AstroBoy Online Forums

In the animation slice<Astro Boy>, the robot had gone through all kinds of hardships and difficultie to obtain with the human's equal right.But, the robot is in the actuality can obtain with the equal right of Human ? Or say, do the human have the necessity to get for robot with the equal right of oneself?

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I think

When robots develops to can think by itself, consider something all by itself indeed, robot equal with human is naturally , also is inevitable, and, believe that people also would accept the robot are equal with them.



Everyone comes right away the discussion once this future problem.

I think it comes down to the issues of sentience and the soul.

There was a Star Trek TNG episode that dealt with this. A scientist developing artificial intelligence wanted to create an android like Data, but Dr Soong was the only one who had successfully done it and he'd gone missing. So the scientist wanted to claim Data as StarFleet property and have him dismantled for inspection.
The crew and science board had to determine whether Data was just a machine and could be dismantled, or whether he had achieved a level of sentience that made him equal to humans and allowed to have human rights.
Towards the end one human character worded the issue very well - "Does Data have a soul? Do I even have a soul?"
I think the crew accepted Data as just another crewman. He seemed to get the full deck of human rights.

I think the desire for humans to create a robot that is ultimately indestinguishable from humans (like Robbin Williams in Bicentenial Man) is mirrored in other aspects of live.
I have relatives who live in Indonesia. Over there, it's considered beautiful to have a more prominent nose and paler skin - attributes of Australians. And over here in Australia, no one likes being called big-nose and everyone wants to get a nice dark tan to look more beautiful.
It's the same with Astroboy and the humans around him. Astro wants to become more human, and he meets humans who want to become more like robots (like that kid in the circus).
And going back to Star Trek, Data was always trying to become more human. In one episode he was admired by a little kid who wanted to be more like Data - more like a robot.

I think I'm rambling a bit. Perhaps the desire for humans to create a more human-like robot (and I suppose to the point of giving it human rights) is a desire to better understand ourselves. In essence, a kind of reverse-engineering of ourselves for knowledge. You know, building positronic brains and that kind of thing.

I don't think equality between robots and humans would ever come about easily. Look how hard it was for the black people to get equality. Aboriginals didn't get the right to vote for ages, and Negroes still don't always get the right to vote in America. They were enslaved, abused, killed and treated so unjustly.

And they were human atleast, to introduce sentient robots to our society would just give us someone else to discriminate against, maybe after a long hard fight they could be veiwed by everyone as equals. Sure some people would except them, but I still don't think they have a chance at becoming instantly accepted as sentient beings, let alone equals in society.

Here is another thread this covers some of this topic:

Robot Rights mainy covers the similarities between Astroboy & Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex, which among other things, includes humans' regarding AI robots as chattel, and becoming fearful when these robots begin to show behavior that is too close to human. B)

Good point, Super Kim. It also raises issues of employment, pay and ownership.

Originally posted by DrFrag@Feb 10 2005, 06:46 AM
Good point, Super Kim. It also raises issues of employment, pay and ownership.

So it does. Ofcourse, if a robot were employed they should get a higher wage as they would be without human error, and would be more equipped for the job they were in, but then, if they were designed for the job they would have been bought from the person who created them and put to work. They wouldn't actually get a wage because they would belong to the person who bought them. But if they were sentient then no one could really own them, but because they were machines people would think they could.

It would be so exciting to create a sentient robot, it would question everything. Religion, ethics, humanity. I would love to live in the time of the sentient robot, actually, I would love to create the first sentient robot. As tough a time as it would be for the robots, its bound to happen one day, I'd just like to be alive to see it.

I suppose the robots would eventually reach a point where they come out of "slavery".

I also wonder how long a sentient robot would take to question issues. In The Terminator, the soldier from the future said that as soon as Skynet became self-aware, it decided our fate in a millisecond.
But how it questions issues might depend on it's type of brain. A logic circuit is very fast, but human brains have a neural net which might be a requirement for sentience. For example, the human brain is particularly well equipped for facial recognition and identifying sounds. Despite modern computers being able to calculate billions of floating point operations per second, speech and facial recognition is still fairly new and imperfect. Even Optical Character Recognition for PC scanners is only accurate when you play nice with it - take a photo of a busy marketplace and no current computer is going to be able to read all the signs.
So why can't I perform even 1 floating point operation per second in my brain?

Just rambling.

Originally posted by DrFrag@Feb 15 2005, 08:42 PM
So why can't I perform even 1 floating point operation per second in my brain?

Because the software is not adapted for this
Did you try to do your accountancy using only the calculator on your computer? Sure you can do it, but a nice spreadsheet (or better an accountancy software) will do it far better although it is the same computer.
And on the same idea, a computer will have great difficulties "emulating" a brain because of its massively parallel nature. The "hardware acceleration" to have a neural network running with dynamic connections is still to be invented, and the software counterpart is far too slooooooow to have some value, even with the best microprocessors

I wonder if it would be possible for the Internet to become sentient. It's kind of like a neural network.

Originally posted by DrFrag@Feb 16 2005, 12:23 AM
I wonder if it would be possible for the Internet to become sentient. It's kind of like a neural network.

Not enough nodes: millions vs billions. However the "connectivity" is more evolved: basic electric charges vs complex data transfer.

Recently I had a very weird idea...
I wondered if my old computer that I use as an Internet server has not achieved some kind of consciousness by "borrowing" mine :huh: No I'm not crazy, let me explain before calling the "men in white"
Let's forget about what it is and let's look at the server as a black box. It manages several semi-autonomous applications such as downloads/uploads, but also servers such as HTTP and FTP. In a general situation it doesn't need intervention from me, only to schedule what will have to be done. At this point, it acts like an autonomous entity that works for me ( and don't get paid ).
Now comes the weird idea: recently I made a very heavy upgrade. Basically, I replaced the entire system with a new one completely different. Although the installation of the new system required to be compiled from srcatch and needed litterally days to be ready, the downtime of the server was about 2 hours, and only because I ran into a serious problem. What hapenned is that I managed to cause the previous system to "mutate" to the new one :wacko: First create a kind of virtual environment for the new system, then install the core, and finally launch and schedule the work over a week. Last step: reboot the whole thing under a temporary system, swap the 2 environments, and reboot again B)
The reason why I did such a complex thing was rather strange as it created problems (always when changing the system). Of course the situation was better after that, but I was wondering if it was worth the troubles. I realized that a part of myself (that part that "interfaces" with the computer, knows what is the current state of the computer, knows how to handle it) wanted to use the new system because it is self-compiled and allows to install more easily new packages downloaded from the Internet (the old system had often troubles with that and tweaks were sometimes needed). That allowed an increased mobility in the system that I didn't personnally needed as there was no real impact on the already running applications, only problems as I had to reinstall them (and again run into other troubles). Of course later that mobility allowed very useful improvements, but I didn't know there would be improvements, only that it was a possibility.
At first it looked like a caprice. I did it anyway because after all, the computer is mine and I don't use it to run a firm, so if something goes really bad, just get the backups and install a fresh system. But now I think that a part of my mind has identifed into the computer and has adapted to this different environment. This phenomenon is not so strange after all, it is nothing more that an immersion that occurs frequently when playing video games or even driving a car. The car and myself don't behave the same way when I am before the wheel than when I am not. It is the same with the computer with the exception that the computer has a persistent state, like the car going were I told it to go while I can busy myself with something else
Now I have written a good pack of words and I am not even sure I have made my point The main idea though is that something/someone is more that the mere sum of its/his/her different parts.

Ok, that's enough, anyway I must now be flagged as crazy, lost for society, and maybe dangerous