Is the world ready for the self-aware robot?
Published: 12 Apr 2005 19:25 BST
Are there classes of robots? Are there, if you will, social strata — you have things like Roomba the vacuum cleaner, and you have assembly line machines, but then you also have at least the goal of creating something that's more like a person, a humanoid.
Roughly you can distinguish between autonomous robots and nonautonomous robots. Autonomous robots are those who kind of decide for themselves what action they're going to take, and that is definitely the robotic stuff that I'm interested in, and the nonautonomous robots are the ones on assembly lines that just do their thing. Roomba is a highly efficient and highly autonomous robot — it just follows its plan, it just vacuums the floor and that's pretty powerful. You could just switch it on and there is no danger that it will do something to anything, and so we can build probably grass-cutting machines, lawnmowers, the same way and —
I'm little scared by the idea of a lawnmower going off by itself.
Well, I think you need probably a very good fence. *Laughs*
But the idea is, all that research comes out of the study of human intelligence or insect intelligence or animal intelligence, because what makes us all intelligent in a way is that we can cope autonomously with our environment and with its requirements. That is why we survive — if we weren't autonomous, we wouldn't survive — and so for me there is only a gradual difference between a robot like Roomba and the humanlike robot. I mean the difference is huge, obviously, but it's a difference in complexity but not a real qualitative difference.
Another common image people have of AI, and robots, I suppose, is HAL in "2001 - A Space Odyssey" — a very smart machine, smarter than people perhaps, but it's a computer. What's the distinction between computers and robots?
Because I focus so strongly on the body, that distinction is actually extremely important because the robot shares with us our world. With computers, we have to enter their world, via keyboard, we have to speak their language, we have to do their command. [With] robots on the other hand, and that's a big part of this whole autonomous robot research, you have machines that share our world and enter our space, understand our signs, understand things like pointing and gesturing, understand natural language... I think the reason why HAL is so powerful is because of the physical attributes — the eye and the voice. Whenever HAL speaks we hear this gorgeous voice and see this glaring red eye, and so we have physical attributes to anthropomorphise.
I think people are more comfortable with the idea of something like a C-3PO or an R2-D2 — cuter sounds, the face is a little easier on the eyes, perhaps.
The funny thing is that people like R2-D2 more than C-3PO. And I think that is because R2-D2 has emotions and C-3PO just comes across as this annoying, British-accented sort of constantly complaining being. It's not cute. C-3PO is not cute and therefore we love R2-D2 much more.
I want to ask you about the ethics of people working with robots, using robots. Should we build robots to do our dirty work? If we're going to think about according them personhood, are we ready to send them into combat to do mine sweeping and things like that?
I think the attempt to build autonomous robots that are like us, that are self-aware and interactive and all that kind of stuff, should be very distinct from the question, for what should we use them. What I mean is, if you have a non-aware mine-searching robot who is just autonomous and does its job, I think that's fabulous, and that's a very, very good thing. But I think if we ever reach a kind of robotic skill where the robots are actually like us, aware of their surroundings and in social relationships and all that, we would have to treat them as an intelligent co-species. And that means we couldn't expect them to do anything that we couldn't expect from other human beings.
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