Cartoon  904

It is amazing, but then again not. We have to remember the times. In the 1950s the Cold War was gearing up. We feared at any moment we would destroy ourselves. We believed we were not capable of managing our own affairs. Therefore the movie plot of the 1950s version of “The Day the Earth Stood Still” is not so surprising.

The plot was that an Alien came here to warn us. The alien was part of a community of worlds that created a race of autonomous destructive robots. The imperative of the robots was to utterly destroy any aggressor world. The robots could not be tampered with or dissuaded from their imperative. I imagine ‘sorry’ or it was an out of control faction would not cut it. You would still be a cinder. The alien was issuing a dire warning. We were technologically about to enter this sphere of control and would be subject to the same rules.

There is a bigger message here. A recognition that humans are incapable of managing things for the general welfare. We need a parent. Our system of justice is chicanery. There are studies that throw everything in doubt. There are simple examples of being able to convince witnesses of what they did not see, of witnesses executing wish fulfillment and many other things that make a system based on witness testimony suspect. Second, we can see over and over again that money determines the outcome in our justice system. The very rich keep appealing until they get a verdict more to their liking. They later come back and even have that overturned. Money, which equates to legal offense, is why minorities are overwhelmingly convicted. The other profound reasons are racism and politics.

If we had the capability to turn over our justice system to an autonomous tamper proof Artificial Intelligence neural network, would we? Absolutely not! We would never give up the ability to “game” the system.

But notice I said administer justice and not the law. The law is often not just. Suppose someone who glanced at their cell phone hit someone and got 30 years. Suppose the CEO and Board of Directors to increase the dividend slightly of an insurance company raised rates and dropped people. The result was 10,000 people dead or destitute. They are not culpable under the law. But what is just in these two circumstances?