The emotional machine

So what would an intelligent car be like, for example?

Well, there may never be such a thing. But we used to have intelligent cars; they were called horses. And they used to know stuff that our cars don't know. They used to know where they lived and how to get home and how not to knock over people. Even how to refuel themselves. The amazing thing was that they could even make new cars. The intelligent car would be like a horse. Something that really enjoyed a good drive and prided itself on not knocking people down.

You think it's possible for machines to enjoy their work?

Yes, one of the reasons people worry about machines wanting to take over the world is because human beings want to take over the world. We're a miserable lot. A large part of the reason we're miserable is that most of us are being oppressed in one way or another and being forced to do things we hate. We all want to be someone else -- like the king or a film star or anybody we envy. Most human strife comes from envy. There's no reason at all, if we made machines do those things we hate, why those machines should hate doing them. It would be stupid for us to design machines that hate doing the jobs they do. If they enjoy doing them, why would they envy anyone else?

If they had the ability to enjoy doing their work, would they then have the ability to decide that they didn't like it anymore?

I think they have to have that. If you want to make something really intelligent, then it has to be free, but no freer than we are. We're pretty trapped in the world we're in and they would be trapped in the world they're in.

What incentive would they have, though, to do this work?

Because they'd enjoy it. We evolved to live in the jungle. All our emotions are tuned to certain kinds of relationships. Certain things excite us and certain things we find unpleasant. But now we don't live in the jungle, we live in the concrete. That's why there's so much angst in the world. If you're going to build intelligent machines to do specific jobs, then you're going to tune their emotions to the environment you want them to live in. They'll be happy there.

Do you think that human beings will feel differently toward machines if they are aware that these machines have feelings?

Ethically and morally we'd have to give them the same rights that we give other living things. But at the moment we don't know what those rights ought to be. We don't know what those rights ought to be for cows and children. The human race breeds cows and then shoots them and eats them. It's a pretty strange kind of thing to do when you think about it. Sooner or later we have to figure these things out and what rights living things have. We're going to have to figure it out anyway, intelligent machines or not, because we have to worry about cloning, genetic manipulation ...

And abortion.

Yes, I think we've been too glib about it up until now. It's been easy. A hundred years ago people were either dead or alive, and you were either born or you weren't and that was all there was to it. That's not true anymore. You can be kept alive, whatever that means. You can be cloned.

How will artificial life help us figure this stuff out?

It will give us more examples of life. We're judging all these issues on a sample of one: the kind that evolved here on this planet. If we invent machines of our own that are alive or if we suddenly got invaded by aliens, then that sample would jump up to two and we'd have a wider understanding of what it meant to be alive.

Are you still working on Lucy?

Yes, I hope I always will be.

What are you building exactly?

I don't mind standing up and suggesting that the creatures I made before are alive, but they're certainly not conscious. I started asking myself why. The first thing that struck me that was missing was that they have no imagination. They're just automated. They react to their environment, they can't think ahead, they have no sense of the future, they can't build models in their head and they can't worry about what you think because they can't imagine what it would like to be you. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that everything that we care about in what it means to be human has something to do with imagination. I set out to try to figure out where that comes from.

She is an orangutan?

Ostensibly. She's a heap of aluminum with something vaguely like an orangutan's head.

What is her brain?

She doesn't really have one yet because I'm still working on the theory, but it will be made out of simulated nerve cells and chemicals, just the same as the Creatures' brains but very much more complex.

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