Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
phasizing man's sense of power over robots. But as Ninian Smart points
out, we can exercise a similar power over the animal kingdom through
crafty breeding—if we bred cats that love mice would it be reasonable
to argue that the cats have no feelings? Of course not. So why should
we accept that any entity created partly through the exercising of human
power necessarily has no feelings? When robots are endowed with con-
sciousness or develop it as part of their own evolutionary process, they
will also acquire feelings.
The intelligent robots of the future will undoubtedly claim that they
have beliefs, consciousness, emotions
and
feelings. Indeed, a robot's
models of emotion will most likely be formulated in terms of the robot's
intentions and feelings, and when a robot analyzes its own behaviour it
will create beliefs about its own feelings. As Sidney Hook has observed,
when robots claim that they have feelings, our acceptance of their claims
will depend upon
...precisely the same set of considerations which lead us to the
belief that other human beings have feelings. The exact point at
which we conclude that objects hitherto regarded as nonhuman
and treated as devoid of feelings have acquired them depends upon
complex considerations, all reducible in the end to whether they
look like and behave
like
other people we know. [13]
Hook is not saying that if a robot looks like Madonna and acts like
Madonna then it is Madonna. His point is that if a robot looks like and
acts like Madonna, then we should accept that the robot possesses con-
sciousness and feelings just as Madonna does. Hook's comment provides
yet another example of Turing's philosophy, and in fact Turing himself
expected most people to agree that robots who communicate with hu-
man beings would have feelings.
RobotHopesandWishes
Accepting that robots will have consciousness and feelings leads to the
possibility that they will also have hopes and wishes, as John McCarthy
explains in his article “Making Robots Conscious of their Mental States”:
Should a robot hope? In what sense might it hope? How close
would this be to human hope? It seems that the answer is yes and
quite similar. If it hopes for various things, and enough of the hopes
come true, then the robot can conclude that it is doing well, and
