Very sneaky article by Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times about robots called The Real Transformers. I'm a big robot dork, so it was great to read about the sociable robot revolution. I knew about Kismet, but knew nothing of Mertz, Leo and Domo, a robot who is basically all arms and was my favorite. There are YouTube clips throughout the article and watching Domo slowly stick a bottle of whiskey into a Styrofoam cup all on his own (see above) is thrilling because the movement is fluid and yet so dumb.
The article is sneaky because while it does an excellent job of catching the casual reader up on current trends in robotics, it's really a feint to get into a deeper discussion about human emotions and consciousness. Read the article for yourself. It argues that current robot development, which has by and large abandoned the idea of creating a "thinking brain" A.I. in favor of creating robots which express human-like behaviors, is so successful because in reality, that's what humans do. Fake it till you make it, baby. 'It', here means "a soul".
There's a trend right now in philosophy to take a mechanistic and adaptive view of human intelligence. Oh, that sounds boring. Okay- so scientists nowadays are pretty certain that there is no "you". Daniel Dennett leads the pack on this- arguing in Freedom Evolves(probably the world's only page-turner about free will) that rather than the old-fashioned notion of a solid cohesive "self", the reality is that the thing you look at in the mirror every morning is made up of millions of little programs, behaviors, learned reactions, embedded flight or fight instincts, etc...
This ad hoc homminem theory doesn't deny the complexity of human experience, but it does reject that the human consciousness is one blended smoothie of self-awareness. There is no sum to our parts. Our perception of self is powered by the same ability we have to see animals in clouds and it's just as illusory.
It's taken me a long time to come to agree with this. The whole of Western culture is built on the nobility of the human soul. Not to mention, I can be pretty egotistical. There's something downright inhuman about stripping away the soul, to admit that our emotions aren't coming from some Apollonian well of spirit, but rather from millenia of trial and error by our ancestors (well, the ones who managed to breed). If you believe in evolution at all, however-- you can't hide from it. Art, poetry, music, greed, betrayal, kindness and imagination all resulted from the same process that gave us the opposable thumb.
There are all sorts of interesting questions posed by this world view. For one, if the Rube Goldberg contraption we call consciousness really does result from the same adaptive processes of evolution, then how does our own altering of the environment effect that? For instance, the Internet and the digital age in general has changed the way we communicate and has reshaped our social environments dramatically. As we adapt to these new technologies, are we reshaping our intelligence, reasoning and behavior? That is, are we reprogramming our brains? Are we changing the definition of human?
I, for one, take a bit of peace from the idea that I'm soulless. My failings are not the result of corruption, but faulty adaptation. It doesn't divorce me from being responsible for my actions and behavior, but it does allow me to be more self-aware and hopefully spend less time bemoaning my fate and more time adapting to and changing my environment, and making informed choices about integrating successful strategies and jettisoning those which don't work for the situation at hand.
I don't think (end of statement?) that this is a call to be a self-serving opportunist. It's a call to look around at the world and at yourself and decide (based on you know, all the cognitive resources you've picked up along the way) who you want to be and where you want to be and figuring out how to achieve those aims.
