![]() ![]() That conclusion is unacceptable, so the claim that men want carefree sex more than women do cannot be correct. Carefree sex is natural and good, it is assumed, so if someone claims that men want it more than women do, it would imply that men are mentally healthy and women neurotic and repressed. “The unstated premise that nature is nice lies behind many of the objections to the Darwinian theory of human sexuality. (…) Aggression, like every other part of human behavior we take for granted, is a challenging engineering problem!” ![]() ![]() We no longer worry about electronic serial killers or subversive silicon cabals because we are beginning to appreciate that malevolence-like vision, motor coordination, and common sense-does not come free with computation but has to be programmed in. But the only mayhem comes from unpredictable chaos or from human malice in the form of viruses. Today's ubiquitous, networked computers have an unprecedented ability to do mischief should they ever go to the bad. ![]() “Why give a robot an order to obey orders-why aren't the original orders enough? Why command a robot not to do harm-wouldn't it be easier never to command it to do harm in the first place? Does the universe contain a mysterious force pulling entities toward malevolence, so that a positronic brain must be programmed to withstand it? Do intelligent beings inevitably develop an attitude problem? (…) Now that computers really have become smarter and more powerful, the anxiety has waned. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |