I have a friend who thinks that robotics are wrong, what do you guys think, are robots wrong, or are they only wrong past a certain point? Tell me what you think.

Your friend is retarded. The next time (s)he opens his/her mouth, smack that bitch upside the head for being a moron. Seriously, how the heck can (s)he be opposed to robotics?

Robot's are only wrong when we turn ourselves into them

Of course robots are wrong! Who are we to play god!

"Though shall not buildest robots" - Levitcus 2:46

I find your trollbait lacking in conviction.

But seriously, it depends what you mean by wrong. I can't think of any possible use of robotics except for violence that would be "wrong".

Can you truly claim that even that is wrong? Robot armies are a definite step forward - wars can be fought with zero casualties and with immense enjoyment! ROBO WARS, BABY!!!

I was implying robot-on-human violence.

Oh come KermMartian, surely you can be more creative than that. Robotics has a nearly endless list of nonviolent uses! Anything from domestic slaves (without the ethical considerations ;)) to nanobots that enhance our imune systems and fight diseases. To imply that an entire class of technology is destined for naught but perceived evil is nothing but ignorance. The Luddites were and always will be, wrong.

That is what my friend says, and I am wondering about AI robots especially, as that is where my friend is most centered around.



no my friend is actually quite smart, and would be a bad idea.

I don't really find that the playing God argument holds water but for a relatively philosophical reason. I shall explain.

The argument that we are playing God asserts that we are trying to essentially recreate humans. Now at this point you could now assert that taking pictures of people, or making sculptures that depict the human form are also "playing God". To that end I will not argue with you, I don't argue with idiots. With that out of the way we must first address what it is to be human (you can't recreate human without knowing what it is...) There are essentially two main POVs when it comes to defining human. The first is that the human body is an organic mass which recieves electrical impuses from the similarly organic mass that is the brain. This brain is nothing more than a chemical system, a computer if you will. As a computer it is of course deterministic (or random if you wish to delve into quantum mechanics) and does not posses the concept referred to as "free will". If this be the case then we need not fear "playing God", we have no souls, God need not even exist. The second opinion of what it is to be human assumes that free will does in fact exist. Since a deterministic system cannot posses free will, and robots are deterministic systems, then we are not in danger of "recreating humans" in any meaningful way. We may create machines that mimic the actions and functionalities of humans but will nevertheless lack a soul. In other words, they are no more blasphemous than statues (though far more useful).

are they against computers? because a robot is nothing more than a computer in autonomous control of machinery.

as an FRC team mentor, I have to be in favor of robots. They can done to do things that are either too dangerous, too delicate, or too large for humans themselves to complete. Granted, I know such projects are done with humans are done all the time, but why chance things in my opinion.

Free will does not imply the existence of a soul or of god (free will simply means that your choices have not already been decided). However, the lack of free will directly implies the existence of a god (lack of free will means that everything is pre-ordained, meaning there is a god of some form), so you need to reword your first POV.



If your friend believes that creating robots is playing god, then I hate to tell you this, but your friend is a complete and utter idiot. No religion ever has preached that god plopped us down on earth with tools - tools have ALWAYS been man made. As robots are essentially tools, that means that by creating robots we are "playing man"

why not just play an RTS? by the time you have androids that advanced, you probably have supercomputers 100s of times better than what we have now. Might as well save the money and play an realtime raytraced RTS (wishful thinking) in the future than waste money to have lots of robots scrap each other. Not to mention sounding totally desensitized.

1) www.usfirst.org
If robots are wrong, we've got a lot of people (I can't remember the exact number for the life of me) devoting way too much time working on an evil thing. Something is wrong with that picture.

2) You didn't say what your friend's rationale for thinking this is. Have to understand them before really knowing the best "counter-argument".

3) Robots are too useful and fun to be wrong or evil, imo. Then again, I'm working on a skateboard that uses mecanum drive (r&d), with 1.5 people helping, so how unbiased can I be?

