A new model for building AI (Humans)

by dhw, Wednesday, November 10, 2010, 16:22 (5126 days ago) @ David Turell

My daughter has sent me a fascinating article by Dr Cynthia Breazeal, Director of the Personal Robots Group MIT Media Lab, who acted as a consultant on the movie A.I., and who has since been working with Stan Winston, a "pre-eminent special-effects animatronics expert".-Unfortunately, I can't find the article on the Internet, and it's far too long for me to type out here, but I was particularly struck by certain passages which I will reproduce:-"Robots such as Kismet and Leonardo serve as a mirror, reflecting our humanity back at us as we interact with them and they engage us. As we look into these mirrors, we can better see ourselves ... scientifically, socially and ethically."-"What ultimately matters when we make a judgment as to the authenticity of the emotion or friendship of another? Is it how they treat us? Is it how these attributes are implemented in biological (or silicon) brains? Is it how such things are grounded in experience? How human-like does the exchange have to be? If we are willing to grant other species with genuine emotion ... e.g. dogs with dog emotions, dolphins with dolphin emotions etc. ... then are we willing to grant robots with robot emotions? If so, then what is robot emotion? And what is the nature of the emotion or relationship that it might evoke in us?"-"What distinguishes 'us' from 'them'? Humankind has steadily been retreating from our notion of specialness for hundreds of years. Science has shown us that we are not at the centre of our solar system, that we share a surprising percentage of our genome with other species, that certain animals (and certain machines) are also able to use tools, communicate with language, and solve cognitive problems in at least limited ways. Now technology is even entering into the social and the emotional realms, as computers begin to recognize facial expressions and reason about socio-emotional states of people."-"Robots may eventually incorporate more biological technologies to leverage from biochemical processes, such as the ability to self-repair. [...] Will we still be human? What does it mean to be human? What do we want to preserve of our humanness? What are the implications for granting the status of personhood?"-There are some great questions here, and I can well understand Matt's fascination with this subject. Dr. Breazeal has no idea herself how far the technology can go (she says that programming the various human attributes into a robot is "a daunting task, if not impossible") but it's obviously part of the fascination to keep testing the frontiers.