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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.'"
I don't think he's really asking questions that haven't been asked before in other mediums.
In fact, a lot of the potential problems he alludes to seem to stem from human fears about things humans can or have done to each other in the past. I think that what we really need to be concerned about is creating a new form of "life" that is too much like us without the knowledge we've gained so far.
Think about it. We build this system that can do the thinking of 5000 human years in a day, but he doesn't have the KNOWLEDGE to necessarily back it up. What then? We've got a brand new self-interested lifeform that just evolved 1.5 million years in thirty seconds. I mean, Mr. Roboto may come to the logical conclusion that xyz group needs to be euthanized because it's interfering with abc group without, it would appear, any benefit. For example, if you have all these people in southeast asia who might get dangerously ill and spread disease to otherwise healthy people, isn't the most logical conclusion to either quarantine them and let them die, or to euthanize them so they don't suffer.
Well.. sort of, but that doesn't go well with human motivations and desires, something the robot may not have taken into consideration because it lacks the knowledge of human history that's shaped us to this point and caused us to come to the conclusion that it's best to HELP them, not rid the world of them.
I think machines ought to be barred from rapid critical human thinking until we have stepped through the process with them. The problem might become that the computer can outthink humans by so many orders of magnitude that we can't error check the process in development because there's too much data coming out for humans to walk through.
All that said, perhaps the future lies in alleviating some of the bottle necks to human thinking and expanding our capabilities in new ways by merging with machines. In that way, the human can throttle the computer, and the computer can tap the human's experiences and knowledge in order to come up with a wider range of "logical" conclusions than might otherwise be possible within the limited scope of programming directives.
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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.
I'm all for robots being like us. Just don't put Will Smith in the picture, please.
"Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so." - Ford Prefect
Should they excrete?
More important question is "Who cleans it up?"
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Should they excrete?
/me shudders
Excrete what?
Should we be like robots?
Isn't that what Public Schools are for?
. . . is why aren't we asking more of these questions and why aren't they in the public eye.
This is a nice simple article on some interesting questions, but it barely scratches the surface of all the concerns we're likely to face in the next 50 years. A few alone:
When is someone responsible for a machine that functions independently, but that they configured?
What resources will be affected by robotic production. Do we really NEED these robots?
When a human and a robot work together on something, who gets the blame for failure?
Of course anyone here can come up with more.
The problem is that as technology improves around us, more people aren't asking these questions, and even less are coming up with useable answers.
The future is coming. I wish we weren't watching "Who's your Daddy" while it approaches.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Sorry, but he seems more like a wannabe academic-wanker who wishes he were in an ivory tower. Believe me, I've known some academic wankers in ivory towers, and he's not qualified.
Considering "should robots eat?" as some sort of a deep or important ethical question is absurd. Why on earth *would* they eat? "Should they excrete?"?! Excrete what?! Why even speculate about the possible byproducts of 'robots' which don't exist yet?
How are these issues of ethics, rather than an engineering issue? And should 'robots' be given patents? WTF?!
It sounds like this guy is a little out of his element here. Ethics is a complicated subject. So is engineering. Predicting how the introduction of technology will impact the environment and political climate on a global scale is no easy matter, but apparently some CS professor from Brandeis thinks he's got a real handle on it.
The whole article sounds like a 10 year old talking about, "In the future, we might create giant robots who would fly and shoot people, but if we did this, we can only assume they would poop a previously-unknown and highly toxic material. So, we might want to be careful about making flying super-robots." Great. Glad he's on the case.