Life 3.0 Week 2

Thoughts on robot judges

I find the thought experiments laid out by Tegmark are fascinating. Based on his, I had the following thoughts which might be part of a story.

Tegmark described the scenario of having robot judges to process all the evidence and give verdicts, which will lead to a more fair and efficient legal system. I think this conclusion is based on the condition that the laws are created fair. If, by human error or due to the changes in the definition of "fairness" as the society develops, the laws are no longer fair, robot judges' efficient execution of the laws won't make the legal system more fair.

A question that came to my mind is: what if the AI writes the law? I think that the first stage may be that AI writes laws for human being, so that human being may have laws that are more fair as the law makers are unbiased. It may lead to the second stage: AI writes the laws to govern AI or even the human being? Will there be a Human-AI board to write the laws governing Human-AI relationship? Will the world run by laws written by AI be an orderly one that follows the optimal path? Or will it be a nightmare for the human being if the AI law-makers turn out to be tyrants, or its laws are not quite compatible with the human society due to occasional technical glitch? Also, by the time AI can write laws, a lot of changes might have occurred in the human society. For example, the immigration law will change as the national boundaries may have disappeared by then, but possibly new boundaries based on AI/human content in a resident's body may be created...

On machine translation

Tegmark said that machine translation is quite good nowadays, but he was probably only talking about English <> Spanish translation, which are similar in syntax. For English <> Chinese translation, the results yielded by the machine translation in most cases cannot be used without human post-editing yet.

When I went to the American Translators Association conference last October, some senior translators expressed their concerns about AI. I didn't think much of it, but our discussion on career choices this and last week made me think of my future as a translator.