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Robots that Lust and Reproduce
redcone writes "The Guardian unlimited is reporting that Korean roboticist Kim Jong-Hwan, who founded the robot football (soccer) World Cup, and is the director of the ITRC-Intelligent Robot Research Centre, has developed a series of artificial chromosomes that, he says, will allow robots to feel lusty, and could eventually lead to them reproducing."
There's another article here that provides a little bit more detail. It's pretty much software... a quick snippet from that article to summarize it all: "The artificial chromosome is a software system. It means that the information - their 'genes' - can be easily sent to other robots," he said. "So if I send the chromosomes to another robot, that robot can then reproduce by itself. In that sense the robots will be created by the 'genes'. The personality of robots will be created by artificial genes." Dr Kim said there was no danger that such self-reproducing robots would take over the world as portrayed in movies such as this year's blockbuster I, Robot. "If we design the chromosomes quite safely, then we can avoid such a bad situation," he said.
I may be mistaken, but you seem to be confusing 'lust' with things like 'love' and other so-say higher order drives - lust is essentially an instinctual, pre-programmed thing. Presumably you're aware of a qualitative difference in internal state between love and 'mere' lust.
Whether or not we'd be happy to say a robot could experience it, depends to some extent on whether you look at it from a top-down, or bottom-up perspective..
fortune -o
If you believe that the laws of physics are the most fundamental things there are, then the logic is inescapable.
Actually, reductionism/determinism at the level of mental phenomena is a hard sell and is hardly as obvious a conclusion as Schaeffer wants it to be. For one, there's plenty of good work going in CogSci about consciousness as an emergent phenomenon without a strictly causal relation underlying physical processes. For another, there are those (i.e., David Chalmers) who argue that consciousness is a fundamentally irreducible phenomenon. Still further, we have this strange capacity to formulate normative principles ("One ought to tell the truth") and it's hard to explain such things without some notion of free will (see Christine Korsgaard).
But Schaeffer doesn't care about these sorts of objections because he's really just interested in the punchline -- Jesus! -- and in order to set it up he has to create a problem: "The Horror of Modern (Mechanical) Man".
From http://robocup.mi.fu-berlin.de/buch/chap1/HistoryR oboCup.html :
But there was Korea and researchers there were also active organizing their own robotic league. In September 1995, Jong Hwan Kim started the Micro-Robot World Cup Soccer Tournament (MiroSot). The first MiroSot competition was held in November 1996 in Korea with 23 teams from 10 countries. Mirosot tournaments followed then every year from 1997 to 2002, sometimes in the same country as the RoboCup events, as was the case in 1998 (France) and 2000 (Australia). However, in the MiroSot league only small robots compete, there is nothing similar to the mid-size robots used in RoboCup and there was no legged league until 2002. There is of course a kind of rivalry between MiroSot and RoboCup, each one claiming to be the World Cup on Robotic Soccer, but the RoboCup events have become much larger, are better organized and publicized as the MiroSot tournaments.
at dieselsweeties.com...
Watch out for Red Robot!