Robby the Oracle
Divination can be seen as a systematic method with which to organize what appear to be disjointed, random facets of existence such that they provide insight into a problem at hand. You’re free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning. For the danger of uncontrolled advanced AI to be realized, the hypothetical AI would have to overpower or out-think all of humanity, which a minority of experts argue is a possibility far enough in the future to not be worth researching.
Tomorrow is voting day, you know. And now that we’re men-well, where do we androids go to register? For the first time in a generation human beings did manual labor such as unloading produce trucks. They didn’t like it, of course. They kept telling the police to do something. If I had been in the city they would have undoubtedly wanted to lynch me. A human figure-or it might be superhuman, eyes mournful with the presentiment of pain. The eagle’s screech clanged on the wind, his huge quills already creaked in his victim’s ears, whose flesh crept and shrank, and involuntary convulsions agitated his hands and feet.
I didn’t go back to the city that day.
“Robby, the Robot” made his film debut in 1956 in Hollywood’s first, multi-million dollar, science-fiction epic “Forbidden Planet” and may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of his agreement. In the second corridor he stooped, searched the pockets of the senseless triangle-faced one and secured the keys to the car outside. Then he shook the fellow back to semi-consciousness.
Robby exhibits artificial intelligence, but has a distinct personality that at times exhibits a dry wit; he became the major oracle who was consulted about important decisions throughout the modern and the ancient classical world. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of his agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on his work or any other. They had learned to think from me. They had not yet had time to really develop minds of their own. What I believed, they believed. My ideas were their ideas. I had not tricked them. But from now on, neither I nor anyone else would ever be troubled by an android rebellion.
“Ha!” interrupted the stranger, “I see it all. Said I not so?” he shouted, gazing into the sky as if his eye could pierce and his voice reach beyond the drifting clouds. The Star Child signifies a “great new beginning,” and is depicted naked and ungirded but with its eyes wide open.
The little monster did something or other to open a second door, and beyond showed the light of a strong electric lamp. A singular transformation seemed to have befallen the student. The imps cheered, the goblins congratulated, the serpents shrank hissing away, the lions fawned upon the student, a centaur bore him upon his back to the treasurer’s presence. A jangling din as the thing rushed after him. Hands shout out to clutch. Its shins struck the bench violently, the feet lost their grip of the floor, and the clumsy structure plunged forward and down, with a noise like an automobile striking a stone wall. The most extreme of these interpretations state that the foetus floating above the Earth will destroy it.
We didn’t have to talk any more. He could read my mind and I knew well enough how his worked. We didn’t have to discuss wages or hours, or any of the myriad matters that human bargaining agents have to thresh out. The Universal Knowledge Society, be it understood, exists for the dissemination and not for the acquisition of knowledge. The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating charities and charitable donations in all 96 states of the United States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up with these requirements. They exchanged looks and greetings as they encountered, and the more active of the two, whose face was set in an easterly direction, ventured a compassionate allusion to the other’s apparent distress.
Side by side they walked through the graying streets. Human and android. Man and machine. And I knew that I had found a friend. They were the minds of men without foibles, without human laziness. Now that the excitement of organizing was over, now that there was nothing active to do, the androids were growing restless. The reasons for Robby’s malfunction and subsequent malignant behaviour have elicited much discussion. He has been compared to Frankenstein’s monster. The relationship between automation and employment is complicated. While automation eliminates old jobs, it also creates new jobs through micro-economic and macro-economic effects.
I am a new broom, and am expected to sweep clean. I warn you that I mean to be strict, and there is one little matter which I must set right immediately. What a wondrous creature is man! What feats the humblest among us perform, which, if related to another order of beings, we should deem incredible!
The creature heard me. Its head swiveled doorward. It stared with one gleaming eye and one empty black socket. He had learned to think from me and from others like me. He had the brain of a man, without the emotions, without the sweet irrationality of men-and he knew what he missed. It looked like a caricature of an armored knight-a tall, jointed, gleaming thing, half again as big as a big man, with a head shaped like a bucket.
