Is the world ready for the self-aware robot?
Published: 12 Apr 2005 19:25 BST
Are we really ready for humanoid robots, to have something that's not us, it's not what we've known for centuries, living with us?
I do not think so and that is why I wrote my book now. I really didn't expect that, but when I started on my first chapter and suddenly started talking about war, I realised that we are not even capable to assign each other personhood — we are lousy at that. I think as long as we are not capable of assigning [all] humans personhood, we obviously will not be capable of assigning robots personhood. But I think the whole question about whether or not we should helps us then to consider the question of human personhood.
So why do we build robots then? I mean, if it's so hard, so expensive and we're not sure we're really ready for them, why do we build them?
There's really a lot of motivation. First of all, simply, it's fun. It's fun to build cool machines. I just love to build something that moves and that just does something.
The second thing is, the whole idea of building artificial counterparts to humans is a very old one. You know, you find that in Greek mythology, you find that in the golem tradition, you find that even in Egypt. The idea to construct a counterpart, a mechanical counterpart, I think is a very fascinating one.
The third one is the whole idea of trying to understand ourselves by rebuilding ourselves. Especially through that building of embodied machines, we have learned so much about the body and so much about our capability of empathy and social interactions and stuff. So, that's pretty powerful. Then I think really we have lost — that is now the theologian speaking, obviously — but we have lost our connection to God and we have become a very lonely species, we don't have any partners with whom we can interact, because we stopped interacting with God, and stopped being close to God. So I think building robots in our image is kind of on the same page as searching for extraterrestrial intelligence and trying to understand dolphins and chimps. The whole idea that we want to — at least some of us want to — understand other beings and otherness.
Humans have two tendencies. The one tendency is only to be with people who are like-minded and reject everything new and different, but on the other hand, we are a very curious species and we want to know how people from different worlds and beings who are different from us feel.
[Robots] are scary because they are potentially threatening to our complacency and to our superiority, but at the same time they are never-ending fascinating because they make us think about ourselves in a different way, and that's cool.
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