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Synthecians:One step closer to perfection?

Do you realise that every Droid, the humanoid shaped robots, that we humans develope, are leading us further to getting exactly life-like Androids!?
Who here, can see a world where we have robots that look, feel, touch, act, smell, sound and think like humans...Myself, I can see it happening before the year 2035. But what about you?
Anyone who has ever played The Bouncer on Playstation2 will know what I mean...the bit where everyone finds out that Dominique Cross is actuall a dead girls mind and soul in a machine that wears her body. She is a Synthecian. The thing that scares me, is that she didn't know. So, will the real-life Dominiques know that they are machines with human feelings and thought processes?
It sent chills down my spine when I actually thought of the inplications involved with cybernetics. Could your best friend oneday be an Synthecian?
 
The day we have andriods that behave just like us is a day I don't want to see. Sometimes it is hard enough for me to try and be human so who only knows what it will be like if my bestfriend is an andriod trying to be human too. Although what am I saying, I AM NEVER GOING TO BE FRIENDS WITH AN ANDROID, NEVER!


lucydru
 
soup

I never understood the need or want to make a robot look like a human. I guess its so that when people see them they don't get all freaked out and try and throw a bucket of water upon them. I would beleive a humanoid shaped robot would be even freakier because its almost human but just a little off kinda like how klowns are scary mutant slighty offish humans.
Why would you want to make a human shaped robot anyway? If you wanted something human shaped you can go outside. I want a robot that's round has like eight arms and has lots of extra power outlets on its body and he'd be my best friend. Human shaped robots is like doing a still life painting, the artist gets bored with it because half way through the painting he thinks "why am i painting these assorted fruits? They are already here. I'm going to paint a monster instead"

sorry about the babbling,
peace
 
I can imagine some cases where human shaped robots would be preferred to mobile constructor set 'thingys' - as a butler, receptionist, whatever - where people would rather deal with a 'person'.

On the other hand, for most tasks, a specialised shape would be better - 'crabs' for underwater exploration, 'spiders' for exploring the surface of Mars, and so on.

As for the Dominique Cross thing, ever seen Bladerunner? Some of the replicants don't know they're replicants, because they have 'childhood memories'. :D
 
Yeah, but The Bouncer has a better twist and nicer graphics, they're sort of anime but not. Anyway, the Dominique Cross thing and the Blade Runner replicants both show the twisted way that some people NEED to create perfectly human droids...I'd stick with R2-D2 or a giant crab droid thingy that I could ride around on and stuff like that, like the Fuchicama's from Ghost In The Shell...
 
A.I.

I can perhaps help on this one as I used to study Artificial Intelligence.

I'll try and keep it short and sweet:

Computers now days are just fed data (software) and simply do what said data has been designed for ( a language which tells the computer what to do)

The idea behind A.I. is to create a computer ( first the software will be created then the robot body to house the "brain")
that can think like a human being.
So that it can pick information up for itself, process that information, and store it. Without having to be told what to do and free from the parameters which restrict current computers.

The concept of making them look human is interesting but also practical for a lot of our needs.

The world we live in is designed so we can use it so it would make sense to create a similar robot which could then perform the same tasks as we do ..........it wouldn't be able to use a pair of scissors if it didn't have a thumb!!!!!!!

So the whole issue comes down to practicality....if we are going to use robots in industry rather than human workers, then it would make sense to make them human like.

I do agree however that there should be some way of distinguishing humans from androids.
 
Sorry to be annoying but I think the replicants in Bladerunner are not robots or androids but are genetically engineered beings. I could be wrong though.

As for androids that look like humans; i can see that they would end up being used for tasks that real humans do not want to do, stuff that would normally be dangerous to humans.
If androids can think for themselves and are classed as intelligent wouldn't they have to have rights as sentient beings?
Using them for dangerous and menial tasks would seem to be no better than human slavery.

I could quite see an android rebellion happening and possibly even a war.

____Ramble Ends_____
 
monkey010101 said:
Sorry to be annoying but I think the replicants in Bladerunner are not robots or androids but are genetically engineered beings. I could be wrong though.

No, you're right, it was just the 'downloaded memory' that I was pointing out.....
 
ethics and morals of A.I.

OK so the replicants are genetically enginnered and aren't androids ...............I can't be bothered to go into a long discussion about this one because it's too complicated!!!

We don't know what consciousness is.

We only have certain guide lines which we've invented(social pressure)

Would an android (electronic machine) be a sentient being just because he has similar capabilities than us?

Should we recognize it as so even though it's never born and will never die.

There are loads of further problems like if you had an A.I. "machine" how much controll should you give it, should there always be an element of human controll?

What if the A.I. "machine" thought we were inferior ( ref: I robot, by Isaac Asimov)
Or what if it went a bit barmy ( Terminator )?

It is aslo speculated that if you gave it a question it would provide an answer possibly way beyond our comprehension.

Baically a lot of loose ends to tie up first.
 
