Flesh, robots and God

In the labs, there's been a big resurgence of interest in building humanoid robots over the last 10 years, especially in Japan but also in Europe and the United States. You may have noticed that a humanoid robot from the Honda Corporation rang the Stock Exchange bell [on Feb. 14]. Now, that was pretty much totally operated to do that. But there has been a lot of work in the labs on building humanlike robots with human emotions, human form and the ability to communicate on a sort of cross-cultural level: Saying "Uh-huh" and nodding, and making eye contact, recognizing facial expressions and processing voices. So certainly that's becoming more and more plausible in the labs. Whether we ultimately decide we want robots with human form wandering around our houses is really an open question. I can't quite decide.

What would the time frame be?

In the short term, they're not going to have that form just because they're too expensive. The robots we have in houses are going to be more tin can sorts of robots. How it all plays out in a 20-year time frame is pretty hard to predict.

I just saw "Westworld" on cable, in which Yul Brynner plays the entertainment park robot, a black-hatted gunslinger, who then turns into a very deadly, real killer. What are the chances that we'll create monsters?

Hollywood has picked up on the idea that there are going to be these robots which are super-intelligent and take things into their own hands. Well, we're not going to build a robot like that from scratch. Over the next 20, 30, 40, years, we're going to build robots incrementally, one after the other, and we're going to decide the things we like having in our robots and things we don't. We're not going to build robots that all of a sudden can be so smart that they can take over the world. We're going to decide when we don't like uppity robots and we'll put controls in them.

What about the other Hollywood scenario in which some fiendish genius builds a kind of Frankenstein robot?

I think that's sort of like somebody building a 747 in his backyard. I don't see it happening.

What do you see happening?

As these technologies become more and more available, we're going to start implanting them in our bodies. So we as humans are going to drift in the robotic direction, as the robots get more intelligent. Where that ultimately leads is a little harder to predict. But it's not going to be something that's going to jump up and surprise us. We'll be making those decisions along the way.

You mentioned the word "emotions" a moment ago. Do you really mean that these machines will be having genuine emotions or even that we will perceive them as such?

That's an interesting question for us philosophically. We as humans have had to deal with some blows to our egos over the last few hundred years. You know, five hundred years ago, we had to give up the notion that the Earth was the center of the universe, and with Darwin, most of us had to give up the idea that we were fundamentally different from animals.

And now?

And now what we're left with is the belief that we're better than machines because we have emotions. You know, when Gary Kasparov was beaten by Deep Blue, he said, "Well, at least it didn't enjoy beating me." I certainly think, as most molecular biologists think, that we are fundamentally machines. We're made out of bio-molecules that interact in a rule-like manner. So if we are emotional machines, then I don't see any reason, in principle, why we can't build silicon and steel machines that have emotions.

Well, will we?

As I mentioned, in our labs we have machines which everyone will agree certainly display emotions and act as if they have emotions. It's going to be a matter of time, as it has been with accepting evolution, before we come to attribute real emotions to these machines.

In fact, you write about the possibility of attributing "free will, respect and ultimately rights" to robots.

I think these are issues that within this century are going to start to come up, yes. What will it take to give personhood to them at some point? What will they have to exhibit to us?

You suggest in your book that we have an unfair bias against machines.

We've seen this same thing throughout human history. In the 19th century, the British and many Americans didn't attribute personhood to people from Africa. Germany declared Jews as non-persons. Of course, robots are different than the examples I just gave, in part because they can't interbreed with us. But it's a similar feeling.

Maybe it will come down to the fact that we have meat for brains and they have circuitry and silicon?

Yes, ultimately I think that will be the only thing left. But I don't think that will even be left because we're going to be putting silicon and steel in our bodies. We're already starting to do that. Tens of thousands of people have artificial cochlea implants with direct connections to their nervous systems that allow them to hear. It's going to happen more and more. You know, I say to my kids: You rebel against me by having a stud put in your tongue, but your kids are going to rebel against you by getting a wireless Internet implant -- and they're going to be instant-messaging their friends while you think they're talking to you. I think that is fairly inevitable. Where exactly that leads is hard to say.

Next Page: Sharing the earth with conscious humanoids

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