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.)

Comments

Re:Aren't you just another shameless tech self-pub

[nharmon]

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.

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 /.

Useless question.

[aussersterne]

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!