First Robot able to Show Emotion & develop bonds (Humans)

by dhw, Wednesday, August 18, 2010, 10:43 (5019 days ago) @ xeno6696

I am trying to find out just how "human" a robot can become, and how responsible it might be for its actions. I asked Matt to what extent its sentience would be controlled by a will of its own, and to what extent by the preparatory work of the designer.-MATT: AI programming shares one thing in common with imperative programming; the machine will only do what it's told to do. However, what an AI is told to do is learn, and make decisions based on what it has learned. A TRUE AI is tabula rasa. It is connected to some kind of sensory equipment and its programming is purely to make sense of something(s) in its environment. The designer of the machine would have to train the AI from the ground up--just as if it was a child.-If a true AI is a tabula rasa, I don't see how it can possibly be independent of its designer in the way humans are of their parents. A child is born not only with instincts but also with a will of its own and a vast array of inborn characteristics: personal temperament, individualized intelligence, selective memory etc. How it responds to the impressions created by its sensory equipment will largely depend on these inborn elements, even if its decisions and the "sense" it makes of its environment may be influenced by training. Your robot is born with nothing except the programme its designer has given it. If the designer endows it with its own temperament, degree of intelligence, selective memory, it may appear to behave like a human, but its will (i.e. the degree of control it has over its own actions) and character will still be the product of the programme. In my book, that makes the designer 100% responsible. You wrote, however, that "this confusion comes down to the completely different paradigms that exist for machine programming" in which the machine "cannot display any behavior that we as humans haven't planned for." I can't see the difference, so what have I overlooked?