As the field of Artificial Intelligence continues to make progress, there is a question of what protocols should be developed to make sure such developments are accomplished in a responsible way.

NEW YORK, Aug. 30 (UPI) -- In the NASA video called "Seven Minutes of Terror," which famously went viral over the last month, Tom Rivellini, one of the engineers in charge of the landing, outlines its eye-popping difficulty.

As he says, the Mars lander had to go "from 13,000 miles per hour to zero, in perfect sequence, perfect choreography, [with] perfect timing, and the computer has to do it all by itself, with no help. ... If any one thing doesn't work just right, it's game over."

The idea of having a computer do it "all by itself," with just 500,000 lines of computer code to allow its artificial brain to work, is at the core of engineering agony.

After their years of hard work and emotional and monetary investment (to the tune of $2.5 billion), the humans in charge had to leave the most crucial part of the mission to an artificial proxy. And they were not exactly sure if this proxy would work the way they intended, because there was no way to test it completely.

This situation illustrated two pressing issues regarding the development of digital servants: our apparently perennial insecurities about using them and whether we are too hasty to rely on them.

The idea of creating artificially intelligent proxies to do what humans cannot -- because the job is too dirty, dangerous or dreary, is a surprisingly old one. It goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks and it reappears in every age in slightly different forms.

In his "Politics," Aristotle reminds his audience that the blacksmith-god Hephaestus made robot-like serving stands that could move around the banquet halls of the gods by themselves; and then he ponders the idea of making intelligent machines, such as weaving looms, that could "obey and anticipate" the will of their makers.

In the Middle Ages, stories appear about famous philosophers who make artificial servants. One such story is about Pope Sylvester II, who was also a very accomplished mathematician and inventor. Medieval contemporaries claim that Sylvester had made a talking brass head that could predict future events and could also outperform humans at mathematics.

In Shakespeare's time we have Robert Greene's play depicting the creation of a similarly precocious metal head. This lineage of artificial servants picks up again in the early 20th century most famously with Karel Capek's play of the 1920's "R.U.R.: Rossum's Universal Robots," in which the term "robot" -- a Czech word meaning "slave" or "worker" -- was first used. Rossum's world is one in which Earth's citizens have come to rely on intelligent robots for everything.

Originally posted here:

Outside View: The Mars Landing and Artificial Intelligence