Robots Must Be Designed To Be Compassionate, Says SoftBank CEO

An anonymous reader writes: At the SoftBank World conference in Tokyo, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son has made a case for robots to be developed so as to form empathic and emotional relationships with people. "I'm sure that most people would rather have the warm-hearted person as a friendSomeday robots will be more intelligent than human beings, and [such robots] must also be pure, nice, and compassionate toward people," SoftBank's Aldebaran tech group will make its empathic "Pepper" robot available for companies to rent in Japan from October at a rate of $442 per month.

Comments

How?

[KermodeBear]

And how, exactly, does one program a robot to be compassionate or empathetic?

Can emotion be reduced to a few simple formulas, some generic algorithms?

I'm not convinced.

Oh They WILL Be

[Greyfox]

Don't worry, all my robots will be designed to feel bad about killing the meatbags. They'll still DO it, but they'll feel really bad about it!

The real question...

[Xtifr]

Ok, so he's the CEO of a big company that makes robots--among many other things. So I really have to wonder if he's actually as clueless as this makes him appear, or if he's cynically trying to convince stupid people that they should by his company's pseudo-friendly robots?

Or is there some third option I'm overlooking?

I mean, he might as well say, "robots must be designed to answer the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything." That's just about as plausible, given the state-of-the-art. (And then he could try to sell us speaking robots that can say "forty-two".) :)

Re:The real question...

[Dutch Gun]

I think maybe it's code-speak directed at lonely otaku that their dream of having a doting android-girl may be just around the corner.

Compassion is highly overrated

[pubwvj]

Compassion is highly overrated.

Simulated emotions? Big mistake

[msobkow]

The worst mistake we could make is to try to simulate emotions. That's what true psychopaths do -- simulate and fake their emotions.

no thanks

[bloodhawk]

NO THANKS, Once we have robots of such intelligence the last thing I want is for them to be become susceptible to human failings and manipulation through feelings. how about we simply aim for them to ALWAYS err on the side of caution when dealing with humans.

Re:Can my car have a sense of humour too?

[The Real Dr John]

I would like it very much if you could provide some information that suggests that all you need is complexity to make something with feelings and emotions. Cells respond to chemicals, like hormones and neurotransmitters because that is how signaling pathways in the target cells are activated. But the key is that they are alive, which allows for sensations and in more advanced organisms with a complex central nervous system, emotions. Just because emotions involve "chemical reactions" (like the signaling cascade that occurs after a glutamate ion binds to an NMDA receptor in the brain) that doesn't mean all you need for emotions is the right chemical reactions. You need the living cells in an extremely complex network, at least that is the best neuroscience can determine at this point. There is no evidence that any machine of any type even has a "thought", let alone an emotion.

So until you can come up with examples where any machine has shown the capacity for sensations or thoughts or emotions, then I posit, along with lots of other neuroscientists, that living cells are required to have attributes of living organisms. It is why we distinguish between animate and inanimate objects.