alt Hacker NewsI’ll bite the bullet: if a robot has a complicated enough internal representation of the world, it may very well develop a concept of love (or “care”, or “noticing”, or “intention”. Love is such a slippery word…) that we would have to trust.
Imagine a cat-sitting robot. The robot can differentiate between individual cats. It learns how to play with the cats and feed them in in their preferred way. The cats grow to trust the robot and enjoy its company. When the cats become sick and old the robot knows how to help them and ease their pain. Over decades The robot remembers cats in its care that have died, and new cats spark recognition of previous cats it has known. It becomes better at caring for a wider range of cats as its experience grows. The cats cry out when it leaves. When there are no cats around the robot remains motionless, but springs into action and play as soon as cats are around. Children would describe the robot as “happy”.
If after some decades I smash it with a hammer and recycle the pieces, am I killing something? Are its internal representations and control systems not a kind of thing that produces “qualia”?
Replies
> if a robot has a complicated enough internal representation of the world, it may very well develop a concept of love
There are two concepts of "may" at play here:
"may" in the sense of "nothing keeps us from imagining this", and in the sense of "we know how it works, and it can happen".
A car may crash, and glass may break are the latter.
But for the former we actually have no idea how this could work. That is what makes it a hard philosophical problem. That kind of "may" is cheap.
How does the robot work? Sound like there's some knowledge accumulated in there, and you'd be being destructive, like burning books, but the robot doesn't create ideas. Qualia, I couldn't comment on. Well, it seems the term refers to private ideas that can't be communicated. So, no.
no you didn’t kill it, it was never alive. the same way my dishwasher or vacuum aren’t killed when they break and i replace them. even if the robot “remembers”, who cares? when i bin my phone did i kill siri because she sometimes remembered things for me?
nicely done and well put. one of the better intros to the “hard problem” i’ve read, truly
This - as usual - confuses behaviour with consciousness.
Humans bonded with ELIZA, but that didn't mean ELIZA was conscious. ELIZA was an automaton that mimicked certain behaviours that triggered certain emotional responses.
If you scale that up you get an LLM and/or a social media bot farm, both of which are much better at triggering responses than ELIZA was.
It's now trivial to create an automaton that play acts various moods, and if you give it a memory it will mimic relationship-related conversations.
But it doesn't need to be conscious to do that, and the parsimonious Occam's razor explanation of its behaviours is that it's more economic and credible to assume it's still an automaton with no self-awareness.
Otherwise you have to argue that much simpler systems, like PID thermostats, and pretty much every computer system, are conscious because they "experience" qualia that represent a varying state of the world, with memory.
The sneakiness in your example is choosing an example which mimics emotional bonding. Rhetorically that makes it look like a hypothetical robot is acting emotionally, which is one of the covert signals us mammals tend to associate with consciousness.
But the criticism stands. Feigning emotions well enough to fool other mammals isn't at all the same as experiencing them.
To really experience emotions you need a self-image quale which includes an emotional component. And since subjective experiences have no objective element that can be measured, we can never say for sure whether anything or anyone else actually is conscious.
We assume we are, because we experience it, and we assume others are by implication.
But there's a point where that assumption stops being reasonable, and that's where your cat robot exists.