Our desires made... mechanical?
There's a recent article in Seed magazine regarding the rising field of roboethics. It's quite good with regards to current events (I'd like to get copies of EURON and South Korea's charter) but really quite introductory read with regards to the philosophical aspects of roboethics. For a better introduction to the subject of roboethics, I'd suggest Anne Foerst's "God in the Machine." However, this quote in the article caught my attention:
And so, roboethics is starting to ask some questions for which we, as yet, have no concrete answers. "If our experience with [these robots] is based on a fundamentally deceitful interchange—[their] ability to persuade us that they know of and care about our existence—can it be good for us?" asks Turkle.
(This photo from my trip to Boston is of Kismet, a robot created by Cynthia Breazeal at MIT Labs. Some of Turkle's work directly involves Kismet.)
Authors love to tackle this difficult notion in fiction: what we create can turn on us, disappoint us, because we (in forgetting to account for human nature) have created better or worse than we had anticipated. Paying attention to our creations gives them a certain power over us, the ability to ensnare us with this "fundamentally deceitful interchange."
Except robots are made. Making as an act implies that the creator deems the creation (and its role) necessary, necessary enough to devise and finish. It is not enough to walk, we have deemed it necessary to create horseshoes and saddles and F-16s. Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay arrives at this conclusion, but in a stronger fashion:
But it seemed to Joe that none of these -- Faustian hubris, least of all -- were among the true reasons that impelled men, time after time, to hazard the making of golems. The shaping of a golem, to him, was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something -- one poor, dumb, powerful thing -- exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties, and inevitable failures of the greater Creation.
Whatever deceit is being coined, it starts with us. I recently finished Villier de l'Isle-Adam's Tomorrow's Eve, where the theme of a man's attachment to an android is the central theme. The android, Hadaly, is meant to be a superior substitution to the original woman -- a woman who while fair of face, remains obstinately morally bankrupt. Edison, playing a Faust-mythologized version of his authentic self, explains to the man:
Nobody can see the real character of what he creates because every knife blade may become a dagger, and the use to which an object is put changes both its name and nature.
What versatile uses! If you pour your heart out day and night to a dog, it becomes your confidant. If you stab your husband with the butter knife, it becomes a murder weapon. If Edison creates a beautiful doll with a high number of pre-assembled sayings spoken in a melodious voice... whether or not it remains a potential or an actual lover depends on the man.
