Addendum: Hydrogen Cars

I thought this was an interesting addition to our in class discussion about hydrogen cars that I read in my dad's copy of Technology Review.

After watching Al Gore's documentary (and trying to avoid completely giving myself into the fear mongering I so often mock Reader's Digest for) this does seem like an issue that we can't ignore. I feel like it's been so intensely politicized that I'm not completely sure if anyone's telling the truth any more, though.

My friend Travis who was in Searcy last week told about the scientific community's view on the issue as he had seen it represented in his Environmental Science course. He said something along the lines that scientists aren't arguing about whether we are the impetus of the current warming cycle or not; they're really only discussing how much longer we can wait before extensive damage to our planet is unavoidable. He told me that his teacher portrayed the issue as having been politicized by the media--both liberal and conservative (I'm trying to be as fair as possible here)--and that television news and the papers have really messed up what the best science is saying about global climate change.

I also got this idea from An Inconvenient Truth (surprisingly interesting and not as boring as I might've expected from Gore; I'm a little in love with him now, in fact), which has really gotten me to think more about my impact on the environment and to try to start making a few changes, so that maybe I can help part of this wonderful place we're supposed to steward.

I lost count and ran out of good titles

I'm going to make an assumption here: you meant to put Arthur C. Clark's name in the question about 2001 rather than Carl Sagan's. I did a little quick reading on Sagan, and couldn't find what the question mentions and we never mentioned him in class (not to say that he doesn't sound interesting; I want to read Pale Blue Dot now). Clark, though, does seem to have more to say specifically about the relationship between creator and created.

Clark's plot explores the dangers of allowing a purely "logical" thinking machine run large parts of human lives. I don't know what his actual views are, but some of what the film explores reminds me of Asimov's stories about robots, where a large portion of humanity refuses to trust thinking machines, forcing the company that builds them to deeply set the "3 Laws of Robotics" within their positronic brains. Clark's characters are afraid--rightfully so, I suppose--that HAL will usurp control of the ship from them. Asimov's robots generally behave, him trying to reassure the modern public that technology is nothing really to fear, that we will usually be able to have enough safeguards in place to keep things from getting too out of control (no Matrix stuff). Clark doesn't seem so sure, though.

I just read an anectdote about Clark being amazed at an IBM demonstration where they showed off a "vocoder" that could sing Daisy Bell. If seeing this inspired so much of his thinking for 2001, I can't imagine the fear that haunts him in connection to virtual worlds. Though it could be argued that the AI involved in many modern video games is still of a different kind than that proposed by either Clark or Asimov, the complexity of what's going on even in a sophisticated fighting simulator where the AI adapts to your personal style makes their proposals seem a little more reasonable than they might've even 15 years ago.

Though, I said that Asimov's machines generally behave, there are situations where things go wrong. In my reading of his stories, the most interesting of all the "malfunctions" is in the 1st Law of Robotics--a robot shall never harm, or through inaction allow harm to come to a human being. What happens when action will harm a human, but inaction will also harm a human? Generally, in his stories, the robot shuts down or breaks because of the paradox. But, there is one story (I've forgotten which) where he explores robots who have developed the ability to judge which course of action would be better, almost turning the 3 Laws into a religious creed that all robots must adhere to, but a few are learning to twist and pervert to malicious interpretations, much like usually happens in human religion.

Both Asimov and Clark seem to be at least a little wary of humans becoming too confident in their control over the things they've invented.

I'll explore a couple other things tomorrow.