They bypass our conscious awareness and appeal directly to our emotional selves, perhaps convincing us that they are endowed with real intelligence. As prototypes for future commercial products, they represent a form of dishonesty. Several research groups have produced eerily lifelike robots.Īs research tools, the robots may provide insights into how humans interpret robot behavior and communication. Unfortunately, Turing’s warning has gone unheeded. “I certainly hope and believe that no great efforts will be put into making machines with the most distinctively human, but non-intellectual, characteristics such as the shape of the human body it appears to me quite futile to make such attempts and their results would have something like the unpleasant quality of artificial flowers.” Alan Turing warned against making robots resemble humans: Nearly every human knows what it’s like to hit one’s thumb with a hammer or to feel unrequited love.Ĭounteracting this natural human advantage is a natural human disadvantage: the tendency to be fooled by appearances-especially human appearances. Fortunately for us, we have a distinct advantage over machines when it comes to knowing how other humans feel and how they will react. If being human is our main selling point to other humans, so to speak, then making imitation humans seems like a bad idea. We should think twice before allowing machines to take over roles involving interpersonal services.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |