In our last class discussion, we talked about the ethical dilemma of falling in love with a robot in response to conversations in the novel Bladerunner. The question was asked: “If you really loved someone, had been with them for years, and found out one day that they had been a human-like robot the entire time you were together, would that be a deal breaker for you?” I think this might be asking the wrong question, instead, I think it would be better to ask: “How comfortable are we giving androids/robots human-like features and mannerisms? Can a bond such as love and empathy be shared between man and machine? What is the human animal?” My dad always had a saying: “If it looks like a duck, talks like a duck, smells like a duck, then it’s most likely a duck.” That is to say, if a cow thinks it’s without any question a duck, but we associate its physical features with a cow, who are we to tell this cow that it isn’t a duck?
We see this type of dilemma playing out in modern-day transgender and gay communities. Many people would argue that one’s gender is assigned at birth biologically based on one's genitalia and chromosomes. XY for male, XX for female. The pushback from these communities makes the argument that gender is a state of mind. A man can say “I was assigned male at birth, but now associate myself as female(transgender).” That is to say, no one is born straight, or born gay/trans, but can acquire the desire to be through individually lived experiences. According to a quote from the American Psychiatric Association: “Some people believe that sexual orientation is innate and fixed; however, sexual orientation develops across a person’s lifetime.” Even so, many conservative parties in the US make the claim that these type of relationships are “taboo”, and shouldn’t be allowed because they run contrary to the status quo, but due to the efforts of protest, modern media such a as film, art, literature, and so on, these communities are slowly starting to become more widely accepted as time goes on.
Back to robots. In 1974 Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori came up with a theory on robot relations called The Uncanny Valley. He believed that the more human-like features a robot has, the less positively humans will respond to a robot. Let's play a game. I’m going to show you three robots, and I want you to note to yourself how each one makes you respond emotionally.
Image #1 (Wall-E)
Image #2 (Zeno Hanson Robotics in Texas)
Image #3 (Ava Ex Machina)
Odds are pretty good that Image #1 of Pixar’s Wall-E gave you positive emotions. Wall-E has human-like qualities such as the big eyes and bipedal body but is distinctly NOT human. After all, he’s just a cute little robot, right? Image #2 is a project called Zeno, a robot designed at Hanson Robotics to have physically child-like features. Odds are pretty high that you were probably a little shocked by this image. It’s a robot built to very closely mimic human-like features, but we distinctly know that it’s not human, and this knowledge disturbs the average person. Image #3 is of the android Ava from the 2014 film Ex Machina. While we know as viewers that she’s a robot, her features are just realistic enough to where we as audience members begin to emotionally sympathize with Eva, and consider her to be a fully realized person by the end of the film. She has, in essence, almost escaped from the Uncanny Valley. This chart below very loosely tracks the emotional response to the Uncanny Valley.
The less human-like a robots features, the more positively we tend to respond to it, but once you start to add human-like features, our fear and anxieties about the robot begins to increase, To fall in love with robots in the future, roboticists are going to have to overcome the curve of the Uncanny Valley and create robots so indistinguishable from humans like Ava, that we’ll hardly be able to tell the difference. Only then can I get my robot bride to love me. Here’s hoping that the future and technology can catch up before I get old.
Until then just remember to follow this advice:
I have to agree with how relevant the saying "If it walks like a duck..." quote is. In the ending chapter of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", Deckard finds a long-since extinct frog and instantly catches it thinking he's found the last one alive. He is genuinely happy to have found it and it's heartbreaking to learn that it's fake. However even when its found out to be fake, his wife still orders fake food for it fake eat. Because the frog matters, real or not.
ReplyDeleteGreat post. I think you're right. In general, I think humans are very wary that we might create something that succeeds us as the heir apparent to all there is. It certainly seems to be going that way as evolution has no chance of matching the scale of technological advancement. I think what you talk about here is a matter of when, not if, and I will admit that I'm hoping I'm not around to see how it goes.
ReplyDeleteLenny Cohen
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