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."

Comments

How?

[desplesda]

He says the software, which will be installed in a robot within the next three months, will give the machines the ability to feel, reason and desire.

How does that work? Genetic imperitive to reproduce is classified as reason now?

One step closer

[thesatch]

All we would need to is stick one of those in a RealDoll, and we'd finally lose all use for the female race.

Re:One step closer

[period3]

I don't know what's funnier - that link, or the fact that it's modded 'Insightful'.

His statements were misheard.

[ikkonoishi]

He really said rusty, but you know how those asian languages are with their Ls and Rs. :)

Nah seriously. How is this important?

If the robots need to reproduce they will have to have ways to build other robots. Robots can't use chromozonal mapping for protien creation like animals can. Therefore cromosomes are useless for robots.

Of course the article could have completely misquoted him or misunderstood him, but in that case how is this news?

Mod editor +1 Redundant

I don't get it

[Digital Pizza]

In Korea, only old robots have sex.

Sorry.

I wish the article had more detail; I'd like to know how this is supposed to work. Is it just the control software that's "reproducing", or are these robots actually constucting copies of themselves?

Robots with emotions is a cool idea in terms of fantasy/sci-fi, but is there a practical reason for it?

What is the morality of having robots do dangerous jobs instead of humans? Kind of ruins the point of building robots in the first place.

More Seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure if this is the direction we need to go
in the current state of Artificial Intelligence research. I think there are more worthy areas of research, like trying to create intelligence that works . ( It all depends on your definition of Intelligence in AI, do you mean mimicking human intelligence or do you mean capturing the principles of "intelligence" and creating devices that are TRULY intelligent )

If we take the latter notion then we need to make greater inroads in creating true intelligence in our devices ,then offshoot of that will lead naturally to researh into personalities. If we take the previous notion ( where we are just mimicking human behaviour ) then I guess it might just end up being another set of rule based system, or a system based on refined dependencies.

This is a bit of rant, its not meant to be, but when evaluating things like this you need to look at what our notions of intelligence really area...

Cyberbullshit

[Digital Avatar]

So, what, this means that he's encoded the behavior of his machines in a form resembling genetic code, in the sense that he intends for his machines to exchange code and recombine program segments to yield novel combinations of behavior?

This article is just so much cyberbullshit it's hard to believe that it was posted.

Condensed article..

[Tjoppen]

Article in condensed form:

Fuzzy logic
Genetic algorithms
Control robot behaviour
"Some time in the future"

It's easy to mimic feelings. Making up new ones or the robots evolving new ones though.. That's the tricky one.
Also, cue a hundred or so futurama related jokes. In fact, I'll just hop on the bandwagon;

- If robots don't reproduce - why are they so interested in sex?
- Entirely for the perversion

Are human desires appropriate for a machine?

[headkase]

Humans have emotions such as love to ensure we care for our young and parters - love has had positive selection along evolution. But what need for love would an intelligent probe need out around Saturn?
I'm not saying that emotions shouldn't be pursued for machines however. Emotions are great for giving us a general feeling about our environment, a sort of basic situational awareness. For example, if you had burned yourself previously on a stove you would probably be more wary of it through association with pain than if you had not.
As for reproduction, in my opinion it's a non-issue that's actually more a bit of flamebait. Your kid ask's you where he came from and you'll tell him 'your mom'. A robot will just come from the factory and that's all. It would simply be one of those facts of life that a mind would learn early and just be one more datum within it's set of common knowledge.

Re:Sound-Proofing

[Syre]

Actually, they won't enjoy anything.

For them to enjoy something they'd have to experience it and therefore have a consciousness.

This professor is very mistaken when he says they will experience lust. Unless you define "lust" as "programmed tendency to move towards another robot and interface to it" or something.

The most that this can do is to program sets of behavior probabilities. It won't by any means cause robots to suddenly become conscious beings.

Truly horrifying

[rewt66]

Modern mankind's problem is this: We are convinced that we are machines.

This is not a casual statement. If you believe that the laws of physics are the most fundamental things there are, then the logic is inescapable. You are determined by the laws of physics, chemistry, and neurology. You have no free will. What you think of as thinking is just neurological machinery over which you have no control - it controls you. There is no such thing as love; all there is is chemical machinery. All we are is machines. (The only escape from this logic is if you don't accept the premise - that all there really is is the laws of physics.)

The horror of the modern position is that we cannot accept that we are just machines. We feel that we are more, that humans are not just machines. And so we feel that we are more, but rationally we are driven to view ourselves as just machines.

If this is the modern human's horror, why do we want to take machines, and give them feelings? If it's horrifying to have human feelings, but rationally be forced to accept that you are only a machine, how horrifying is it to have human feelings, but be trapped in the body of a machine?

Note: The above analysis closely follows the thoughts of Francis Schaeffer. I can't claim much credit for it.

An economical disaster...

[Anonymous Coward]

If my robots reproduce, then why should I buy more? Maybe I can sell the offsprings and make a lot of money!

Re:Sound-Proofing

[GOD_ALMIGHTY]

Then what makes you enjoy anything? Isn't experience the sum total of chemical reactions in your brain? If you mimic those reactions in silicon, then why wouldn't a computer 'experience' something just as well as you would? Lust is a simple reward system. What scientific evidence do you have that you are not simply a very complex form of a lusting robot?

