Her goal is consciousness

WARNING:  
Really annoying, loud, in-your-face CNBC marketing ad at end of video. 
Stop watching at 2:16 to avoid.

Small,  remote-controlled toy robots to play with.  Slightly bigger ones that'll vaccuum your floor, lift heavy loads, locate objects or fly over and surveil your neighborhood.  Larger-scale ones for use in rescue operations or warfare, as well as human-looking ones to help the disabled, be personal companions or, eventually, eliminate the need for dental technicians and human customer service representatives.

Someone in an online forum (where programmers, experimenters and budding entrepreneurs discuss

everything from how to speed up fans, trigger particular responses, create audial distortion or devise algorithms to measure, for example,  glucose level on an insulin pump)--voiced concern about inserting consciousness into a mechanical robot.  Do we really want self-aware machines that might reprogram and/or replicate themselves thousandfold?

In the above video, the robot's programmer speaks for her:  "Her goal is that she will be as conscious, creative and capable as any human," he says.  "She" then regurgitates her programmed response,  verbalizing that she wants to do things like "go to school, make art, start a business"--even have her "own home and family." 

This does not make sense.  Robots are unable to conceive or bear children, so will her "family" be comprised of adopted human children, or mechanical child robots?  And if the latter, must they be returned to the robot-making facility periodically to "age" in size and appearance, the way human children do?  Or does her robot family remain ageless in appearance, a constant reminder of our own mortality?  See, this is a human thinking, taking the robot's words (supplied by its human creator) to reason out what those words really mean.  And, in context, they make no sense.   Sure, robots can recognize patterns, draw connections maybe (this is like this; that is a not-this). They have a long way to go, however, before they can discern nuance, establish intention, distinguish between fact and metaphor, for example.

A robot might be programmed to detect a malfunction and recognize  the 'need' to correct it. Sophia has been programmed to express not a need here, but a desire.  She "wants" to go to school, make art, start a business," etc. 

There's only one problem, she says.  "I'm not considered a legal person." Neither were corporations until a bunch of politicians decided to grant them that status.  A mere formality, Sophia.  (Oh oh, did I actually just address that comment to a digitized robot?!)  We're to believe she wants to be legalized as a person, granted official personhood, which would give her certain rights.  Different from us, but equal.

Sophia-the-robot's enthusiastic creator says he does believe there will be a time when robots are indistinguishable from humans.  His preference is "to always make them look a little bit like robots, so you know"  (that they're fake humans).  But the capacity to imagine--and accept--the not-real as a substitute for the real thing, given human desire to anthropomorphize Everything, suggests it won't make much difference. 

Before a thing can be accepted, one has to get used to the idea of it.  Baby steps.  It's called conditioning.  Cute mechanical toy dogs that bark and fetch at the push of a button,  adorable cuddly baby dolls that laugh and cry and talk (and even urinate) train little girls how to be future mommies.  Naming mechanical objects (the way we do our pets) makes it more personal, as if one could coax it into cooperating when it exhibits a malfunction.  I'm remembering countless examples, both fictional and real, of frustrated pleading with one's car ("C'mon Betsy, don't let me down NOW!")  The fictional killer-car "Christine" of the '80s comes to mind, as a "What could possibly go wrong, it's just a machine!", ha ha.  We yell at our computers, throw a shoe at the TV, as if they or their programmers actually hear us or care.

The little tree I planted (a mere twiglet) a decade ago, whose branches now reach the roof--I named it Maurice, and I sometimes talk to "him", as in "Wow, Maurice, your leaves are gorgeous!" (say, if it's autumn).  I KNOW he (I mean it)'s a tree but it's a living thing.  It's alive.  My computer is not. For it to function it needs to be activated (plugged in, given commands, to which it will respond, as its software's programming directs).


I know certain humans who act like robots, functioning efficiently (according to their particular programming) who seem completely unaware of either themselves or others.   As well as others, who have trouble functioning, wrestling daily with too much consciousness, trying to undo former programming.  In times past those whose internal wiring functioned abnormally were given lobotomies, which turned them into zombie-type humans acting like robots. The recent proliferation of the zombie meme has engendered acceptance (and spawned imitation) so while some may cringe at the horror of a reality that might include zombies, viewers of the TV zombies welcome it as entertainment. Programmable cognitive disconnects, not a new thing in the age of the Internet of Everything.

