3-04-08

if a new technology comes out can you reject it?
can you use it partially for good

it wouldn't be possible to recreate Yod
Avram never saw Yod as a person but almost everyone else did
like the old Rossum
Malkah gives a different influence

lesson: machines shouldn't be created with human characteristics, only for a particularly purpose
think through what you are doing to its logical end before you start on it


Different perspectives on the world:

• Riva: information should be free to help people (it is what we don't know that hurts us)
• Avram: just a tool for humans to use, tool for defense
  
• Malkah: craft (a mix of art and science), loyal to her town and to the idea of freedom, her pleasure and serving her community coincide
  
• Gadi: manipulated technology to serve himself, escapist
  
• Nili: enhanced almost to no longer human (p. 191, 361), but she sees technology to augment a human, not to make someone no longer human
• 
  

Nili was human because she was born and grew up, not programmed (Yod became human by interaction)
she could be killed, not repairable the way Yod was
What if the brain is kept alive in a machine?
What if a brain is uploaded to a machine

Book is clear that Yod was a person and has rights but not a human person
if you are conscious you are a person
you have to be genetically human
(Peter Singer, animal ethics, animals aren't any different inherently from humans)

Yod isn't clear whether what he feels is what people feel as love
He says he isn't programmed to be monogamous but he will be because he sees it would hurt Shira and he doesn't want to do that

What makes Yod a person is Malkah's programming

• wanting to please
• taking pleasure in learning
• wanting companionship
  

Star Trek episode:"What are little girls made of"
three levels: body, brain, and soul
the android could override his programming for survival
saw biological creatures as inferior

are these works of fiction raising questions we should care about?
(relative to what we should do with our science and technology)

assumptions:

• science will continue moving forward
• we are going to make robots that look exactly like us
• android--anthopomorphic robot
  
• can mean not identical but at least roughly similar in size and shape to a human, but humanoid is more often used for this
  
• cyborg--a robot with biological components or an enhanced human
  
• we tend to think that the way to make robots to make a better job is to make them more like humans
• assumption that we are able to make a conscious robot
• it is doing something it was programmed to do, even if it can learn
• we don't know what consciousness is
• we don't understand enough about how we work
• how do we recreate intangible things like love or trust?
• 
  
• fiction assumes science and technology will turn against us (watch for next book)

Questions about humanoid robots:

• why do we want to make robots to do what humans can do?  Why not just use humans?
• what would creep us out now might not have the same effect on future generations
• is there something more fundamental there?
  
• all the robots in fiction are either servants or threats, no example of a mixed community?
• we need to see ourselves as superior to machines
  

back to He, She and It:
Point of the book:

• better to make people into partial machines than to build conscious tools (p.412)
• book seemed to be going towards an integration of machines and humans, but then the decision not to create another Yod is clear
  
• there was regret that they couldn't bring Joseph back to life, yet fear of the machine that can't be controlled
  
• Yod chose to die to save the people he loved, didn't want another one to be created because it is too dangerous or too painful to be a conscious weapon or he is too limited
  

next week we switch from non-scientists worried about the future to a scientist arguing about what is really possible