Re:Getting lusty is one thing...

[Coneasfast]

If an A connector wants to marry a B connector, they should be allowed to!

uh, i'm confused, wouldn't it be an A connector that wants to marry another A connector be the controversial issue here?

We don't know

[dustmite]

The problem is not that we can't "re-create it". In fact we might have already. The problem is that we can't measure it.

We can't even measure it in each other, because we really don't know of any measurable physical properties that may determine the presence of consciousness. And because we don't know how to measure it, we cannot know if we've already created it. Not you, nor anyone here on slashdot or anywhere else. For all we know, modern silicon-based CPUs already have some (very) dim, glimmering cognitive awareness of sorts. We really do not know. It is completely unfounded for anyone to claim that it has not happened yet (or likewise that it has happened) if we don't even have a clue what it really is or how to measure its existence. Heck, it's so elusive we don't even have a rational definition for it.

We don't know what physical (or otherwise?) properties of the human brain result in sentience. At all. Therefore we cannot predict what physical properties (possibly already present) could give rise to sentience in man-made creations. We have no 'measuring device' to stick in the brain that 'detects' sentience. (Asking "are you sentient" is futile, because the answer to that is computational.)

In fact we probably never will know if our own creations have "consciousness" until we figure out how to measure if other humans have it.

(Unless you are referring to a computational ability to "compute" and consider the "self", but that is not related to consciousness, that is pure computational machinery, just 'nuts and bolts', the mechanics of processing the understanding thereof. This is most likely completely separate to consciousness; any self-diagnostic system is "aware" of itself in that sense, and an advanced one could conceivably answer questions "Do you exist" and "Are you thinking" purely computationally - with or without sentience.)

Re:We don't know

[Luthair]

Consciousness and sentience are reaction to external stimuli, other definitions fall into metaphysics.

On a more humourous note, Robot + Lust = Bender on Futurama.

Re:We don't know

[ralphclark]

You sound like the perfect scientist: until it is proven false it must be true.

If that is how you believe science operates, you clearly don't know the first thing about science or scientists. I bet you get all your "science" from the National Enquirer and the Discovery Channel.

Cognitive awareness is not taught and learned and something that is not living will never have cognitive awareness.

Oh, really. And when, and by whom, was this demonstrated exactly? Oh I see - you made it up.

Being an ignorant fool, therefore, it would probably be best for you to shut up and leave the talking to those who are able to think straight, and who know the difference between evidence and logic on the one hand, and unthinking assumption on the other.

Re:We don't know

[neuromortis]

Yes and no. We cannot measure consciousness and sentience in others as anything other than physical effects, so establishing the consciousness of a machine would in fact be a metaphysical project. However, this is not to say that the question is meaningless, although it would likely be irrelevant if our goal is simply to create an artificial being which exhibits sentient-qualities.

[Warning: I've had difficulties explaining this concept to people offline, so I apologize if I am unclear below.]

The difference between your mind and a machine (possibly your brain) which produces responses that make us think it has a mind is that of sensation or experience. By this I do not mean that it can process visual data or that it can act based on past data, but rather that what's going on in your mind has a peculiarly mental aspect.

Consider what happens when you look at a blue wall and when a sophisticated, camera-equipped computer looks at a blue wall. Both (we will assume) can look at it and report that they are looking at a blue wall, but most of us would want to say there is something different going on in each case. The computer receives input through the camera which results in some transistors flipping between states and ultimately gives an output "The wall is blue."

Something similar happens with your brain. Light goes into your eyeball, some neurons fire, and you announce "The wall is blue." But something else also happens: you experience "blueness." You have a sensation, one which cannot be reduced to words (the problem of trying to explain color to a blind man).

It also cannot yet be easily reduced to physical processes. Particular neuron firings might always be connected with your experience, but we do not yet have a mechanism to explain it. We have no "sension particles" or whatever that explain how a bunch of atoms bouncing off each other somehow result in your seeing blue. This is not to say that they are not intimately related, but merely that it is an incomplete description of what is going on.

In summary, there's a difference between processing blue and seeing blue. It may be irrelevant to simulating people, but the fact that I see blue is pretty damn significant to me and serves as the identifying characteristics between me and what I perceive to be unsensing machines.

Re:We don't know

[ultranova]

Consciousness and sentience are reaction to external stimuli, other definitions fall into metaphysics.

By this definition, anything that can be perceived has a consciousness.

If you can perceive something, that something must somehow interact with its surroundings (you, at the very least). By the law of force and counterforce, if an entity exerts a force on anything (for example, reflects photons) then an equal but opposite counterforce is exerted on the entity. This counterforce will cause a deformation (due to uneven distribution of force on different parts of the entity) and/or acceleration (if the entity is free-floating) of the entity.

Therefore, all observable entities react to external stimuli; it's that very reaction that makes them observable.

IMHO physics is a wrong tool to try to explain consciousness. It would be extremely difficult to explain even simple information-handling systems (such as the Linux kernel, for example) with nothing but physics, so of course trying to explain comples ones (like consciousness) is an exercise in futility. It could be done, theoretically, it's just very, very painfull.

Think physics as the assembly of the universe; anything that can be done, can be done with it, but that doesn't mean it's the best tool for every purpose.