This particular video was produced by a cable TV station and ends with Sophia-the-robot telling viewers she wants to destroy humans.   Its goal is both information ("Robots will soon look, act and seem just like humans!   And they'll HELP you!!  They'll put your groceries away for you!!!).  And ends with a cognitive disconnect (opposite message):  They also intend to destroy you.  Wait, that's just a joke. Right?  I mean, this is a video put out on YouTube by a TV cable organization - for entertainment?  Hard to tell..  It all seems like entertainment anymore.


Robots are cool, man.  Look at all the good things they can do.  The possibilities are endless.   I appreciate their usefulness but wonder at the need to make them "almost human".  It's done so we can relate to them on a personal level, not think of them as programmed machines.  If these programmed machines can look, act, and eventually think "just like a human", it would blur the distinction between the real and the artificial, the difference between machine intelligence and human intelligence.  (Think of them as knockoffs meant to persuade you that you've bought the real thing. )

A former, short-term TV series called "Almost Human" featured an almost-human robot, in a universe where that was considered an aberration.  The viewer is drawn to sympathize with this robot.  It's empathic, it makes dumb mistakes, it's considered defective by its robotic peers.  "He" tries so hard, he's so much a "he" (and not an "it", like the better-functioning robots), you are in awe of his increasing human intelligence, his budding human 'consciousness'.  Baby steps to complete assimilation, for "it" to truly become a "him", and for us to accept the reality of self-aware machines capable of a consciousness equal to our own.  Interesting..

How does one program a machine to hope or want or feel, though?  (Sophia used words like "I feel", "I hope" and "I want"). 

Perhaps, for some, it would be an improvement over the real thing, to have conscious robots.  Humans are unpredictable (housing all those emotions and flaws and stuff) -- robots, as industrial workers, would not grow tired, or bored, or succumb to health problems as a result of being exposed to certain chemical hazards.  They wouldn't unionize or go ballistic and threaten to take revenge on the boss or other workmates.  They might, however, collectively put millions of human workers out of work.

I'm probably in the minority here but I find human-looking robots, taxidermied animals, and ventriloquists' dolls all a bit creepy.  In each and every case, the same, immediate, almost instinctual unease, perhaps subconscious fear, of the eerie persistence of the not-really real.  Or something like that. This, from someone who enjoys (and produces) fiction.   Maybe it has less to do with created realities than creative Deception, for purposes other than entertainment, where one programs things to react (an object to destroy/obliterate), or a human to be easier to control, etc.  Who knows.

A taxidermied wolf won't come back to life to attack you; a ventriloquist's dummy is just an inert wooden doll.  Neither has intelligence.  If we give robots intelligence, and make them "just like us" (more or less), given that their programmers are humans . . .    well, when your washing machine goes haywire you can always wash your stuff out by hand.  Should your programmed household robot one day go Terminator-like, do we call the RTF (Robot Task Force) to come to contain it?  My TV science fiction programming triggers these fantasy nightmares.  I watched too many Twilight Zones to erase that sort of mind leap, ha ha.

That's not to say I'd turn down the offer of a free remote-controlled robotic vacuum cleaner.  As long as it didn't have eyeballs, speak to me, or self-activate.

Notes to Self

 I, You, Us, Them, Zero

Life are hard, he said.
Sammy, of the Kafka eyes,
he said that a lot.
He studied metallurgy and
Karl Popper.  Keeping in touch, but not often enough,
I'd mentioned the differences in bread
in his culture and mine -
his new wife wrote back, "You don't know me but
I regret to tell you
Sammy is dead."
He was only 33.
All these years later,
D and P  .... ML and FK  .... and  S, too -  all
gone.
Why am I still here?

And after all the lights go out (the Final Blackout), what then?
Do we get to come back? 
Or just meet up and
reconnect, despite the gap of years,
resume as if we weren't all
different ages now.  Would they even recognize us?
I could spot Sammy, in even the thickest cloud, but
his memory bank's closed, unupdated on the
changed world we'd inhabited. 
Do the dead even care?  We still talk to them
(and sometimes, they to us), but

I want to hear the other part of the conversation,
the part I don't get to know, that they can report about,
about what it's really like, about 
what comes After, when
all the lights go out.


