Several recent events triggered these thoughts. The first was Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot which I had always wanted to, but had not read all these years. Finally, I was able to read it slowly and really savor it. I was particularly intrigued by the “robopsychologist”, Dr.Susan Calvin.
Then the book with the title R U R by the Czech writer
by Karel Capek. The word Robot was the creation of this author, at the
suggestion of his brother, and the expanded title reads as Rossum’s Universal
Robot. This was the first time the word robot appeared in print.
The next is an essay on robots in a recent issue of
National Geographic.
Finally, an essay on What is Human by Peter H. Kahn,
Jr., Hiroshi Ishiguro, Batya Friedman, and Takayuki Kanda. They should know.
Each one of them is a leader and a pioneer in their fields. Their focus is on
“humanoid” robots. They show how developing a robot with human-like qualities
requires an understanding of what a human is. Their focus was limited however.
Kahn, Ishiguro and their colleagues were
interested in learning how to measure their success in building human-like
robots, from the psychological point of view. For their purpose, they suggested
developing “psychological benchmarks” defined as: “categories of interaction
that capture conceptually fundamental aspects of human life, specified
abstractly enough so as to resist their identity as a mere psychological
instrument (e.g., as in a measurement scale), but capable of being translated into
testable empirical propositions.”
Their suggestions are intriguing even with
this limited definition of the “complex” that is human. They identified 6
items. They are: autonomy, imitation, intrinsic moral value, moral
accountability, privacy and reciprocity. For details of these concepts and why
the authors chose them, I refer you to their article. (What is a Human? –
Toward Psychological Benchmarks in the Field of Human-Robot Interaction. Peter
H. Kahn, Jr., Hiroshi Ishiguro, Batya Friedman, and Takayuki Kanda. The 15th
IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication
(RO-MAN06), Hatfield, UK, September 6-8, 2006) You can access this article
through Google-Scholar.
What is intriguing, but not surprising is
that all of these items except imitation impinge on moral and ethical
characteristics. The way things are going, Isaac Asimov may be right. We may
have robots with these characteristics in the future. Do we call them “human”
or “humanoid”?
Although we are the ones who taught them
those values, the robots may be capable of making moral and ethical decisions
more consistently, since they do not have to deal with emotions. That is my
major point. If emotion is lacking, how can it be called “human”?
Since we are the ones who teach them
“values”, how do we get ourselves out and judge the robots to be “objectively”
correct?