Asimov and the Higgs Boson

I was just reading an article about artificial intelligence (which I’m not linking to – it’s not the point of this blog and, quite frankly, I didn’t understand it- something about computers being able to recognize a picture of a cat without being told it was a cat) and the author brought up Isaac Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics, seemingly for no particular reason except to show that he’d read Asimov.  The 3 Laws of Robotics are:

Outlaw Robot

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.                                                                                                                                            I’ll get to the reason I think this is all bullshit in a second, but let me digress and tell my favorite Asimov anecdote here.  I was reading an interview with him and he said he hated it when fans told him their favorite story was “Nightfall” because he’d written it when he was 17 and it was like saying he hadn’t improved as a writer since then.  The title didn’t mean anything so I got an old anthology down from the shelf, found the story and, inside of a paragraph or two, remembered…oh, yeah, that’s my favorite Asimov story.                                                                                           Anyway, the point of my blog tonight is that Asimov’s 3 Laws are not actually laws, but a plot device.  They’re not even a real thing.  I would hope that, in future, when we can make artificially intelligent robots, we would program them to not kill people, but that’s a decision that hasn’t been made yet.  Actually, I’m pretty sure that in that future there will be evil scientists building killer robots just as soon as the technology allows and it becomes cost effective.  People haven’t really evolved much morally over the last 100,000 years, I don’t expect them to in the next 1,000.         So, the 3 Laws of Robotics is just a phrase, and it’s silly to take it literally as if it was a real thing.                                                                                                                       Which brings us to the Higgs Boson, or “God Particle.”  Lots of comment boards are filled with comments from people saying “See, even scientists admit that God exists,” or, on the other hand, people saying “Here is proof that God doesn’t exist.”               Nothing of the sort.  It proves that something which has been nicknamed, by human scientists, “The God Particle” exists.                                                                     The map is not the landscape and words are not actual things.  Let’s keep it straight.