QOTD: monkeys vs robots, wrt truth/logic
June 22nd, 2010
“That clear response, shorn of the ambiguities of presumption or prudence, would be the one given by a computer or a calculator and would be the only one that their inflexible, honest natures, that of the computer and the machine, would have allowed themselves, but we are dealing here with human beings, and human beings are known universally as the only animals capable of lying, and while it is true that they sometimes lie out of fear and sometimes out of self-interest, they also occasionally lie because they realize, just in time, that this is the only means available to them of defending the truth.”
– Jose Saramago, Seeing
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then why do robots keep lying to me
yes, good pointing out the flaw in this logic, in that robots are made by humans.
it also always irks me whenever people say that “humans are the only animals that…” and then are almost always incorrect. for example, the viceroy butterfly has evolved to look like the poisonous monarch butterfly so birds don’t eat it…so it’s whole statement of who it is in the world – “I am a Monarch!” – is a lie. and it’s a lie told for a lot of the same reasons that we all tell lies – to protect our ass in a scary world
. we’re all animals (and if we’re making the robots, they have some animalness about them too…).