Domo Arigato (day 25)

The dream of robot slaves.   There's been lots of talk lately about robots that can walk, run, stay balanced, go up stairs, serve coffee, chop vegetables.    Alongside the talk about new robot abilities there's been nervous hand-wringing about the ethics of having robots among us.  It's funny to me because I actually got into computing science because of a sort of fascination with telling the computer what to do.  Write a program, press enter, and it does exactly what you specified.  At that time, the computer was a semi-conscious thing for me.   I had no real knowledge of the inner workings so it was a capricious being, fighting yet giving in with the right incantation.  I still feel that way but now I know the innards so it has lost a bit of its romance.   So I wonder if acquiring a robot to chop vegetables for me and do laundry might not be a version of my first encounter with the Commodore 64.  Mysterious yet pliable, my robot frenemy.   Here of course I'm talking of the benign affect of telling a robot what to do.   The difference between a robot and a computer is in the potential for harm.  Motility takes computers way beyond the harm of computer viruses and privacy invasion.  Sentience and free will adds a whole level of unpredictability which may swing it towards harmful behaviour.

Asimov's laws three laws (don't harm humans, obay humans, preserve thyself) as a starting point for ethics but they have been found lacking it seems mostly on the basis of the robot's sentience or free will getting in the way.  The conundrum is that we are creating something stronger than us and expect two things:  that it will not harm us and that it will harm the ones we don't like.   It's the fantasy of the gun as a defensive device, again.   We are afraid that we will create the robots a little too much like us and have to deal with mood swings on a scale beyond prozac.  So we need to ask ourselves who's creating the robots?  What are their intentions?  It's unlikely a dove can come out of a hawk's nest so we really need to choose the root genetics of this new line really carefully.  We should feel revulsion at drone attacks.  We should feel disturbed by a robot that looks like a girl and is pleased to repeat any recorded positions when you tap her on the head.  These are real affective behaviours and abilities.  Our relationship with robots informs and is informed by our relationship with other beings.   It would be infinitely better to amplify the best in human behaviour.

A song for this post.