsolescence will arrive sooner than we might expect. And it won’t stop there. Economic incentives will relentlessly drive advances in robotics until robots displace the entire human workforce. How will Americans survive? Who will support them? Can a human reasonably hope to control robots that are smarter than he is? Are Asimov’s laws adequate? Is a robot-human war inevitable? How can we smoothly transition from having no intelligent robots to being overrun by them? How do we avoid violence and privation on the way to becoming a robot nation? Tackling these questions head on, Robot Nation not only describes the stark consequences of mass human obsolescence, it lays out solutions and argues that these require unprecedented changes in the political, economic, social, and moral underpinnings of Western civilization.

124 pages, Paperback

First published December 20, 2010

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like the way this books tackles a question that has generally been ignored: “What is the explicit moral code that should be programmed into robots?” He points out that for the first generation of robots, of relatively low intelligence, these should be rule based. He then points out that for any rule-based morality (e.g. Asimov’s Laws) there are always circumstances for which the rule yield an undesirable result. The alternative is a goal-based ethics, which Neilson labels the Fundamental Ethical Objective: maximum aggregate desire satisfaction over the foreseeable future. He recognizes that this a modified version of 19th-century utilitarianism, points out that it has heinous consequences, but argues nonetheless that the consequences of not adopting this principle are far worse. He further argues that this is consistent with the American moral consensus, and that the best vehicle through which to promulgate this ethic it is the Catholic Church (because it is the largest religious denomination in the U.S.)
Neilson is refreshing direct and succinct is describing his solutions for the near term, midterm, long term, and distant future. I wish more books would apply straight-forward reasoning to the problem of robot/AI ethics and human obsolescence, as this one does.