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Do Kids Care If Their Robot Friend Gets Stuffed Into a Closet?
- stephengillie 14y agoSince corporations are people, can robots be people as well?
- anamax 14y ago> Since corporations are people, can robots be people as well? Corporations are aggregations of people. Are robots?
- lurker14 14y agoThat's not true. Conspiracies and cohorts and partnerships are aggregations of people. Corporations are legal entities owned and managed by people. (LLPs are a weird in-between thing.)
- stephengillie 14y agoSo corporations are slaves?
- dclowd9901 14y agoWhen a group of thinking minds create a thinking mind, I wouldn't know what else to call it.
- interknot 14y agoI don't have an answer, but it is interesting to consider something like https://www.anybots.com/ https://www.anybots.com/ in this context.
- ck2 14y agoReminds me of that video where the child refuses to hit his party pinata that looks like spiderman, instead puts down the stick and goes over to hug it.
- dudurocha 14y agoCan you find this video? I'm very interested.
- sethg 14y ago80% of the children surveyed said it was OK to buy and sell the robot, while 50% said it was not OK to put him in the closet. The authors of the study speculated that “we are creating a new ontological being with its own unique properties”, but this could just be an extension of a very old ontological being. Back in the ancient world, it was considered perfectly OK to buy and sell slaves, but there were moral and legal limits on what masters were allowed to do with their slaves.
- evincarofautumn 14y agoSlaves come readily to mind, but also pets. We buy and sell dogs all the time (under the guise of “adoption”) and expect them to be obedient and helpful—but also do our best to treat them well. For a being of lesser intelligence than a human, I think that’s fine; still, we should treat our equals equally, and robots will someday equal us.
- eurleif 14y agoDogs are animals like us, so they have, or might have, consciousness. Robots most likely won't, regardless of how intelligent they may be, unless we discover what causes consciousness to occur and use that knowledge as the basis for implementing robot AI.
- evincarofautumn 14y agoAs a pragmatist, I’m willing to assume anything that’s indistinguishable from a conscious being is indeed conscious. In other words, understanding how a robot’s brain works does not preclude said brain from harbouring true consciousness—otherwise, studying our own brains would be a kind of very slow intellectual suicide.
- lurker14 14y agoWhy do you assume that consciousness is unlikely to be created accidentally? It already happened once, with humans.
- astrodust 14y ago
- evincarofautumn 14y agoHere’s the really interesting thing: thanks to this kind of empathy, if an AI is indistinguishable from human intelligence—that is, it passes the Turing test—then we’ll be obligated to endow it with equal rights. Even if we fully understand how it works. I predict strong opposition to robot rights on that basis alone, because I really don’t think most people grasp that the mind is physical.
- AerieC 14y agoI really hope I live to see the day that "robot rights" is a legitimate political issue.
- GuiA 14y agoFor more research in this topic, I highly recommend Latitude's "Robots @ School" report, which investigates how children perceive robots on a number of points: http://latd.tv/Latitude-Robots-at-School-Findings.pdf http://latd.tv/Latitude-Robots-at-School-Findings.pdf
- adventureful 14y agoChildren will emotionally relate to stuffed animals as well, such that they will get upset if you mistreat their favorite teddy bear. As a child, I remember getting extremely pissed off at my brother when he intentionally threw my teddy bear into a bathtub full of water, nearly ruining the bear. There's nothing particularly unique about the robot scenario. Even if a stuffed animal doesn't interact like a robot might, a child will often fill that void of personality with their own imagination, bringing the stuffed animal to life in their own mind. Children are obviously capable of intense creative projection.
- dyeje 14y agoI'm interested in seeing how the dualist/monist debates. If one thinks that the consciousness is separate from the body, how does that position stay defensible if we are able to create something which is, for all intensive purposes (that is to say, it acts indistinguishably from a conscious being), conscious? I imagine that someone would argue that you create a soul somewhere along the process of creating such an object/being, I think it would be interesting to see where people draw that line.
- goggles99 14y agoTeleoperated robots? All this proves is how easy kids are to influence by a staged illusion. Pull the veil back to let them see the wizard (the person with the remote control/microphone) and we'd see far different results. What a waste of time/money. Any parent (or someone who has been around kids for any length of time) could have given you this same information.
- tensafefrogs 14y agoThis reminds me of a Radiolab episode where they asked kids to hold furbys upside down (vs. a barbie or other doll) to see if they had feelings for the robot vs. the doll. http://www.radiolab.org/2011/may/31/furbidden-knowledge/ http://www.radiolab.org/2011/may/31/furbidden-knowledge/