Reid Hoffman: belief

Transcript context

…Asimov’s Three Laws — how good were they? I think they were really good, although they were out of conceptualization for a target. If I were to update them, and it’s a little bit like — to reveal my nerdishness — Giskard’s zeroth law. I think that what you really want in it is to parallel almost a Buddhist sense of the importance of life and sentience. That’s the kind of thing that you want if you’re creating really autonomous intelligences. I think the kind of Uncle Tom, if it really is a totally autonomous being — hence being careful about going into it — a new form of robot slaves is perhaps not ultimately where humanity would want to be. There’s not enough stress in them, I think, in what the robots are obliged to believe. A robot is free to believe something crazy and then act on it. That seems to me the biggest weakness of the law, at least what you see in the stories.…

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