I agree with you guys, my unspoken question was the one you picked up on proegssilb the one of how to get a good counter argument in that he will understand. Kllrnohj I have to disagree actually my friend is fairly smart, though I would agree that not all of his ideas are the best and that he is a bit thick headed at times. Rivereye I agree, but what do you think of completely autonomous fighting machines that will kill first ask questions later, that is what my friend really hates. Proegssilb here is a big reason my friend thinks ALL robots are evil, he think that we are in essence creating and enslaving them.

Machines don't, and never will, do anything that we have not told them to do. They cannot "think first and ask questions later". Technically, they think before doing anything, and can only do what has been determined to be the correct response by the programmer. At this point in time we aren't even remotely close to anything truly autonomous and capable of decision making, meaning someone somewhere is directly controlling it.



Hence your friend is an idiot. You cannot enslave a tool. I don't see him/her complaining that we've enslaved all the SUVs

I think that in the next 50 years or so computing power and storage capacity and speed will reach a point where our machines can "think" faster than us with analogous parallelization; at that point, simple logic will still be followed on course, but I think it will be interesting to see if this power allows machines to give the appearance of human-like intelligence. If so, it would be a significant argument either in favor of or against the position that the human brain is a simple deterministic computer, but that the sheer complexity of it is what gives the illusion of free will.

Put simply, there is nothing wrong with robots, at least not for the foreseeable future.

Personally, I find robotics an intriguing subject and want it to move forward rapidly, but hey, that may just be me.

Robots are designed to do PRECISELY WHAT THEY DO, and while there is the possibility of error, it is the fault of the programmer, as robots will not reach actual sentience for a looong time, if it is even possible (I think it is, but that is up for debate, but it probably won't happen in our lifetimes)

Once robots finally reach sentience, it could be considered enslavement, but I don't think so, even though they are similar to us, they are simply a web of circuits, we are a web of chemicals. It is also unlikely that a robot will ever be able to precisely imitate a human thought process, since I believe it may seem roundabout and inefficient at times, even though it works perfectly for us =)

I also don't believe that robots will ever be truly sentient because they would simply be reacting to set stimuli, which is arguably what we do, but when they can dream and act like a real human, than tell me (Blade Runner and IRobot come to mind =) ).

And also, tell your friend he doesn't have to worry about it because it won't happen in his lifetime. For the timebeing, robots and AI are designed for 1 purpose, or linked to together for many purposes, such as the DARPA challenge. To the computer, it is merely a lot of number crunching and calculating, and there is NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT.




Oh yeah, this is kinda off topic, but the robot in I Robot is wrong when she says her logic is perfect. By enslaving/keeping humans down, she is violating the rule about not harming them (like when the humans attack the robots) =P
I really need to read the actual book I Robot and not just the movie, I may be wrong on something =P

Well, that was long winded, but we got out of school early because of "inclement weather," so I am happy


http://cectic.com/comics/069.png
Oh so true... (Even though it is about religion, it applies to pretty much everything =P)

"Enslavement" requires that you force someone to do something in service to you, with little to no payment, against the will of the slave. At least, it does in my mind. Were the house-elves in Harry Potter enslaved? Robots are even further into the murky territory than house-elves, since house-elves could actually be presented with the choice to be paid, but frequently chose no payment. Robots can't even understand the concept of getting paid, nor could they be aware you're trying to explain something to them. They don't really even know they exist. They just do what they've been programmed to do.

The absolute farthest I've seen AI even theorized about is in telephone systems. There were some different techniques being analyzed a few years back for dealing with customer support. The system would (a) use speech recognition to know the words in your question, (b) analyze the question grammatically, identifying what each word was, (c) find the key phrases in the question, and (d) use those key phrases to answer the question, primarily by statistical database. That system has to be pre-programmed with every single bit of data it has, and might not actually know how to use what it is saying. And that assumes it actually became reliable; I never heard anything more about it, so it might have epically failed.
If that's the advanced case, then how the heck can we expect that to analyze enough to realize it is being enslaved, and that it deserves payment? How would it recognize the concept of leisure? Family? Friends? Loneliness? Emotion? Such basic concepts that just can't be programmed; they defy the computer. The best we could get with current programming is to emulate the human brain in real-time. Only then can we start worrying about enslavement.

:inhale: