Now here is a poser that an old friend of mine asked me recently: When robots do acheive artificial intelligence, and, along with it, the power of free will, will we continue to treat them as mere objects/property, or will they demand and be granted the same legal rights granted to humans? [for those with a legal background, the case of Dredd Scott, in which the US Supreme Court decided that slaves were property who could be forcibally returned to their owners even if they had successfully escaped to a non-slave state.]
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Not Quite HAL 9000, But It Vacuums
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What else is important to understand about the robotics field today?
There are two typical reporter questions that you haven't asked me, and I'm glad you haven't. [The first] is: but a robot can't do anything it's not programmed to do anyway, so it's totally different from us. And my answer to that is that it's an artificial distinction, I think. Because my belief is that we are machines. And I think modern science treats us as machines. When you have a course in molecular biology, it's all mechanistic, and likewise in neuroscience. So if we are machines, then at least it seems to me, in principle, there could exist machines built out of other stuff, silicon and steel maybe, which are lawfully following the laws of physics and chemistry, just as we are, but could in principle have as much free will and as much soul as we have. Whether we humans are smart enough to build such machines is a different question. Maybe we're just not smart enough. That pisses off the scientists when I say that.
Well don't physicists say that, in a way? That there may be things that our brains are just not configured to understand about the universe?
Yes. Actually, Patrick Winston, who is a professor here—I used to co-teach his AI [artificial intelligence] course many years ago—he'd always start the first lecture on artificial intelligence with the undergrads here, talking about his pet raccoon he'd had as a kid, growing up in the Midwest. And it was very dexterous with its hands. But, he said, it never occurred to him that that raccoon was going to build a robot replica of itself. The raccoon just isn't smart enough. And maybe there are flying saucers up there, with little green men or green entities from somewhere and they're looking down at my lab and saying "What, he's trying to build robot replicas of himself? Isn't that funny! He'll never make it!"
And you said there was one other [typical reporter] question.…
When? When are we going to have them in our homes? When, when, when?
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