Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
New World
scenario of Aldous Huxley's novel, where persons are
manipulated and enslaved. Decisions by a group of people or by
a whole society would be inevitably limited by particular sets of
values and outlook. (Think for example of a group of roboticists
deciding about what kinds of creatures there should be.) [26]
Given the many ethical concerns raised in this chapter it seems not un-
reasonable to ask the question: “Should we create self-reproducing intel-
ligent robots?” More than 130 years ago, in his topic
Erewhon
,Samuel
Butler discussed the topic of creating intelligent robots, though he did
not, of course, use the R word:
Certain classes of machines may be alone fertile, while the rest dis-
charge other functions in the mechanical system, just as the great
majority of ants and bees have nothing to do with the continua-
tion of their species, but get food and store it, without thought of
breeding. One cannot expect the parallel to be complete or nearly
so; certainly not now, and probably never; but is there not enough
analogy existing at the present moment, to make us feel seriously
uneasy about the future, and to render it our duty to check the
evil while we can still do so? Machines can within certain limits
beget machines of any class, no matter how different to themselves.
Every class of machines will probably have its special mechanical
breeders, and all the higher ones will owe their existence to a large
number of parents and not to two only.
We are misled by considering any complicated machine as a single
thing; in truth it is a city or society, each member of which was
bred truly after its kind. We see a machine as a whole, we call
it by a name and individualise it; we look at our own limbs, and
know that the combination forms an individual which springs from
a single centre of reproductive action; we therefore assume that
there can be no reproductive action which does not arise from a
single centre; but this assumption is unscientific, and the bare fact
that no vapour-engine was ever made entirely by another, or two
others, of its own kind, is not sufficient to warrant us in saying
that vapour-engines have no reproductive system. The truth is that
each part of every vapour-engine is bred by its own special breeders,
whose function it is to breed that part, and that only, while the
combination of the parts into a whole forms another department of
the mechanical reproductive system, which is at present exceedingly
complex and difficult to see in its entirety.