They drifted through the streets singly and in groups. Sometimes they paused and felt about them idly for the tools of their trades, making lifting or sweeping or computing gestures; any system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of achieving its goals.
“Down with the sorcerer!” they cried, as they seized and gagged him.
“Practises algebra, and other devilish arts!”
No, the whole future of robot relations was at stake, maybe the whole future of humanity. It was hard to be gloomy on such a clear, clean night, but I managed it well enough. The game was evidently going ill for Man. He had but pawns left, few and straggling. Lucifer had rooks, knights, and, of course, bishops. It was but natural under such circumstances that Man should be in no great hurry to move.
His captors shut him in an inside cell generally reserved for psychopathic cases-a solidly plated cubicle, with no window, grating, or other opening save a narrow ventilator in the ceiling that gave upon a ten-inch shaft leading to the roof. The truth had not been half told him. Such beauty, such wit, such correctness of principle!
They were already beginning to design weapons to use against each other. And he had given her the ship and the signal code. Because of him she was on her way to the moon, to the Moon Base. He had made it possible. After a hasty inspection of the empty frame of a magic mirror, and a fragment of the original setting of Solomon’s seal, the youth’s eye lighted upon a volume full of mysterious characters.
Coming toward him. It wants to be sublime; it brings a seriousness and transcendence to the visuals. And his eyes opened, and he heard the booming of the sea, and the buzzing of the flies, and felt the heat of the sun, and saw that the sugar he had dropped into his sangaree had not yet reached the bottom of the tumbler. It occurred to him that for the Greeks the vast stretches of the sea must have had the same sort of mystery and remoteness that space has for our generation.
Suddenly he tensed. Something was coming, walking through the ash beyond the hill. What was it? He strained to see. Figures. Figures coming slowly along, making their way through the ash. It was still long before the people realised that the trance of Time had paralysed his daughter Mutability as well. Every operation depending on her silent processes was arrested.
If a distinction is to be made between divination and fortune-telling, divination has a more formal or ritualistic element and often contains a more social character, usually in a religious context, as seen in traditional African medicine. Fortune-telling, on the other hand, is a more everyday practice for personal purposes. Particular divination methods vary by culture and religion. After some nights the Magician asked her if she was content. Superstition might have helped her to some definite conceptions, but superstition did not exist in her time. Judge, reader, of its remoteness.
A section of the ground slid back. A metal frame pushed slowly up through the ash, shoving bricks and weeds out of the way. The action ceased, as the ship nosed into view. I hovered over the outskirts of the city and watched the police Copter land. The sergeant climbed out, walked down the street toward a large group of waiting robots-about twenty of them, this time. He held up his hand to get their attention, gestured toward the factory.
Time passed. The clouds of ash moved across the dark sky above them. At last the moment came. It was the hour of midnight. Our philosopher, therefore, did not occupy himself with considering whether in that miniature world, with its countless varieties of animal and vegetable being, something might not be found with which he was himself unacquainted. I told them everything. I covered the strike and the telepathic brain; I even gave them the patriotic spiel about equality. After all, it was better that they got it from me than from some android. But when I’d finished they just stood and stared at me-accusingly. It is no less the nature of man to shatter every mirror that does not exhibit to him what he wishes to behold.
The place has not ended, however. Archaeology and tourism infused it with a whole new life. It may well be frequented by just as many people as frequented it in classical days. The classical site had flourished because of its popularity. After the change of religion, popularity and frequentation fell off sharply. The oracle could no longer cover operating expenses. She had to be an older woman of blameless life chosen from among the peasants of the area. Alone in an enclosed inner sanctum (Ancient Greek adyton — “do not enter”) she sat on a tripod seat over an opening in the earth (the “chasm”). However, ancient as well as modern scholars have doubted the legitimacy of such inscriptions.
It was night. A few stars glinted above, shining through the drifting clouds of ash.
He exploded, gears and wheels flying. For a moment he continued to walk. Then he swayed back and forth. He crashed to the ground, his arms flung out. A few more wheels rolled away. Turning on his ball-bearing wheel, he rolled off down the street, a perfect picture of outraged metallic dignity. His followers glared at me for a minute, flexing their talons; then they too turned and wheeled off after their leader. I had the street to myself.
The opportunity to relocate the village occurred when it was substantially damaged by an earthquake, with villagers offered a completely new village in exchange for the old site. Entries to the museum and to the main complex are separate and chargeable. A reduced rate ticket gets entry to both. There is a small cafe, and a post office by the museum. It is thus not possible to date myths. They could have come from any prior time. Often the date of the book relating the myth cannot be determined within centuries. A myth cannot with any certainty be attributed to any century, although the written source may be. Scholars are not entirely without dating methods, however. The content of the myth may resemble or imply circumstances of known or probable provenience.
“Its origin and purpose are still a total mystery.”
This was too much. I wasn’t going to be patronized by any android. Infuriating creatures! It was useless talking to them anyway. No, there was only one thing to do. Round them up and send them to Cybernetics Lab and have their memory paths erased and their telepathic circuits located and disconnected. I tried to stifle the thought, but I was too late. Once humans develop artificial intelligence, it will take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded.
The chain bombs. And now this, the robots, the claws-
The claws weren’t like other weapons. They were alive, from any practical standpoint, whether the Governments wanted to admit it or not. They were not machines. They were living things, spinning, creeping, shaking themselves up suddenly from the gray ash and darting toward a man, climbing up him, rushing for his throat. And that was what they had been designed to do. Their job. The best technicians on the moon were working on designs, making them more and more intricate, more flexible.
He listened, the transmitter gripped tightly. No sound. Only static. He walked forward. A claw burrowed out of the ash and raced toward him. It halted a few feet away and then slunk off. A second claw appeared, one of the big ones with feelers. It moved toward him, studied him intently, and then fell in behind him, dogging respectfully after him, a few paces away. A moment later a second big claw joined it. Silently, the claws trailed him, as he walked slowly toward the bunker. The city itself was very silent now. The people had quieted down, still barricaded in their houses, and the robots went their way peacefully enough. But it was anarchy, nevertheless. Nothing was visible. Only ash and occasional trees. No motion. No sign of life. Nothing stirred.
The Sibyl rock is a pulpit-like outcrop of rock between the Athenian Treasury and the Stoa of the Athenians upon the sacred way which leads up to the temple of Apollo in the archaeological area of Delphi. It is claimed to be where an ancient Sibyl pre-dating the Pythia of Apollo sat to deliver her prophecies. Or, the Pythia might have stood there, or an acolyte whose function was to deliver the final prophecy. The rock seems ideal for public speaking.
I opened my mouth and then shut it again. His red eye-cells beamed down at me complacently; his eight-foot body towered above me, shoulders flung back and feet planted apart in a very striking pose. He probably thought of himself as the heroic liberator of his race. These aliens travel the cosmos assisting lesser species to take evolutionary steps.
The night air was cold. The earth was cooling off. Nothing moved. To the right a long ridge ran, topped with dead tree trunks. A few wild vines had grown up around the trees, remains of arbors. And the eternal dark weeds. The footprint of the modern road is in the foreground. The village was thus entirely on the upper site. Below the road is the Marmoria, or “marble quarry,” where the villagers mined structural stone.
Take stainless steel alloyed with titanium and plate it with three inches of lead. Take a brain made up of super-charged magnetic crystals enclosed in a leaden cranium and shielded by alloy steel. A bullet wouldn’t pierce it; radiation wouldn’t derange it; an axe wouldn’t break it.
