Geez, I can't leave you guys alone for a minute or you add 4 pages to a discussion while I'm not looking!
It is a simple matter to "hardwire" something. Don't want it to kill? Don't give it any way to. No arms, no legs, no mobility, and definitely, no nuclear-powered-slingshot attachements! You might limit who it comes into contact with too: keep away from raving lunatics who might be convinced to do something. No connection to environmental controls (I don't feel like steeping outside for a nice breath of fresh vacuum today), and we don't want it copying itself to the internet.
Another thing we can do is be sure that the stuff it's running on doesn't exist anywhere else in the world; that makes it a lot harder for it to transfer itself and start taking over, like in T3. Of course, Skynet had proven itself as reliable while still sub-sentient, and so was entrusted with a lot of things, but they didn't put in enough failsafes.
One must remember that the majority of sci-fi isn't truly to give a glimpse into the future, it is actually to warn us of potential problems (albeit in an entertaining way). BECAUSE of the Terminator movies, and those of its ilk, we are very unlikely to make such things; we will be much more careful. BECAUSE of ID4 or WotW, we will not instantly assume all aliens are friendly, but BECAUSE of Contact, we will not assume they are all unfriendly. And so on.
Crap. I had another minor epiphany while reading all your comments, and now I've forgotten what it was. You see what the last one did; this one would have been at least as big.
While I'm thinking of it, I recall the Engineer asking what would be the use of a limited AI would be. Well, I for one would not want to HAVE TO be nice to every bloody piece of equipment I own. I am nice to the expensive stuff, and to the dangerous stuff, and to the stuff I like, but there have been times when something pissed me off and I felt no compunction about breaking it or trashing it, aside from the monetary loss. I would not throw my favorite handgrenade against a wall if I got pissed at it, because I don't want it to blow up and kill me! By the same token, it's going to take a while to train an AI secretary to tell the difference between meaningful communications and spam and crap (spam being worse than crap), and that may get frustrating when it *accidentally* posts my contact information to every friggin spammer on the planet.
That is most certainly an offense worthy of destruction, but if you give the bloody thing power over you, well, it makes it harder to give it its just deserts.
And I wouldn't necessarily feel the same about killing a real person, or at least some one I'd grown to like a little bit.
Plus, it's cheaper and more effective to have several devices that do one or two things really well than to have one device that supposedly does it all. In THEORY, the multi-purpose tool is better, but in practice, it's not. That's why computers have yet to replace all other things. It's just BETTER to have a TV, DVD player, blender, light switch, garage door opener, MP3 player, dog walker, and God knows what else, all in seperate packages, since apparently humans cannot make reliable multi-function tools even when paid to do it, but they seem pretty good at making single-purpose tools. (God help you if you entrust your spacecraft OS to MS!!! You'll get what you deserve, I know that much.)
Ah, frig-noodles, I still can't think of it, and I skimmed back over the posts that supposedly inspired me. Oh well, I guess the world just won't be a better place now. Not like that's not the first time.
