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- SpectralSounds, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12What happens?
You call in Deckard. - stephenwq, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9Yeah, it would kinda suck to have an robot thats gone all emo when its meant to be welding the roof on a car.
- pwallroth, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Robots can sweat now?
- archerx, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8I know, how about we make robots with out emotions? I know it's a mind blowing concept.
- KlayBorg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6If we can automate it, why not? That way more minds can go towards bettering our society and helping improve life for others.
- skidzilla, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5"Weld your roof, into pieces, this is my last resort!"
- beelz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5They took our jobs!
- Junkyarddawg, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6It's a bit misleading.
Emotions are feedback between our nervous system and our endocrine ("hormone") system, it's not something the robots will be given.
The robots will be given a scorecard, and instructed that higher score = better, lower score = worse.
Essentially our endocrine system is our motivation system, it's what compels us to do things and not do other things, and on that level the robot "scorecard" system will be the same, but there's no reason to suspect that the systems will have the same effect on their hosts. There's no reason to suspect robots will refuse to do tasks because they're afraid, or may become jealous, or fly into a rage when things don't go right - those are specific responses humans have for situations the robot will not need to deal with (death, reproduction, aggressive maintenance of position in society...).
The robot simply have a system which awards it more points if it does A than B.
Everything else is sci-fi fantasy. - t4k3n, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I'm sorry dave. I can't do that.
- drachasor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Robots doing menial labor don't need emotions. Things like vacuuming, other cleaning tasks, factory jobs, and the like are largely repetitive and need only the most basic of 'AI'. Just some basic sensors and sensor processing is all the 'brain' such a robot needs. Other jobs, like say a cashier at a fast food restaurant can be modified to fit within simple parameters. Get rid of a counter, make a touch menu and voice interface and some robotic 'cooks', and you're pretty much done. The hardest part, without a person, would be making sure the police or other authorities are called if necessary (rare, but a necessary precaution). I don't think that requires AI, all you need is some good research for identifying 'odd' behavior. Worst case you could pay someone to watch over multiple stores, and if the AI notices odd behavior, it patches video feeds to the watcher (who notifies the authorities if necessary).
Humans need emotions because we have to decide what to do with ourselves. We have a huge variety of obstacles and other challenges, and we have to navigate through the world, prioritize tasks, and make a lot of decisions on what to do with ourselves. For any one person, there is no inevitable decision to be made in many of these cases. Hence, logic alone is insufficient for these decisions. Hence I think desires and needs are necessary for any autonomous AI -- that is, any AI that is going to be deciding how to handle complex tasks on its own with incomplete information on the best course. I think the emotions would naturally develop from various "rules of thumb" for the AI's behavior. Of course, with an AI you could probably make something more logical in daily affairs than people (certainly most people), but given limited computing capacity you'll always such rules of thumb, which will not always be the most logical decision (if you had absurd amounts of time to consider a course of action).
Also, emotions are useful for helping robots interact with humans, but most robots don't need this. Afterall, people feel close to furbies and Sony Dogs (forgot the name), so you don't need much AI or emotions for this. Of course, a furba (furby + roomba) might sell very well for this reason, but getting people to emotionally attach themselves to a thing doesn't require any AI at all (which reminds me of how some people are about their cars or computers).
In short, anyone that makes an emotional robot assembly-line worker is an idiot. That robot needs no emotions nor real intelligence, and all the inventor has done is create an ethically problematic situation for no reason what-so-ever. - tony23, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@klayborg: Not all minds SHOULD "go towards bettering our society"
- nukethewhales, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4FTA:
"If a robot feels happy after it has cleaned a dirty carpet particularly well, then it will apparently seek out more dirt in order to do the same,"
Does anyone else see an obvious problem with this?
Here let me give you a hint.
Robot Brain: "I like cleaning dirt. It makes me happy. Now I am out of dirt to clean. Must find more dirt. If I blow the dirt out I have more dirt to clean. Yay!" - superpixel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"If robots are able to do all of our jobs, then humans will be free to pursue their passions. We will live in a beautiful age, 10 times that of the previous renaissance."
navitatl, I want what you're smoking. how about:
"If robots are able to do all of our jobs, then humans will be free to pursue their passions. Like beating up smaller humans, felching, rape, murder, mind-bending torture, voting for grumpy monkeys, and playing boring videogame sequels. They'll live 10 years less from the lack of mobility they gain by never having to lift their asses off the couch, except when another victim of their dystopian meatspace arrives-- and then it is time to feed."
