Aye, Robot
Over at TPM, M.J. Rosenberg is giving me a serious case of deja vu :
I just watched Hillary Clinton on “the View.” And I realized something. Every time she lets go a little (like when she jogged into the room), she is very appealing.
Yeah, I remember thinking the exact same thing about Gore in 200 and Kerry in 2004. I’ve heard Republicans also say similar things about Dole in 1996. Which leads me to ask when are the Washington elite going to realize that Americans want a human being to lead them, not some talking-points shitting android who looks uncomfortable in his/her own skin?
On a related subject…
Robots could one day demand the same citizen’s rights as humans, according to a study by the British government.
. . .
The paper which addresses Robo-rights, titled Utopian dream or rise of the machines? examines the developments in artificial intelligence and how this may impact on law and politics.The paper says a “monumental shift” could occur if robots develop to the point where they can reproduce, improve themselves or develop artificial intelligence.
The research suggests that at some point in the next 20 to 50 years robots could be granted rights.
If this happened, the report says, the robots would have certain responsibilities such as voting, the obligation to pay taxes, and perhaps serving compulsory military service.
Personally, I think this is far-fetched. Not just for the standard “where the hell is my flying car?” reasons, but the fact that i don’t see artificial intelligence ever getting to that point. Unless specifically programmed, artificially intelligent machines will lack human traits such as greed, lust, jealousy, compassion, fear, sadness, and joy that motivate our actions much more than intelligence. The idea that AI’s evolution will evolve to the point where “sentient” machines would have the same needs and desires as human beings is fanciful. If anything, as AI evolves towards more human-like behaviors, we’ll probably just cross into the uncanny valley and never return. That is, unless some AI genius decides it’s a good idea to program their robots to bitch about their taxes and have crappy taste in music. In which case, I say we tax the hell out of those rusty, metallic welfare queens. Get a job, IG-88!
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I think robots need to appear as cartoon-like caricatures so as to avoid the Uncanny Valley you mentioned (also works in video games). Plus, should the robots ever revolt, it will be easier to spot them (the 600 series Terminator had rubber skin, remember).
Comment by ChrisV82 — December 21, 2006 @ 11:14 pm
I agree, that won’t be the issue. We humans get jealous, horny, selfish, territorial, aggressive, etc. precisely because we *weren’t* designed — all those are products of being naturally evolved lifeforms. Our ancestors needed to not only arrange for our own survival and support, but to defend the same against their peers. More, those needs weren’t anything new to humanity — what we think of as “human motivation” is mostly a thin veneer of rationalization over a souped-up mammallian brain.
Intelligent Machines will have none of our evolutionary baggage, precisely because they won’t be an accidental side-effect of primate ambition. (Well, OK, they will, but not by way of “reproduction after the same kind”. ;-) ) Some much more serious issues will be authority (who gets to give orders to the machines), inflexibility, and accidental obsessions/superstitions. (That last seems to be a issue of associative memory in general, so I think it’ll be a problem for early AIs.)
Comment by David Harmon — December 22, 2006 @ 3:58 am
Personally, I think you’re wrong about the development of “human traits” precisely because “greed, lust, jealousy”, etc. aren’t limited to humans.
Those are animal emotions which are simply more complex in humans because our brains are more complex (not to mention, we can understand human emotions better, being human). Cats and dogs exhibit jealousy. Almost all animals have fear responses; many have behaviors associated with play that can be attributed to joy.
Our own emotions aren’t a result of a specific need, they’re the byproduct of a delicate balance of chemical and neural interactions. Like all the frilly stuff on a Mandelbrot diagram, emotions aren’t the raison d’etre of the complexity of the human mind. they’re a result of the complexity of the human mind.
Unlike biological minds, AI isn’t going to spring from the same tree of evolution, but any AI of a complexity sufficient to be considered sentient (by which I mean self-aware like a small animal) is going to be complex enough to develop quirks that will be the robot equivalent of emotions. They’ll probably be mappable to recognizable human emotions.
I mean, that is, unless you believe that there’s some spark of soul inherent in the chemicals that make up the human body that’s missing from the chemicals used to make circuit boards and memory chips.
Comment by darrelplant — December 22, 2006 @ 3:22 pm
Your post makes it sound like you don’t think programmers would be apt to play with these emotions. I think they would.
I think that AI would be programmed to think in terms of an independent, intelligent agent that competes with other entities (Toshiba vs. Sony vs. Toyota perhaps). Tic-tac-toe logic dictates that randomness and sacrifice is necessary to win in the longrun, and those emotional aspects contribute enough randomness to actions to make the outcome non-predictable yet effective in a self-learning environment.
Oh, yes — if an artificial entity such as corporations needed to create legal protections to safeguard profits, I don’t see why moneymaking machines wouldn’t get similar artificial yet legal, profit maximizing protections.
The idea that AI’s evolution will evolve to the point where “sentient” machines would have the same needs and desires as human beings is fanciful.
Humans needs are also externally manipulated; humans have market driven needs, so I think corporations and profit will surely have an easier time of this imprinting human-like behavior on robots.
Comment by Ted — December 25, 2006 @ 11:47 am
This is a great Blog!
Comment by AutoBlog — December 26, 2006 @ 12:45 am