An interesting article over at Wired today. It’s titled Do Humanlike Machines Deserve Human Rights? You can read the full article over there but I just want to pull out some key ideas and comment.
The article basically details a new human-like robot, Elmo Live, yeah the same Elmo that’s been causing parents nightmares around Christmas time for the last several years. But I guess they just keep improving it and the newest version is much more responsive to human interactions. The article brings up the following.
I’ve seen videos of the incineration of T.M.X. Elmo (short for Tickle Me Extreme); they made me feel vaguely uncomfortable. Part of me wanted to laugh—Elmo giggled absurdly through the whole ordeal—but I also felt sick about what was going on. Why? I hardly shed a tear when the printer in Office Space got smashed to bits. Slamming my refrigerator door never leaves me feeling guilty. Yet give something a couple of eyes and the hint of lifelike abilities and suddenly some ancient region of my brain starts firing off empathy signals. And I don’t even like Elmo. How are kids who grow up with robots as companions going to handle this?
I can certainly empathize with this. I really don’t feel any sympathy for a machine that doesn’t look in the least human like. But there is something odd that happens when you make something resemble a human in any way at all. I felt for Wall-E when he was getting tossed around in the movie. I wrote a program to make my computer speak to me on it’s own, that is without me telling it what to say. When it speaks, I listen (usually) because I want to know what it’s going to say. I think somewhere deep within our genetic code, we’ve got some weird things going on.
And as I wrote in a previous article, the adoption of robots on a larger scale is coming. Even if they don’t become the sole providers of car for our children, they will have a much more ubiquitous presence in our daily lives. Kids won’t have to learn to deal with the death of their best friend (formerly, the dog) anymore, but that’s just a precursor for extended life in humans anyways! :)
Also from the article.
It’s already being considered overseas. In 2007, a South Korean politician declared that his country would be the first to draw up legal guidelines on how to treat robots; the UK has also looked into the area (though nothing substantial has come of it anywhere). “As our products become more aware, there are things you probably shouldn’t do to them,” says John Sosoka, CTO of Ugobe, which makes the eerily lifelike robot dinosaur Pleo (also tortured on Web video). “The point isn’t whether it’s an issue for the creature. It’s what does it do to us.”
Kind of the same argument as what we do in video games really reflects on us as a people. But I think that actually torturing a ‘life-like’ robot is worse than torturing an animated character in a video game. At the very least you are losing the controller interface abstraction. Maybe torturing defenseless toy robots will become the new alert symptom for later abusers?? I can’t wait to see the Law & Order episode!
And finally, to bring us back to reality.
Back on Sesame Street, Elmo Live’s creators have an answer: Keep soul-searching to a minimum and recognize that you’re buying a product, pure and simple. “This is a toy,” Fisher-Price’s Sirard says. “There shouldn’t be any laws about how you use your toys.” Happy grilling, Elmo!
Word.
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