That sounds a little more accurate. - stevenb, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I'm suprised that none of you really keyed in on the fact that...
The majority of the jobs in the united states are service related jobs... (fast food, factories, etc..etc)...
What happens when these multi-billion dollar corporations decide to cut costs and slash their employees out.. and replace them with robots?
How many hundreds of thousands of millions of people are going to flood the unemployment market.. with little to no job skills other than flipping burgers.. which now is conveniently been filled by a robot who doesn't want to be paid. I predict very sad days when this happens... very very sad days. - SeppukuBLUE, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Here comes the Second Renaissance.
- DrScott, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Just develop robots that can't process emotions? What mindless laborious task requires the worker to feel anything?
- xoxuxox, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Just say domo arigato to Mr. Roboto!
- navitatl, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6If robots are able to do all of our jobs, then humans will be free to pursue their passions. We will live in a beautiful age, 10 times that of the previous renaissance.
- vertinox, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@"If robots are able to do all of our jobs, then humans will be free to pursue their passions. We will live in a beautiful age, 10 times that of the previous renaissance."
I've been thinking this myself. Humans will be replaced with machines in most job sectors in the next 30 odd some years. However, humans will still have the right to vote and own property so what will happen is that there will be a sort of Feudalism Serfdom or 1850 slave owner-esque of robots.
So basically, humans will measure their wealth by the amount of robots they own and those who don't any robots will be considered poor and will unemployed living off government checks. However, because of robot labor everything will be so cheap anyways it won't really matter.
But in general the real powerful humans will be those who own the most robots... Of course this might be the government or corporations.
Personally, I have no clue what will happen, but it is going to be interesting. - Philluminati, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3
We already have sweaty mindless robots for repetative boring tasks.
There called "lower working class" - tearor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I just want to know when we can start eating them.
- colouredlights, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Looks like we're heading towards self-imposing the matrix.
- NanoStuff, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"Emotions are not emergent properties of intellect. Emotions are hormones, not something an intelligence "develops"."
I won't speak for you, but I assure you I have emotions, and am intelligent, or at least I like to think so :)
Emotions are hormones you say, I'd wager you won't find a single neurologist that agrees with your logic. They trigger emotions through action potential, as any other system in the brain that conveys information, one way or another. Emotions are derived from information patterns. - qwertydvorak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2what will the robot carpet steamer do when it has no stains to get out ? i picture a murder scene with blood everywhere...
- dodoporridge, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"If robots are able to do all of our jobs, then humans will be free to pursue their passions. We will live in a beautiful age, 10 times that of the previous renaissance."
I would like to think that would happen, but I can hardly envision it in the world we inhabit today. All I can imagine is corporations' trying to eke out even more "productivity" from workers whose most basic tasks are automated. What would happen is that a handful of people in the world become multi-trillionaires because of their robot help, and everyone else claws and scrapes to get by. It would be nice if people didn't have to work at boring, rote jobs to live, but getting to that point isn't a social value. After all, imagine if people could pursue their passions without a boring day job--who knows what trouble they'd stir up? - Meowbiusfox, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Ursula!Fetch me thine Ganymede!
- GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Yeah in a free market people will always find something to do. There is always something that can make people's lives better and as more simple things are automated or made easy we will hunt down increasingly tiny benefits with greater vigour.
- GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2At some point others will realise that what can be automated should be automated.
- Hyperhidrosis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Sweating Robots would be awesome. Even excessively sweating robots would be cool. But only if they don't rust. Could machines have hyperhidrosis? Who knows, makes me perspire just thinking about robot sweat.
- Junkyarddawg, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Emotions are not emergent properties of intellect. Emotions are hormones, not something an intelligence "develops".
No matter how intelligent or conscious you make the AI, it wont have emotions unless you give it emotions.
That's where most sci-fi writers get it wrong: fear, anger, ambition, love, jealousy, hate, boredom, frustration... those are not intellectual processes. They're levels of neuroactive chemicals in your bloodstream, triggered by and in turn triggering neurological impulses. Because emotions - this feedback between the nervous and the endocrine systems - are so intrinsical to us humans, it's hard for us to understand that intelligence or self awareness in itself doesn't have anything to do with emotions.
Robots wont get bored unless we program them to, and when we do they'll be "bored" only in the same sense a computer is "bored" when it starts the screensaver. - ksponge, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I agree with most of what you say junkyarddawg, however, I would say that while intelligence does not create emotion, the two are directly related. Inversely in this case. Meaning having a higher intelligence enables one to more appropriately control these processes within the brain dealing with emotion, and therefore curb the effects or eliminate them all together.
- michellepeet, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Sweating robots? That's crazy, what kind of excessive sweating antiperspirant would they use? What if some of them had a sweating problem? I'd give them this stuff for their sweating http://www.excessivesweating-antiperspirant.com totally works for my hyperhidrosis but maybe not for robot sweat.
- milhouse007, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1H.U.A.R.!
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"Inauthenticity" means lacking in authenticity, not real, fake. It has nothing to do with the subject of the article.
Buried because both the poster and the author are too stupid to know what the word "inauthenticity" means. - Junkyarddawg, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Yes you're intelligent AND you have emotions. That's the point. The one is not a function of the other, although they are linked and function in concert to make you take actions which are beneficial to you.
Example: your eyes see someone pointing a gun at you, your brain decodes the image, identifies a threat, and ranks it; this triggers a cascade of responses which by trial-and-error over evolutionary time has been determined to be optimal for this level of threat.
However: it's not your conscious identification of the threat, but the horomones the endocrine and autonomous nervesystem releases, in response to the brain informing it that there's a threat, that make you feel scared or angry.
In a robot, you'd have the eyes see the gun, the brain decode the image and identify & rank the threat... and decide what to do about it.
Now, any AI worth a damn will likely have a ranked set of instructions on how to act in danger, it may even have a system awarding it points for avoiding danger, and you could certainly programme it to act like a human might under similar circumstances - but from that concluding that the AI is, say, "scared" is really stretching. Or, more accurately, anthropomorphising. It doesn't have the biological "legacy systems" to be scared with. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1they don't have the manual dexterity for the most important tasks, therefore humans are needed. leave this task to me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7nHml2mgaA
- NanoStuff, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3"The robot simply have a system which awards it more points if it does A than B."
How do you know what the robot has? There are many approaches to AI, one of which is evolutionary algorithms. If such an AI shows emotions, how would you dispute their existence? The best thing to do in this case would be to figure out how to set the conditions so that it's not evolutionarily advantageous to develop emotions. If the AI shows signs of consciousness, you cannot just assume it to be an illusion any more so than that of a human.
If strong AI proves to be possible using conventional program structure with static algorithms this shouldn't be a problem, but if the only solution to developing such an AI is evolution, that could end up being a serious ethical dilemma. We already know that with sufficient processing power there are no theoretical limits to evolving human-level or better AI, but I for one hope it will be possible to construct AI without resorting to measures of natural selection, as such an approach is too close to home for comfort. Various control systems, including those for power plants, military systems and so on are already evolved not programmed, so far the method is proving to work remarkably well. It's reason enough to be concerned given exponentially growing processing capabilities to evolve more complex systems. It's a fascinating concept, that's for sure, but I really DO NOT want conscious AI around, not only for our sake but for theirs. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1robots are our children, were just used to making babies with our bodies/dna up until now, making them with our minds/inteligence instead is no different it just takes some getting used to
- clonejks, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1If we can provide everyone with everything they need with robots, why do we need to hold on to notions of employment anyway?
- vertinox, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Somehow I'm getting a vision of a million roomba's swarming by strip mining the Earth's surface.
- hendzen, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Resistance is futile.
- palillont, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Not a terribly well written piece. It isn't really sure what topic to discuss, the economics of human labour, or the so called singularity.
Regardless, I do firmly believe that mudane tasks in both the primary and secondary industries will one day be taken over by robots to allow the higher beings (humans) to more effectively use their intellectual capacity to a much greater degree than would be allowed at, say, McDonald's. Not that there aren't things to learn at such jobs; however, there is a bigger world out there and many mysteries to the Earth and universe we could be spending our time thinking about. - mattxb, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4We'll never get more free time, because we live in a competitive world where every company need to be efficient as possible. Email saves alot of time compared to snail mail, but in the end it just means we are expected to do more work (and its easier for us to take our work home with us.) All the down time people envision in the future is fat that will be cut by corporations.
- billybob476, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yeah that way they won't feel bad when they're stealing old people's medication to use as fuel.
- stevenb, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@clonejks
What do you propose? Everyone live in a communistic environment with no chance to move up in the world? - FishRHuman2, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Do we really want sweating robots?
- colouredlights, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1With the speed of today's microprocessors, the first inkling of an emotion and within a few seconds the robot will be dressed in tie dye and waving the peace sign.
- vertinox, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2@"I know, how about we make robots with out emotions? "
Because that would be boring. - GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Haven't you seen the propaganda video
'Don't Date Robots!' -
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