Terminator and Philosophy: I'll Be Back, Therefore I Am by William Irwin, Kevin S. Decker, Richard Brown
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egoists to give up some of their freedom to pursue any goal they like and to accept social, lawful restrictions. Given that no party in the state of nature is guaranteed to win the fight, and given that we are all fighting over the same limited resources, it makes sense to submit to a single governing power to keep order. Hobbes argued that this power should be an absolute sovereign who is above the very law he is empowered to enforce. To see how this could apply to our mechanical creations, note sci-fi author Isaac Asimov’s solution to the dangers of robots pursuing self-preservation. 8 He proposes three basic robotic commandments, with the first rule of Robot Club being “Robots cannot harm humans!” The second and third rules of Robot Club have to do with robot self-preservation and carrying out human dictates, but obedience to these rules is always secondary to “Don’t harm humans.” For Asimov, the sovereign is the robots’ designer. A robot’s failure to follow the laws of robots leads to dire consequences. The sovereign is internalized, but an all-powerful force all the same. Of course, even this drastic solution didn’t actually work out, so thank God for Will Smith!
But imposing an all-powerful sovereign is not the only way that reasonable cooperation can take us out of the state of nature. Recent studies in game theory show how the strategic moves of rational players in a designed “game” produce useful (or less useful) outcomes. One of the central interactive games studied is the “prisoner’s dilemma.” Consider two crooks, arrested by the police. If both remain silent in the interrogation, they can be held for a week and released ( habeas corpus assumed!). However, if one rats out the other, the rat gets released right away while the other (known as “the sucker”) gets the full weight of the law and is sent up the river for ten years. If both rat, they each get five years—busted, but with time off for being a narc, or informant. Both crooks know the options. If you were one of them, what should you do in this situation? If you keep quiet, your partner in crime might rat you out, and you’ll be the sucker. And even if you both turn narc, it’s still better than being the sucker, so you ought to rat. If only you could trust each other to keep quiet! If the crooks could agree to cooperate; then they’d both do better in the long run. So it seems there’s good reason to develop a binding code, one that ensures that the crooks never rat on each other. In this way, you both give up some of your freedom, but you’re also both better off in the end. There is reason even for egoistic crooks to cooperate.
The prisoner’s dilemma can be simulated on a computer. It can be run over and over again—this is called the “iterated prisoner’s dilemma.” The iterated version allows for the spontaneous development of cooperation, even in the absence of an overarching Godfather-like sovereign. Game theorist Robert Axelrod found that the best strategy for dealing with the prisoner’s dilemma is one called “tit for tat.” It’s a sort of “do unto others” type of deal: you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. 9 The strategy starts by cooperating in the first round. On the next round, I simply do whatever it is that my competitor did in the last round. If he cooperated last round, I cooperate this round. If he ratted last time, I rat this time. Eventually, the strategy will lead to a stable cooperative situation. We begin to trust each other. We do not snitch. We keep it real.
Interestingly, it turns out that a slight variation on tit for tat is even better. It’s called “tit for tat with forgiveness.” This strategy allows your opponent a few freebies, with the understanding that perhaps he didn’t really mean to be a snitch, it just happens sometimes. Hey, whaddayagonnado? This avoids the problem known as a “death spiral” of endless ratting, in which all trust is lost
But imposing an all-powerful sovereign is not the only way that reasonable cooperation can take us out of the state of nature. Recent studies in game theory show how the strategic moves of rational players in a designed “game” produce useful (or less useful) outcomes. One of the central interactive games studied is the “prisoner’s dilemma.” Consider two crooks, arrested by the police. If both remain silent in the interrogation, they can be held for a week and released ( habeas corpus assumed!). However, if one rats out the other, the rat gets released right away while the other (known as “the sucker”) gets the full weight of the law and is sent up the river for ten years. If both rat, they each get five years—busted, but with time off for being a narc, or informant. Both crooks know the options. If you were one of them, what should you do in this situation? If you keep quiet, your partner in crime might rat you out, and you’ll be the sucker. And even if you both turn narc, it’s still better than being the sucker, so you ought to rat. If only you could trust each other to keep quiet! If the crooks could agree to cooperate; then they’d both do better in the long run. So it seems there’s good reason to develop a binding code, one that ensures that the crooks never rat on each other. In this way, you both give up some of your freedom, but you’re also both better off in the end. There is reason even for egoistic crooks to cooperate.
The prisoner’s dilemma can be simulated on a computer. It can be run over and over again—this is called the “iterated prisoner’s dilemma.” The iterated version allows for the spontaneous development of cooperation, even in the absence of an overarching Godfather-like sovereign. Game theorist Robert Axelrod found that the best strategy for dealing with the prisoner’s dilemma is one called “tit for tat.” It’s a sort of “do unto others” type of deal: you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. 9 The strategy starts by cooperating in the first round. On the next round, I simply do whatever it is that my competitor did in the last round. If he cooperated last round, I cooperate this round. If he ratted last time, I rat this time. Eventually, the strategy will lead to a stable cooperative situation. We begin to trust each other. We do not snitch. We keep it real.
Interestingly, it turns out that a slight variation on tit for tat is even better. It’s called “tit for tat with forgiveness.” This strategy allows your opponent a few freebies, with the understanding that perhaps he didn’t really mean to be a snitch, it just happens sometimes. Hey, whaddayagonnado? This avoids the problem known as a “death spiral” of endless ratting, in which all trust is lost
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