The Off Topic

****** Amen and amen. ******

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Happy belated cake day @prfallon69 !!!

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Thank you everyone for your good wishes.

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More cake enjoy to the birthday members

Hey
What’s up
With Your Handle?
@SebastienChiu
Seba? Sebasti? Bastión?

Plain ol pennstac wants to know.

What is going on

I think he’s asking if it’s a coincidence that your forum name is the same as your name. What are the odds. :joy:

I was seeing truncated versions of your name (and nobody else’s) when looking at the forum on my iPhone. this included @Sebi and @Sebasti

This happened not only in the message section but on the pop-ups when you try to call someone out.

I wondered if you were editing your name, as some others have done.

Oh come on, Paisley, I know your real name isn’t say “Dave”.

"Open up, it's Dave, I've got the stuff."

“Dave’s not here.”

“I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that”

Which movie?

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Same one with “Open the pod bay doors” Did you know that if you add one ordinal letter from HAL you get IBM?

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Ha, I was certain you’d know that! :grinning: And yes of course I know that!

I’m a big fan of both Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke, and have seen 2001 many times. It of course is one of the all time greatest movies made.

I watched the 4K UHD remaster at some point in the last year, and it was fantastic! Everything was cleaned up, the space scenes looked much better, and except for the clothes and certain dialogue elements it still feels current. It is such a masterful, thought provoking film, and Clarke was a brilliant writer. His “sci-fi” is always realistic and science based, and he envisioned a number of “futuristic” things that have been already realized technologically.

I first saw the film in the theater when I was a kid with my Dad, I must have been 9 or 10. I remember it absolutely blowing me away, and it made a very vivid impression. Some of it was over my head (the obelisk/slab gateway scenes with the apes, us proto-humans!), but it was my first hallucinogenic experience! :laughing:

Anyway, a timeless, classic film!

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I saw it in Cinerama, when it came out.

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A couple of articles in today’s NY Times on the Microsoft Bing AI are absolutely fascinating, and quite disturbing. It’s a snapshot of one take on the current “state of the art”. I realize it’s an early beta, still…

These articles point back to a profound challenge, which is how to program an “ethical framework”, or at least realize the great writer Isaac Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics, which I quote from Wikipedia:

"First Law
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

These form an organizing principle and unifying theme for Asimov’s robotic-based fiction, appearing in his Robot series, the stories linked to it, and his Lucky Starr series of young-adult fiction. The Laws are incorporated into almost all of the positronic robots appearing in his fiction, and cannot be bypassed, being intended as a safety feature. Many of Asimov’s robot-focused stories involve robots behaving in unusual and counter-intuitive ways as an unintended consequence of how the robot applies the Three Laws to the situation in which it finds itself. Other authors working in Asimov’s fictional universe have adopted them and references, often parodic, appear throughout science fiction as well as in other genres.

The original laws have been altered and elaborated on by Asimov and other authors. Asimov himself made slight modifications to the first three in various books and short stories to further develop how robots would interact with humans and each other. In later fiction where robots had taken responsibility for government of whole planets and human civilizations, Asimov also added a fourth, or zeroth law, to precede the others:

Zeroth Law
A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

The Three Laws, and the zeroth, have pervaded science fiction and are referred to in many books, films, and other media. They have affected thought on ethics of artificial intelligence as well."

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I think I’ve read all of this. Looks like the articles have had difficulty with “The Stars Like Dust” and “The Currents of Space” which being quite early have some contradictions with the later Asimov universe. These are placed after the C/FE period in the first R. Daneel Olivaw books, but well before the Empire period. These were written in the early '50s., and the book that “preceeds” them in time is the 1985 Robots and Empire.

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Happy Cake Day @skeeb23

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Thank you for that! Enjoying the day at a disterillery and restaurant. :beers:

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Happy Birthday skeeb23!

Happy cake day, @skeeb23! Let us know how the distillery was!

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Yes @skeeb23 happy cake day and tell us what you remember about the distillery.

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