Slashdot Mirror
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."
Great, now I have to watch out for my dishwasher humping my leg.
Horny Terminators.
My comments may be crap...but they are my crap...and I am brave enough to stand by them...Never post as AC!
... The Rise of the Machines!
uh, no pun intended.
The summary says it will make them feel lusty, but that reproduction is in the future. How cruel is it to make them want to reproduce without being able to?
Not that I've ever been in their position, of course. Ahem.
I'm not sure if this is the direction we need to go
,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.
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
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...
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
int main() { // We should not get here, return an error code.
while( 1 ) {
lust();
}
return -1;
}
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.)