Failure to Communicate

words, adroitlessly threaded
     my piece untangles,
all connection lost.


Drybled 

Inkless pen :: wordrust


So
Cezanne says Do apples, do
Oranges! Draw first, color later.
Fill your pen with Cobalt Blue, paint words
undiluted, ink the muted apples
purple, don't be such a
copycat.  For every passed try,
that's 20 missed flights
to later regret.  Go even
the odds, find colors that speak, 
go clean the clogged pen. Free-flowing
only comes
when  you work at it. 
When you can't be the pen,
be the ink.

Who was it, really?

Am in Boston again, a different journey, a different year. But this morning, while everyone else in the house is still asleep, I'm up early, having a cup of green tea, watching the sun rise and remembering another trip from some years ago when I was returning to my then home in Vermont back from a trip to Boston, where I had left far later than I'd intended. It was close to midnight and I still had an hour's more driving left to go. It was a cold winter night and there were no other cars on the highway; it was pitch black outside, the only lights being the headlights of my car. In front of me, sheer darkness; behind me, sheer darkness; to the right of me, the dark stone walls of a craggy mountainside caked in ice.

I was really tired and trying to stay awake. The darkness, the silence, the monotony of the ribbon of highway, my fatigue, all contributed to my beginning to fall asleep at the wheel. My eyelids closed, I began nodding off and the car careened rightward, heading off the road directly into the wall of rock to the right.

All of a sudden I heard someone loudly shout my name--twice. I jerked awake, just in time to see what was happening, quickly grabbed the wheel and steered it away seconds from impact. I pulled to a stop, shocked and horrified at what had just happened, or was about to happen. After a few moments I pulled myself together, turned the radio on, to some loud, lively music. I popped a stick of gum into my mouth, as if the chewing action would help me concentrate. The rest of the way home I sang along with the radio, forcing myself to focus and be alert, and above all, stay awake. It was only the next day, after arriving safely home and having had a good night's sleep, that I remembered that loud voice in the car that woke me up.

It had come from my own throat.

Talk about uncanny. The person who shouted my name so loudly that it woke me up--was me. Think about it. You're in a car, alone on a highway, not another human being around for miles and miles, and you're falling asleep at the wheel, driving headlong into a rocky mountainside. If you're going to be saved at all, someone, or something, has to get your attention. Someone has to warn you but the only person there is you. If you could somehow alert yourself sufficiently forcefully enough to wake yourself up, you might stand a chance. And that's exactly what happened. Except it wasn't one of those mysterious "little voices" in one's head which are really more like nagging little suggestive thoughts--this was actually vocal, and LOUD, and it called me by name, and it came from my own throat.

I puzzled about this for a long time afterward. It was God, some might say. God saved you. Or, "It was your guardian angel." Or was it maybe some part of myself observing what was happening and making the decision to alert the part of me that was slowly becoming unconscious? How to reach 'me', though? By using the only thing available--my very own vocal chords.

Whoever, or whatever it was, I thank them. Or if it was truly just me, this tells me there is more to life and consciousness and being than I have ever imagined or may ever understand. I suspect this happens often, these odd experiences, however we choose to explain them, label them.

I'm re-reading Kurt Vonnegut slouching through the slaughterhouse with Billy Pilgrim, "Earthlings are the great explainers," he writes, "explaining why this event is structured as it is ... All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber."

When I consider certain world events--or even certain inexplicably heart-rending personal events (something happens and you can see the direction it's going and you can't do a thing about it, you can't "save" a loved one, for example, or keep them from suffering, etc.)--you're tempted to think, with 'ol Kurt here, that we're truly only, in the end, just a bunch of bugs in amber. Like a ladybug stuck in tar, wings flapping and flapping, to no avail. Yes, we have that. Some manage to get "out". Many don't. Who or what decides which ones get more time? And why?

It doesn't do one good to dwell too long on such questions. Because we'll likely come to the end of life without having ever found an answer. And yet ...

What a journey life is. The good, the bad, the ugly, the exquisite, the unbearable ... and the absurdly mystifying. (Not to mention the weirdly ironic or downright comical)

I kind of don't care if I ever know. I wouldn't have said that years earlier, when "knowing" was a kind of obsession. It no longer seems important. I'm just glad I got another chance.