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Ask the Robotic Psychiatrist
No, not Dr. Susan Calvin. She's a fictional character who appears in a number of Isaac Asimov's works. Dr. Joanne Pransky is real, although she happily admits that she's modeled her career on the fictional Dr. Calvin. There is plenty of show biz razzle-dazzle (and humor) in Dr. Pransky's shtick -- she's been a judge on BattleBots and an engaging guest on many talk shows -- but there are hard academic underpinnings to it all, and she is as qualified as any living human being to answer your questions (one per post, please) about robot behavior and human-robot relationships. We'll send her 10 - 12 of the highest-moderated questions and have her answers back to you in about a week. (No hard-tech question, please. Those would go to a robotic internist or robotic orthopedist.)
Could a computer or robot be said to have a "mind" the way a human does?
What is the difference between "mind" and "software"?
It occurs to me that there may be technology to make robots appear to be human before there is technology to make them act human. Do you feel there's a need to pressure the industry to make sure their robots only appear as human as they behave, so that people do not have incorrect expectations about what the machines can do?
-- Fratz, human
Going even further, I am curious what "Dr" Pransky's degree is in. She calls herself the world's first robotic "psychiatrist". Well, real world psychiatrists go to medical school. So aside from being experts on how the mind works, they also know quite a bit about psysiology, and biochemistry. Funny, Roblimo says we need to leave out the hard-tech questions. Why? If psychiatrists are doctors the same as any other, than a robot psychiatrist should be an engineer the same as any other.
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Maybe she didn't go to Medical school. Real world Psychologists have graduate degrees in the field of Psychology. Since she calls herself a Dr.m, I'm assuming she finished a PhD (if she didn't attend medical school). What was her dissertation about?
What a scam it is when slashdot helps some chick stroke her ego and doesn't have the credentials to back it all up. Of course, we have unfortunately come to expect this from
There is no concept of numbers of human being armed is the first law (the only concept ressembling that would be the law 0 that Daniel "invented"). There is some chance that the first part of the law will be evaluated first.
So like most human being (there have been many studies on the subject), the robot will probably choose to stay passive if this kind of situation arise.
Either way, like most human being, the robot will probably be messed up in some way and need the help of a robot psychologist to help him cope with the effects of his decision.
These are judgments even humans are unable to make cleanly or clearly. Entire panels of professional medical ethicists are routinely unable to agree on whether this or that process or product harms or hurts humans, which humans, and whether that harm or hurt protects the existence of the species in the long run or sabotages it.
Medical technology, genetically modified foods, physician-assisted suicide, abortion, the spread of electronics-based technology, nuclear power, invasion of Iraq...
This is basically Ethical Paradoxes 101; before we can program this sort of thing into machines, we'd have to be able to reason it all out ourselves!
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
My question has to do with sanity. Specifically is it possible for an AI to be insane? To elaborate, any artificial intelligence is going to require very sophisticated algorythms. These algorythms are going to likely have significant components focused on logical consistency as it is much easier to handle logically consistent concepts then the fuzzy ugly ones we humans deal with. There is a language called lojban I believe that is completely unambiguous. If you were to translate human input into lojban as an intermediate step in having the AI handle input then you would end up with no ambiguity. The reduction in ambiguity would make it very difficult for the AI to misunderstand or deceive itself (Assuming the translation were correct). Since instany seems to be based in large part on the ability to self deceive the removal of self deception from the input along with the need to keep things as logical and self consistent as possible internally would tend to argue to me that insanity in a functional AI would be very unlikely.
Given that we have become dependent on technology both psychologically (entertainment, information, communication) and physically (medical devices, jobs, manufacturing), at what point would you consider our species having "branched off" to become, for lack of a better word, "cyborgs"?
Given that a huge number of women consider their husband or boyfriend watching porn and masturbating by himself "cheating", I think we can safely assume the answer is "yes". Sue Johansen's show "Talk Sex With Sue" deals with that "issue" nearly every week - some woman calls in freaked by finding her boyfriend/husband's secret porn stash. Humanform sexual robots would definitely be considered cheating. I'd venture to guess that they'd be even more freaked out, because a well designed robot could have a level of physical perfection and skill that no human woman could possibly match. The true Turing test would be, not mearly whether a human can communicate with an AI, but whether a human could fall in love with one.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Though she is not really not a doctor, Pransky says, tongue-in-cheek, she is proactively paving the way for an emotionally healthy environment for the robots of the future.
She's not a doctor, in any field.
But her real mission is to help people to understand the issues that will arise in a world where highly skilled, competent, and sensitive robots will play an integral role.
Nor is she dealing with any real-world issues in the field of robotics or technology.
My guess is she's spending some time ramping up her PR in order to cash in on the latest summer blockbuster. I'm sure someone with her dubious credentials will be a hot item on all the daytime talk shows that week.
You fail to understand the reason for Asimov's laws. It wasn't to build better robots. It was to build better stories.
The 3 Laws exist to create a locked room murder mystery style story. (You know the sort. The body is found dead, locked in a room, that could only be locked from the inside. So how was he killed?)
Asimov set up the locked room (i.e. robots can't hurt us under these rules), and then found every way he could to break them in the process of creating interesting stories that no one else was writing. He came to own that field, and his name will forever be associated with it. A nice form of immortality.
But it's easy to see how unworkable in real life such rules would be. Take, for example, the Second Law. You've got a robot you bought for about the price of a new BMW 7-series, and the first person who comes along and orders it to follow them home takes it away from you. Yeah, right!
I'd quit considering Asimov's Laws to the the Gold Standard of how to build a robot. After all, who wants as many problems with their own robots as his had with his through all his stories?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Anybody who takes the time to register the phrase "World's First Robotic Psychiatrist®" really should have their head examined. I should also mention that Susan Calvin started out her 'career' as a mathematician. Positronic brains were origianally mapped out using complex equations, and that was part of Susan Calvin's diagnostic toolkit. My question to Dr. Joanne is what field of mathematics did she study that led her to her current career. I see from her website that she has done some sales and marketing for Sankyo, was the creative math that most Sales and Marketing types employ useful?