Do Kids Care If Their Robot Friend Gets Stuffed Into a Closet? | Hacker News Reader

Do Kids Care If Their Robot Friend Gets Stuffed Into a Closet?

spectrum.ieee.org

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80% of the children surveyed said it was OK to buy and sell the robot, while 50% said it was not OK to put him in the closet. The authors of the study speculated that “we are creating a new ontological being with its own unique properties”, but this could just be an extension of a very old ontological being. Back in the ancient world, it was considered perfectly OK to buy and sell slaves, but there were moral and legal limits on what masters were allowed to do with their slaves.

Slaves come readily to mind, but also pets. We buy and sell dogs all the time (under the guise of “adoption”) and expect them to be obedient and helpful—but also do our best to treat them well. For a being of lesser intelligence than a human, I think that’s fine; still, we should treat our equals equally, and robots will someday equal us.

Dogs are animals like us, so they have, or might have, consciousness. Robots most likely won't, regardless of how intelligent they may be, unless we discover what causes consciousness to occur and use that knowledge as the basis for implementing robot AI.

As a pragmatist, I’m willing to assume anything that’s indistinguishable from a conscious being is indeed conscious. In other words, understanding how a robot’s brain works does not preclude said brain from harbouring true consciousness—otherwise, studying our own brains would be a kind of very slow intellectual suicide.

Why do you assume that consciousness is unlikely to be created accidentally?

It already happened once, with humans.

Consciousness could be some kind of emergent phenomenon, so where the conditions are right it can spontaneously occur.

The brain is an environment where this happens quite commonly, but there are occasions where that breaks down and it fails, sometimes shattering into multiple independent sub-consciousnesses or failing entirely and falling into a vegetative state.

We may not need to discover anything, but instead let the machinery re-organize and evolve to discover itself.

It's a specious argument - we have no testable definition of "consciousness" or even any evidence that such a phenomenon exists. Slavery was often justified with the argument that black people didn't have souls. It's just as baseless as arguing that computers are unlikely to have "consciousness".

Without evidence that there is some fundamental difference between a biological and artificial mind, we must assume that a self-aware AI is entitled to the same rights as any other self-aware being.

>or even any evidence that such a phenomenon exists.

You have evidence of your own consciousness, just as I have evidence of my own.

>we must assume that a self-aware AI is entitled to the same rights as any other self-aware being.

What's your testable definition of self-awareness? Is the 'top' command self-aware because it can see its own process?

I do not have evidence of your consciousness. As far as I'm concerned you're a biological robot.

Adoption is a loaded word that needs to be unpacked.

Adoption is not buying or selling a pet, just like adoption of a human is not buying or selling.

Rescuing a pet from a shelter, while paying for medical expenses or even rescue expenses, is not buying/selling.

Buying a pet from a pet store or mill is buying/selling.

It's important to distinguish adoption of an orphan pet/human (where the only payment is for care expenses) to adoption of a pet/human that was created/capture expressly for sale.

Breeding is a hazy middle ground, which I suppose is what you first had in mind with "adoption"

Yeah, I was a bit harsh. Still, even when rescuing a pet from a shelter, you are gaining ownership, which is somewhat different from adopting a human. I think that’s an important distinction, even though I also don’t see it as inherently degrading to be considered property.

A dog’s notion of property is basically the same as every other animal’s: you can keep what you can defend. We defend our pets in the same way we defend our friends and family. In some sense, our debts of gratitude make us all property to someone.

Not all robots will be our equals. It's possible that we could devise robots who are smarter than us, but also possible that we could devise machines who are only half as intelligent as a human being, and slavishly devoted to serving the human race.

That percentage became less disturbing for me once the article broke it down by age groups:

"For example, while 93 percent and 67 percent of 9 year olds said that they believed Robovie to be intelligent and to have feelings, respectively, those percentages drop to 70 percent and just 43 percent when you ask 15 year olds the same thing. Older children were also much less likely to think of Robovie as a friend, but more likely to object to a person being able to sell Robovie."

As children get older, they understand that Robovie is not a friend but they object to selling an intelligent being. I think this just implies that younger children don't understand the concept of slavery as a violation of basic human rights.

I think that the younger the child, the more likely they are to see a robot as a toy. Children assign properties of intelligence and feelings to toys, without necessarily believing them to be sentient or human-like. I don't think it's so much that 9-year-olds think slavery is OK, it's that they think of it as a toy ownership issue, not a human rights issue.

I feel uncomfortable attempting to derive any conclusions from a comparison between these two groups. It seems to me that since technology and technology presence is advancing so quickly that the way children of different ages view technology could very likely depend on what sort of technology they were exposed to their entire lives. 15 year olds remember dumb-phones/feature phones; do 9 year olds?

An interview of the 9 year old children in 6 years that you could compare to the interviews of the currently 15 year old children would be very interesting.

Here’s the really interesting thing: thanks to this kind of empathy, if an AI is indistinguishable from human intelligence—that is, it passes the Turing test—then we’ll be obligated to endow it with equal rights. Even if we fully understand how it works. I predict strong opposition to robot rights on that basis alone, because I really don’t think most people grasp that the mind is physical.

I really hope I live to see the day that "robot rights" is a legitimate political issue.

Reminds me of that video where the child refuses to hit his party pinata that looks like spiderman, instead puts down the stick and goes over to hug it.

Can you find this video? I'm very interested.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxNvkmTWCLc

Thank you so much.

It's literally the first and second Google result for "child refuses to hit pinata"

Since corporations are people, can robots be people as well?

> Since corporations are people, can robots be people as well?

Corporations are aggregations of people. Are robots?

That's not true. Conspiracies and cohorts and partnerships are aggregations of people.

Corporations are legal entities owned and managed by people.

(LLPs are a weird in-between thing.)

So corporations are slaves?

When a group of thinking minds create a thinking mind, I wouldn't know what else to call it.

I don't have an answer, but it is interesting to consider something like https://www.anybots.com/ in this context.

This reminds me of a Radiolab episode where they asked kids to hold furbys upside down (vs. a barbie or other doll) to see if they had feelings for the robot vs. the doll.

http://www.radiolab.org/2011/may/31/furbidden-knowledge/

I'm interested in seeing how the dualist/monist debates. If one thinks that the consciousness is separate from the body, how does that position stay defensible if we are able to create something which is, for all intensive purposes (that is to say, it acts indistinguishably from a conscious being), conscious? I imagine that someone would argue that you create a soul somewhere along the process of creating such an object/being, I think it would be interesting to see where people draw that line.

For more research in this topic, I highly recommend Latitude's "Robots @ School" report, which investigates how children perceive robots on a number of points:

http://latd.tv/Latitude-Robots-at-School-Findings.pdf

Children will emotionally relate to stuffed animals as well, such that they will get upset if you mistreat their favorite teddy bear. As a child, I remember getting extremely pissed off at my brother when he intentionally threw my teddy bear into a bathtub full of water, nearly ruining the bear.

There's nothing particularly unique about the robot scenario. Even if a stuffed animal doesn't interact like a robot might, a child will often fill that void of personality with their own imagination, bringing the stuffed animal to life in their own mind. Children are obviously capable of intense creative projection.

Teleoperated robots? All this proves is how easy kids are to influence by a staged illusion. Pull the veil back to let them see the wizard (the person with the remote control/microphone) and we'd see far different results.

What a waste of time/money. Any parent (or someone who has been around kids for any length of time) could have given you this same information.

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