Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
Robots and love
questionablecontentfan:
OMG, haha. I just remember seeing that movie and it was totally inappropriate. Parents had brought their young kids in, thinking it was a kids' movie, and they were so pissed! lol.
Near Lurker:
--- Quote from: Vurogj on 01 Sep 2011, 22:14 ---
--- Quote from: Orbert on 01 Sep 2011, 15:36 ---Asimov also explored this idea in his story "The Bicentennial Man" (source for the movie "Bicentennial Man" starring Robin Williams). The title character, a robot who had been upgraded so many times that he achieved sentience and looked completely human, and was actually granted citizenship and the same rights as a human being, chooses to "die" rather than continue existing without the human companion with whom he had spent so many years. I'd forgotten about this story until now.
--- End quote ---
Is that the film plot or the book plot? As I recall it (from the book, Robin Wiliams eww), he was only granted human citizenship after he'd chosen to die, that decision being what swung the humans concerned with the decision.
--- End quote ---
"The leaders of nations did chortle,
And scoff at this legal loop-portal,
For beneath all their laws
Lay an unwritten clause...
'No citizen may be immortal.'"
(Yeah, I know, fuckin' Mormons, etc.)
idontunderstand:
We can't say whether robots can love or not without defining love.
*thinks*
If we define love as the more-than-friends attraction between persons, the probably sexual one, robots can probably not love, since they don't reproduce through sex. However, by that definition I suppose a sentient sex-robot could "love", while a sentient, non-sexual robot could not. In my opinion, this makes it a weak definition.
If we define love as.. somehow friendly feelings towards someone, feeling closeness and trust and dependence towards another person, robots might be able to love, assuming they are sentient beings. The problem is, I figure, that a sentient robot is probably never really dependent upon human beings, seeing as all they really need is a power source. Can someone who doesn't need other persons really love? Now however, love is not the same thing as dependence. It's possible to feel love towards someone without depending on that person. It seems as though the robots in the QC universe are social beings who enjoy other's company, and we can assume they do so by their own choice, not because they are programmed to do so. A being that chooses to live with other beings and interact with them because of their own choice, must have some sort of motive to do so. Love, possibly. Programming to mimic human behaviour, maybe. But Jeph's last twitter post indeed suggests that the robots live among humans because they want to, because they like humans. (on a more realistic note, creating a being with free will is probably impossible.)
The last definition I can think of is the more universal love, the will that drives the universe forwards and makes the plants grow and the sun glow. Not a feeling, but rather the will to live. Every living being has this will, and there is no reason to assume that the QC robots don't.
So I guess.. I dunno? I think they maybe do? :roll:
HiFranc:
idontunderstand, I remember a discussion about research into love by social scientists on the radio years ago (too many for me to remember the date, year or decade). Their definition of love was simple:
--- Quote ---To understand the needs of another being and to meet them.
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Now that I've had time to think about about it I would modify that a bit:
--- Quote ---To understand the needs of another being and to meet them (even if it means a cost to the provider).
--- End quote ---
In this case "cost" could money, could be time, could be heartache, could be anything. I still feel there's something missing but I can't think of a way of phrasing it that would cover all cases that we would accept as "love". I think I've got it:
--- Quote ---To understand the needs of another being and to meet them (even if it means a cost to the provider) and for that provision to be motivated out of genuine caring rather than narrow self interest.
--- End quote ---
I think that that's a reasonable definition of love. What do you think?
snubnose:
--- Quote from: questionablecontentfan on 01 Sep 2011, 09:38 ---If there were robots talking and acting like humans, I would think they can love.
--- End quote ---
This is a natural reaction. Thats why Disney, for example, humanifies animals in their strips. Its what our brain tells us. That animals are somehow human underneath. Even if animals very likely have a different perspective than us, because of their limited mental abilities (compared to us).
Animals are a lot more like people than computers, though. Even the most simple animals can already feel, and they can already hurt.
I'm a programmer, but I cannot program the computer in front of me to feel anything, or to be hurt. It doesnt matter how much memory you give me or how fast you make this computer, it simply wont feel anything, ever.
Mind, I dont oppose that Momo would ACT like she would actually love Marigold. I oppose that there is actual feeling there.
--- Quote from: Is it cold in here? on 01 Sep 2011, 10:08 ---Neurons can fire, not fire, send impulses to other neurons, and change their sensitivity to input. All their activity is some combination of the above. Can machines like us, built from neural networks, love?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism#Foundations_of_chemistry. Chemists used to believe there was some magic principle unique to organic molecules that made them different from inorganic molecules, and that they could never be synthesized from non-living ingredients.
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I do not believe science has yet understood what consciousness is, and I doubt they ever will. Computers can emulate neuron networks, but that still wont give them the ability to feel, or to hurt.
--- Quote from: Akima on 01 Sep 2011, 18:58 ---
--- Quote from: snubnose on 01 Sep 2011, 06:58 ---Computers only have the ability to perform mathematical operations
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From a similarly reductionist point of view, human beings only have the ability to perform chemical reactions. How can a collection of chemical reactions love? The existence of sociopathy suggests that, at least to some extent, the ability to love is a learned behaviour, or to put it another way, a matter of programming.
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To my knowledge it is more a case of destroyed hardware than the lack of programming. If you disrupt the nerves of a human being or an animal, its possible you can cut off their arm or leg without them feeling anything. Likewise, sociopaths are unable to know consciously what they feel, or to understand other peoples feelings, because of destroyed parts of their brain. They are still able to hurt though.
My issue is simply the claim that was started as early as computers have been known, that somehow making computers faster and more powerful they would turn into something else. Just read or watch 2001 for that one and check out the abilities of HAL 9000. Its more obvious in the book, the movie stays kind of vague about this.
Yet computers did no such thing. They only became faster and better able to store things. They did not turn sentient and show no sign to turn sentient in the near or distant future. Its simply not there. No matter how fast it is, its still just a mathematical calculator.
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