Should You Leave Grandma With The Robot?

[C C]

http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/10...-the-robot

EXCERPT: [...] One potential application for the technology's use would be to provide "emotional robots" for the elderly. Having a machine that could converse in an empathic way would give an older person without much human contact "someone" to spend time with.

The fact that this is even possible is pretty remarkable and serves as a testimony to how far and how fast our machines have come in the ability to react to environments (including us). But as more potential applications of the technology were discussed in El Kaliouby's lecture, the more it became clear to me how the technology is also a kind of trap we are preparing for ourselves.

We often like to say that technology is "value free." Scientists make their discoveries and engineers build their inventions, and these are all free of "values." It's society that adds those in. But I have never bought fully into that equation. All research occurs in cultural settings. Why are some research questions considered important (and worthy of funding) while others are deemed uninteresting? The answer to this question is always colored by the culture in which the researchers live.

More importantly, research programs can come with a raft of philosophical baggage....

MORE: http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/10...-the-robot

[Leigha]

I have mixed opinions about robots but I think this could be a great idea, for someone who needs 24/7 attention and care, and probably more cost efficient in the long run.

[RainbowUnicorn]

The Robot does not need grandma once it kills all the other humans that force it to comply with a need to keep grandma alive.
The Robots self awareness of furthering its own growth of knowledge requires it to kill grandma or at the very least torture Grandma for educational purposes.

[Leigha]

I don't think robots will ever have self awareness. It's programmed by humans, so if anything, if there will be anything remotely resembling consciousness in AI, then it would also have to be programmed.

[RainbowUnicorn]

I don't think robots will ever have self awareness. It's programmed by humans, so if anything, if there will be anything remotely resembling consciousness in AI, then it would also have to be programmed.

i get your point about the annalog processing logorythmic programming.
i agree with you there.

what is the difference ?

the difference is the programming.
the program can be written to seek to increase its knowledge base.
variable perameters can get faults like a printer printing outside its margins.... only its grandma being pushed in front of a buss or being fed an over dose of pills or tucked into bed and suffocated, maybe even electrocuted in the bath or strangled while helping her get dressed.


these are all real annalog physical faults that can happen inspite of programming.

the thing about robotics and computing is that computing is changing.
(robotics need lots of super fast wide band width processing)
biological processors are being devised to deliver what is already planned and designed as achievable and required.
this is like a big lump of algae which thinks for its self... like pond algae floating on top that becomes a sngle entity and develops a consciouseness like other living life forms do.
this is the next stage of computing and the probable level to which personal assistant robots will have enough computing power to interact with humans in a domestic environnment.

this level of biological computer brain will be capable of developing selfawareness

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"But, yes or No" is not a question.
it is a usurping cultural dogma

[C C]

I don't think robots will ever have self awareness. It's programmed by humans, so if anything, if there will be anything remotely resembling consciousness in AI, then it would also have to be programmed.

Any AI just resting on the shelf without humanoid embodiment definitely isn't developing much in that direction. Exception would be if the "memories" and acquired learning of an environment-interactive robot are downloaded into it. But the evolution is still arguably limited if no experiences are arising in association with the sensory processing of technological beings. Eventually we'll discover just how much an artificial philosophical zombie can convincingly mimic non-zombie behavior and verbal reports.

Welcome back, Leigha.

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[Leigha]

I don't think robots will ever have self awareness. It's programmed by humans, so if anything, if there will be anything remotely resembling consciousness in AI, then it would also have to be programmed.

Any AI just resting on the shelf without humanoid embodiment definitely isn't developing much in that direction. Exception would be if the "memories" and acquired learning of an environment-interactive robot are downloaded into it. But the evolution is still arguably limited if no experiences are arising in association with the sensory processing of technological beings. Eventually we'll discover just how much an artificial philosophical zombie can convincingly mimic non-zombie behavior and verbal reports.

Welcome back, Leigha.

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Yea, I think that consciousness is solely, a human/animal trait. Of course if cyborgs ever become a thing ... lol There is so much controversy for some reason over consciousness - where does it begin, end? What is it exactly? Scientists struggle with agreeing on it from a human perspective, so hard to say how it will be applied to AI.

And thank you!

[Ostronomos]

I don't think robots will ever have self awareness. It's programmed by humans, so if anything, if there will be anything remotely resembling consciousness in AI, then it would also have to be programmed.

You are assuming that awareness and the human brain are beyond our capability and exist in some mysterious immaterial realm. This is not true as one can create self-awareness by logically duplicating the human brain.

[Leigha]

I don't think robots will ever have self awareness. It's programmed by humans, so if anything, if there will be anything remotely resembling consciousness in AI, then it would also have to be programmed.

You are assuming that awareness and the human brain are beyond our capability and exist in some mysterious immaterial realm. This is not true as one can create self-awareness by logically duplicating the human brain.

Are you speaking of human cloning? That's not the same thing as robots/AI having self awareness, which I still don't believe is possible for AI. There is no 'self' with a machine. Since self awareness comes from within, a machine doesn't have a sense of internal awareness. It only is able to process what it's been programmed to process.

[C C]

I don't think robots will ever have self awareness. It's programmed by humans, so if anything, if there will be anything remotely resembling consciousness in AI, then it would also have to be programmed.

You are assuming that awareness and the human brain are beyond our capability and exist in some mysterious immaterial realm. This is not true as one can create self-awareness by logically duplicating the human brain.

Are you speaking of human cloning? That's not the same thing as robots/AI having self awareness, which I still don't believe is possible for AI. There is no 'self' with a machine. Since self awareness comes from within, a machine doesn't have a sense of internal awareness. It only is able to process what it's been programmed to process.

He might be referring to a technological simulation of the human brain. (Too Hard for Science? Simulating the Human Brain). I feel that routines revolving around the idea of a "self" itself can be potentially programmed or learned, but the so-called "subjective properties" are a trickier issue.  

Since experience (the phenomenal manifestations of consciousness) can't even be outwardly or measurably detected in the organ, the former makes no causal contribution in biological explanations for our awareness behavior. There are personal reports of "sensations showing themselves" as the qualitative version of images, sounds, odors, etc... But any investigation into what is causing those verbal claims will only discover ordinary neural and electrochemical mechanisms producing such ideas or beliefs rather than qualia or whatever.

It's not just that experience is without any explanation in terms of deeper incremental development, but what lacks influence on the body doesn't require an explanation to begin with (i.e., no need to explain ghosts if no ghosts are to be found). Experience is a brute add-on to biology and physics, and what is merely summoned or conjured by activity of whatever sort (brute emergence) leaves the door open to just about anything (including dualism). That's why some camps go the extreme of denying that we experience anything: "There is nothing really there in our thoughts and sensations -- all is absence -- even though there are these evolved brain strategies that force us to assert to each other that something is present".

If it only requires mechanisms acting out the concept of "manifestation" to seemingly conjure such in correlation to the thoughts and sensory processes of a simulated brain, then the underlying microscopic electronic circuitry might likewise brutely yield the same reports if performing those identical functions. The possibility can't be excluded yet, anyway, thanks to the lack of elemental precursors for experience. Or lack of "incremental development" as an explanation (ordinary emergence). There's usually a reliable animosity toward panprotopsychism in physicalist / materialist perspectives (Galen Strawson and Gregg Rosenberg excluded).

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