Messenger, a NASA probe launched towards Mercury, has transmitted the first image of the unseen side of the first planet in our solar system, Mercury. Whilst Mariner 10 did pass Mercury 3 times in the seventies, it never saw this side due to the strange relationship between Mercury’s spin and orbit around the sun. The image is very good quality, with a lighter region in the top right corner believed to be the area of the planet that comes closest to the scorching heat of the sun.
Rights for robots? Not according to Peter Watts.
I think this is about the third or fourth variation of this story I’ve seen in the last few years, but nonetheless – The Guardian has a brief piece wherein philosopher Nick Bostrom suggests we should be thinking ahead about what rights we will need to grant to our sentient machines.
Which is very well-meant, I suppose. But science fiction author Peter Watts takes a rather different view of the necessity for robotic rights – basically, there isn’t any.
“I’ve got no problems with enslaving machines — even intelligent machines, even intelligent, conscious machines — because as Jeremy Bentham said, the ethical question is not “Can they think?” but “Can they suffer?”* You can’t suffer if you can’t feel pain or anxiety; you can’t be tortured if your own existence is irrelevant to you.
You cannot be thwarted if you have no dreams — and it takes more than a big synapse count to give you any of those things. It takes some process, like natural selection, to wire those synapses into a particular configuration that says not I think therefore I am, but I am and I want to stay that way. We’re the ones building the damn things, after all. Just make sure that we don’t wire them up that way, and we should be able to use and abuse with a clear conscience.”
How about you – are you looking forward to running your Roomba ragged, or planning to kennel your Aibo when you go on holiday? [Image by Plutor]
[tags]robotics, rights, ethics, technology[/tags]
Skysails – Using wind to increase the power to ships
The Oil Drum has a fascinating article on the new developments by the German company SkySails. Their system flies a kite the size of a football field above a normal cargo vessel or tanker. The kites fly around 1000 metres up, where winds are higher and can help pull the ship along, cutting fuel needs and increasing speed. A German cargo firm, Beluga, will be making the first voyage using a SkySail this month.
The kite is computer controlled to get the best of the wind available and is attached to a rail running around the edge of the ship’s hull. The first test will use a 160 square metre sail and aim to save around 15% of available fuel. In later products the company aims to scale up to sails as big as 5000 square metres able to boost the speed of the biggest cargo vessel. With the kite sail pulling, the ship is able to spend less on the increasingly costly bunker fuel needed for engines. A US company, KiteSail, also produces a similar technology aimed more at the leisure market.
Bad, bad Lester Brown
So listening to Science Friday’s podcast today, one of the topics was Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute, an organization dedicated to preventing us from screwing up our planet any more than it already is. He’s come out with the latest version of his book, the 3rd edition of his book called, appropriately, “Plan B 3.0”. In it, he discusses the usual energy crisis, but he also carries it further, describing water wars, the effects of biofuels on food prices, etc. Brown also discusses some things that can be done to rectify these problems. It’s not terribly upbeat, however, as the fixes are rather more politically radical than anything we Americans have heard.
Ok, so it’s not SF, but the speculation is pretty good, and if it doesn’t motivate you to do something, it might just plant the seed for an entertaining story. Check out the book here, the first chapter or so is available free now, and the whole book will be released free later this week. Now that’s a promotional offer!
(image via EPI’s website)
Silicon haiku
Art must change anew –
for now we have machines which
compute our poems.
[Yes, I know that’s not a proper haiku, sorry. I had a late night last night.][Image by *slm*]
[tags]art, poetry, computers[/tags]