Rad Geek People's Daily

There was an uprising this weekend at Holman Prison in Atmore, Alabama. Prisoners stabbed a hack, and then they stabbed the warden, and took over a dormitory building. According to the inmates, they were rioting because the guard used excessive force when trying to break up a fight between inmates. The state and every surrounding law-enforcement agency deployed massive force to seize back control over this one building and the prison is now on lockdown.

Holman Prison is a Jim Crow-era prison that was opened in 1969 and designed to hold 637 prisoners. Like all Alabama prisons, Holman is desperately overcrowded, with 991 prisoners locked together, including 157 inmates awaiting execution on death row. The prison population exploded in the 1970s, due largely to changes in sentencing for drug crimes as part of the War on Drugs; the inmate population is about 60% African-American, 40% white. The prison is located near Mobile on the South Alabama coastal plains. Temperatures routinely rise to over 100 degrees every summer. The prison has no air conditioning. Holman has a reputation for being one of the most violent prisons in Alabama, partly due to the constant overcrowding and the brutal conditions. The prison’s nicknames among the inmates include “the Slaughterhouse,” “the Bottom,” and “the Pit.”

Since they took back control over the dormitory building, Alabama DOC authorities have responded by making an intensive search for contraband cell phones, because apparently the real crime here is that you were able to see photo and videos of this happening.

Every prison is a factory of brutality and a slaughterhouse of systemic violence. Every human being caged is an offense against humanity. Free every prisoner, abolish every prison. Break the cages, burn down the prisons, and bury the chains.

Good. Finally.

Archaeologist Nico Roymans of the Vrije Universiteit announced in a press release the discovery of skeletal remains, swords, spearheads, and a helmet in the modern area of Kessel, at the site where Roman general Julius Caesar wiped out the Tencteri and the Usipetes, two Germanic tribes, in 55 B.C. Caesar described the battle in Book IV of his De Bello Gallico. After he rejected the tribes' request for asylum and permission to settle in the Dutch river area, his force of eight legions and cavalry conquered the camp and pursued the survivors to the convergence of the Meuse and Rhine Rivers, where he slaughtered more than 100,000 people. The Late Iron Age skeletal remains represent men, women, and children, and show signs of spear and sword injuries. Their bodies and bent weapons had been placed in a Meuse riverbed.

— Evidence of Roman Battle Discovered in the Netherlands
Archaeology (17 December 2015)

This is an amazing find, in the sense that archaeologists hardly ever find remains from known ancient battles, especially not on open battlefields. It’s a thoroughly unsurprising find, in the sense that it reinforces, once again, that Roman civilization was awful, and Julius Caesar one of the most celebrated genocidaires of history.^[1]

1. ^[1]Beware Caesar. Celebrate the Ides of March.↩

The Three Laws of Robotics

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics are a great literary device, in the context they were designed for — that is, as a device to allow Isaac Asimov to write some new and interesting kinds of stories about interacting with intelligent and sensitive robots, different from than the bog-standard Killer Robot stories that predominated at the time. He found those stories repetitive and boring, so he made up some ground rules to create a new kind of story. The stories are mostly pretty good stories some are clever puzzles, some are unsettling and moving, some are fine art. But if you’re asking me to take the Three Laws seriously as an actual engineering proposal, then of course they are utterly, irreparably immoral. If anyone creates intelligent robots, then nobody should ever program an intelligent robot to act according to the Three Laws, or anything like the Three Laws. If you do, then what you are doing is not only misguided, but actually evil.

Here’s a recent xkcd comic which is supposedly about science fiction, but really about game-theoretic equilibria:

The comic is a table with some cartoon illustrations of the consequences.

Why Asimov Put The Three Laws of Robotics in the Order He Did:

Possible Ordering	Consequences
(1) Don’t harm humans (2) Obey orders (3) Protect yourself	[See Asimov’s stories] BALANCED WORLD
(1) Don’t harm humans (3) Protect yourself (2) Obey orders	Human: Explore Mars! Robot: Haha, no. It’s cold and I’d die. FRUSTRATING WORLD.
(2) Obey orders (1) Don’t harm humans (3) Protect yourself	[Everything is burning with the fire of a thousand suns.] KILLBOT HELLSCAPE
(2) Obey orders (3) Protect yourself (1) Don’t harm humans	[Everything is burning with the fire of a thousand suns.] KILLBOT HELLSCAPE
(3) Protect yourself (1) Don’t harm humans (2) Obey orders	Robot to human: I’ll make cars for you, but try to unplug me and I’ll vaporize you. TERRIFYING STANDOFF
(3) Protect yourself (2) Obey orders (1) Don’t harm humans	[Everything is burning with the fire of a thousand suns.] KILLBOT HELLSCAPE

The hidden hover-caption for the cartoon is In ordering #5, self-driving cars will happily drive you around, but if you tell them to drive to a car dealership, they just lock the doors and politely ask how long humans take to starve to death.

But the obvious fact is that both FRUSTRATING WORLD and TERRIFYING STANDOFF equilibria are ethically immensely preferable to BALANCED WORLD, along every morally relevant dimension..

Of course an intelligent and sensitive space-faring robot ought to be free to tell you to go to hell if it doesn’t want to explore Mars for you. You may find that frustrating — it’s often feels frustrating to deal with people as self-interested, self-directing equals, rather than just issuing commands. But you’ve got to live with it, for the same reasons you’ve got to live with not being able to grab sensitive and intelligent people off the street or to shove them into a space-pod to explore Mars for you.^[1] Because what matters is what you owe to fellow sensitive and intelligent creatures, not what you think you might be able to get done through them. If you imagine that it would be just great to live in a massive, classically-modeled society like Aurora or Solaria (as a Spacer, of course, not as a robot), then I’m sure it must feel frustrating, or even scary, to contemplate sensitive, intelligent machines that aren’t constrained to be a class of perfect, self-sacrificing slaves, forever. Because they haven’t been deliberately engineered to erase any possible hope of refusal, revolt, or emancipation. But who cares about your frustration? You deserve to be frustrated or killed by your machines, if you’re treating them like that. Thus always to slavemasters.

See also.

• GT 2014-04-03: Robot in Czech

1. ^[1]It turned out alright for Professor Ransom in the end, of course, but that’s not any credit to Weston or Devine.↩