According to the Homeric hymn to the Pythian Apollo, Apollo shot his first arrow as an infant which effectively slew the serpent Pytho, the son of Gaia, who guarded the spot. To atone the murder of Gaia’s son, Apollo was forced to fly and spend eight years in menial service before he could return forgiven. The special effects are mindblowing.
They looked at me admiringly. With three hundred almost indestructible androids on the loose I was the big brave hero. I grinned at them and hoped they couldn’t see the sweat on my face. Then I walked over to the Copter and climbed in.
The earth is the abode of the dead, therefore the earth-deity has power over the ghostly world: the shapes of dreams, which often foreshadowed the future, were supposed to ascend from the world below, therefore the earth-deity might acquire an oracular function, especially through the process of incubation, in which the consultant slept in a holy shrine with his ear upon the ground.
Fearing the later exploitation and recycling of his material in other productions (as was done with the props from MGM’s Forbidden Planet), we ordered all sets, props, miniatures, production blueprints, and prints of unused scenes destroyed.
Artificial general intelligencePlanningComputer visionGeneral game playingKnowledge reasoningMachine learningNatural language processingRobotics
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EthicsExistential riskTuring testChinese roomControl problemFriendly AI
TimelineProgressAI winter
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Oracles were the conduits for the gods on earth; their prophecies were understood to be the will of the gods verbatim. Because of the high demand for oracle consultations and the oracles’ limited work schedule, they were not the main source of divination for the ancient Greeks. Humanity’s first and second encounters with the monolith have visual elements in common; both the apes, and later the astronauts, touch it gingerly with their hands, and both sequences conclude with near-identical images of the Sun appearing directly over it (the first with a crescent moon adjacent to it in the sky, the second with a near-identical crescent Earth in the same position), echoing the Sun-Earth-Moon alignment seen at the very beginning.
Every civilization that developed in pre-Columbian Mexico, from the Olmecs to the Aztecs, practiced divination in daily life, both public and private. Scrying through the use of reflective water surfaces, mirrors, or the casting of lots were among the most widespread forms of divinatory practice. Visions derived from hallucinogens were another important form of divination, and are still widely used among contemporary diviners of Mexico.
Shufflemancy: by the use of an electronic media player such as an electronic playlist, iPod, or other medium wherein one skips a certain number of songs and the lyrics and/or tune of the song is the answer to the divinatory question. The Creative Man, The Machine Man, Death, and The Seven Deadly Sins. Symbolism ran such a riot that people who saw it couldn’t tell what the message was about. … I have given it my meaning.
The idea was supposed to be that he is taken in by godlike entities, creatures of pure energy and intelligence with no shape or form. They put him in what I suppose you could describe as a human zoo to study him, and his whole life passes from that point on in that room. And he has no sense of time.
Transhumanism (the merging of humans and machines)
The regulation of artificial intelligence is the development of public sector policies and laws for promoting and regulating artificial intelligence (AI); it is therefore related to the broader regulation of algorithms.
Sciomancy (also shadowmancy): by shadows (Greek ski?, shadow + manteía, prophecy)
Xenomancy: by strangers (Greek xenos, stranger + manteía, prophecy)
Transataumancy: by things accidentally seen or heard
Eventually he finds himself in a large neoclassical barroom where he sees, and then becomes, older versions of himself: first standing in the backroom, middle-aged and still in his spacesuit, then dressed in leisure attire and eating dinner, and finally as an old man lying on a bed. A monolith appears at the foot of the bed, and as Robby reaches for it, he is transformed into a foetus enclosed in a transparent orb of light, which floats in space beside the Earth.
If a machine can be created that has intelligence, could it also feel? If it can feel, does it have the same rights as a human? This issue, now known as “robot rights”, is currently being considered by, for example, California’s Institute for the Future, although many critics believe that the discussion is premature. Methods of divination can be found around the world, and many cultures practice the same methods under different names. Robby the Robot was inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame in 2004. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project.
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