No Thinking Necessary?
Having had significant success to date by sidestepping
the cognition problem, Rodney Brooks is ready to say that all cognition is unnecessary,
regardless of the behaviours we hope to build into robots. He considers
behaviours that we associate with cognition to be simply epiphenomena and is explicitly not working on the problem.In fact, a key 'problem' in his work has become convincing humans that they are
machines... As he sees it, "all of us overanthropomorphise humans, who are
after all mere machines"and "all arguments that robots wont have emotions boil down to arguments
that we are not machines".
With this view of human nature in place, he is able to
claim that Artificial Intelligence research has produced a robot comparable to
HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. He considers this milestone to have been
passed onMay 9, 2000, when Cynthia
Breazeal defended her thesis on Kismet, a robot designed for social
interaction. According to Brooks, "Kismet is alive. Or may as well be.
People treat it that way".
Of course, he is fully aware of the limitations of current robotics. For
example, Kismet can vocalize but cannot say words, and only hears prosody, but
he does not see this as "an impediment to a good conversation".
But in the final analysis he admits "... we do not stay fooled for long.
We treat our robots more like dust mites than like dogs or people. For us the
emotions are not real".
I'm deeply impressed by the work of Brooks and the AI
Lab, but I would agree with his own assessment that the work to date has
limitations. Because the robots are embodied and don't rely on digital
technology, they are certainly agents where computer programmes are not. But
the degrees of complexity and internal freedom that we see in the next few
generations of robotics will surely remain a far cry from biological systems.
Personally, I suspect robotics will need to borrow techniques from biology, and
even achieve similar levels of complexity before we will meet Commander Data
from Star Trek. Unfortunately, as Brooks himself notes, biomolecular behaviour
is "incredibly expensive to compute".
When Oxford theologian Keith
Ward was asked in an interview if he would baptise a robot, he gave what I
consider a very profound and helpful answer. His reply: "If it asked
properly." Let’s unpack this: First, for 'it' to ask at all, we would have
to be convinced that it was an agent. (If we could trace the question to
programming provided from the outside, it would no longer be a valid request.)
For it to genuinely 'ask' would require it to possess rich notions of
intentionality and relationality. And finally, for it to ask 'properly' would
entail us first deciding how we would tell if a human were to ask improperly,
and then try and apply those criteria to the robot too. Presumably, in order
for a robot to formulate a convincing 'proper' explanation of why it wished to
be baptised, it would be able to express it's understanding of a transcendent
reality. A robot capable of doing this would certainly have my attention!
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| Contributed by: Adrian
Wyard
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