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Ethical Questions For The Age Of Robots
balancedi writes "Should robots eat? Should they excrete? Should robots be like us? Should we be like robots? Should we care? Jordan Pollack, a prof in Comp Sci at Brandeis, raises some unusual but good questions in an article in Wired called 'Ethics for the Robot Age.'"
In the spirit of procrastination (at work) I will attempt to answer these questions myself.
Should robots eat?
If they must eat, they should eat. I'm not sure I would like our food supply to be in competition with a bunch of robots. I would rather them simply sunbathe to sustain their daily energy requirements. I mean... let's try to perfect the human condition not worsen it. Imagine a billion hungry robots. They aren't going to sit around and take it like poor starving nations seem to do. They will revolt and imprison us! They'll take what they need. If they do not, they'll be at the very least competing with humanity for survival. Who do you think would win that battle?
Should they excrete?
If they must. Otherwise, wouldn't it be better if they recycled the energy?
Should robots be like us?
What like depressed and self destructive? Not sure I would want a bunch of those competing with the already self destructive people who exist in the world. Don't we have enough war? Don't we have enough excesses? Do we need robots to be this way? Who knows... maybe there could be a good reason for it, but like TreeBeard, I'm going to have to pretend that because I don't understand it, that it could be correct.
Should we be like robots?
If the programming is good, then yes, we could stand to be more like good programmed robots who obey their masters. But what about the arts? What about creative expression and free will? These are highly valued archetypes and many human beings would fight to the death to preserve them. Maybe it would be cool to have implants that augment human development positively. But I think it should be up to the person. No matter how large your data storage capacity is, or how fast you can process data -- wisdom will always be the true litmus test.
Should we care?
If we should, we won't. I think we should care about people and society and protecting freedom, but because I feel this way, it makes it very promising for someone to try and deprive me of this in order to gain something I have. So if I don't care, then it doesn't matter and I am more free. I care about evolution, being that the evolution towards a more robotic usage will be the most likely direction of humanity, but I do not have that level of intelligence to know what is the right direction of evolution. Not even a God has that level of intelligence (which is likely why we have free will, if you believe in religion and God). We are able to evolve, as we always have, through necessity.
However, Einstein said that humanity would have to be able to augment our physical forms with robotics in order to pioneer deep space. He said there would be no other way to handle the forces of nature out that way. So I guess the question is... do we want to die off on this rock, or do we want to live?
If you want to live, then support robotics and the direction of humanity towards that paradigm.
There's increasing evidence that we're the dominant lifeform on this planet because we exterminated the Neanderthals 30,000 years ago. We were smarter than they were, and that enabled us to put the furs of dead animals around our bodies so we could gather resources from areas that were under ice and snow - areas inaccessible to the Neanderthal.
What the hell??? Neanderthals were specifically adapted to the cold-weather climate of Europe, and it's a fact they made and used furs as clothes, fashioned jewelry and spears, and so forth. There is no evidence whatsoever that they were any less intelligent than homo sapiens. Not a single smidgeon, regardless of the re-revisionism back to the thinking of the early 1900's that seems to be in vogue.
The only rational explanation I've seen for why homo sapiens won out is a) Neanderthals probably didn't breed as fast or as frequently as homo sapiens did (given the smaller number of skeletons of children found as compared to their human cousins), and b) there's little evidence that Neanderthals warred with one another, and a great deal of evidence that homo sapiens did. This makes sense; social conflict that devolves to violence among humans can be non-deadly, but among Neanderthals - who were much, much stronger than any human, even Arnie - a single violent act could easily lead to death. One punch to the face by a Neanderthal and you don't just have a broken nose; you have a crushed skull and your brains oozing out all over the ground.
Relative levels of intelligence most likely had nothing to do with the demise of Neanderthals. It's more likely that low breeding rates and a lack of will to commit organized, regular genocide were the culprits. Homo sapiens weren't brighter; they just bred like rabbits and were more violent.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?