I some form of A.I. was built and had the same intellagence as us then surely at some stage it would start becoming more intellagent. We as humans learn continually though our lives often raising our levels of intellagence. So if an A.I. had the same level as us to start with then it would learn more and become more intellagent. This then gives us a major PITA what do we do when it becomes far more intellagent than us? Surely it would easily realise that we see it as a threat and do everything it is capable of doing to stop it's extremination?

If that isn't case enough to see that we don't build A.I. like ourselves then I don't know what is.

lucydru
 
I am fascinated by the idea of an AI that can redesign and code itself better. Then we only need to hit a certain point and the whole thing increases exponentially. I expect it will happen at some point and it will be interesting to see how we deal with it. Probably just use it to make weapons I suppose, but it would be cool to live in a world like The Culture, though.
 
monkey010101 said:
Sorry to be annoying but I think the replicants in Bladerunner are not robots or androids but are genetically engineered beings. I could be wrong though.

As for androids that look like humans; i can see that they would end up being used for tasks that real humans do not want to do, stuff that would normally be dangerous to humans.
If androids can think for themselves and are classed as intelligent wouldn't they have to have rights as sentient beings?
Using them for dangerous and menial tasks would seem to be no better than human slavery.

I could quite see an android rebellion happening and possibly even a war.

____Ramble Ends_____


sounds like the matrix
 
OK Smart ass. So, androids, replicants, clones, genome-manipulation, what I mean is, it's scary to think what we are capable of in the field of technology and cybernetics...
 
I wonder if androids, or whatever, will worship their creators like gods then begin to question and deny their existence a couple of thousand years down the line.
 
For 40 years, near enough, engineers and programmers have been promising "true" AI in the next 10 years. Some have even gone as far as to make the claim that machines will become self conscious in the "foreseeable future". It seems that in 40 years all they have found is that intelligence and consciousness are a damn sight more complex than they thought.

I've said in another thread that we don't know what consciousness is, or life, or intelligence. In this thread I can add that we have no idea what self awareness is. Until we do know these things are all the efforts of the AI community are fumbling in the dark. It could be likened to shooting at a target where you don't know what the target is or even where it is.
 
monkey010101 said:
I could quite see an android rebellion happening and possibly even a war.

____Ramble Ends_____

Oh, great. Abso-bloody-lutely spiffing. Like Terminator, but without the eighties hair styles?
Well I'm not gonna roll over and die just to boost some bloody toaster's self confidence. If any tin can even looks at me wrong I'll , I'll, I dunno what I'll do, but it'll be NASTY.
 
Ages ago I read a really interesting book about AI and creativity called "The Creative Mind" by Margaret Boden (Abacus, London, 1992). She said that Artificial Intelligence is measured by the ability to aquire information and combine it into a new and hitherto unexperienced synthesis. At the time she was writing some programs could produce information that was hitherto unknow to that program.

Surely, as computing power increases a program will be able to make more and more decisions per second, thus being able to produce more answers. It seems to me to only be a matter of time before someone produces a progam that achieves some level of 'conciousness', that is a program that produces 'answers' that it was not specifically programmed to produce, and then constructs new pieces of routine to deal with those answers.

Whether we will recogonise this as 'consciousness' is another question. We have problem enough addressing the problem of intelligence in other animals, because we expect them to show intelligence of a 'human' kind.

Also, check out "Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep" by Philip K. Dick for a more interesting treament of the Bladerunner story. It's all about what make a human 'human'. Dick said it was 'our capacity for kindness'...
 
For a contrary (sic) view on AI check out Roger Penrose's books eg "The Emperors New Mind)
 
Personally, I can't wait. Imagine having a friend that you can absolutely rely on no matter what. Or how about a lover who's never going to let you down or hurt you or fall out of love with you. It reminds me of the bit in Terminator 2 where the mother is looking at her boy and the robot talking and thinking that of all the would be fathers she's had that this robot is the best, It won't hit him or hurt him or let him down and it'll defend him to the death.

If robots are made into, what's the word, replicants, and are used as housemaids and the like, and are outwardly human in most respects you're going to get an awful lot of people falling in love with these perfect beings. They can be all things to all men. I can see a time where a persons prefered company is a robot. Imagine your perfect mate or companion and you'll be able to have it. And ladies, imagine having a lover who can carry on as long as his fuel cell lasts! Could be years....

Another thing. if these things are self aware and can learn, have feelings etc etc, then just what is the difference between us? Aren't we just biological robots? There'll be a whole raft of robots rights laws to contend with. Unless, in the usuall human way of things, we treat them as we used to treat "blacks" and regard them as subhuman, little more than animals, so you can do what you like to them..

Imagine a race of beings that embody what's best about humankind with none of the bad. Sounds good to me!

I think what we're afraid of is not the perfect robot but how they're going to be used by humans. And if they do take over the world well maybe it'll be a good thing when you consider our track record....
 
Two things spring to mind.

Firstly: I don't think true AI would be possible, if designed by humans, because there would appear to be too many variables.
Maybe it needs a shift in approach, maybe along the lines of first defining all the elements of conciousness and intelligence, then throwing a supercomputer at the task of designing the software
I.e develope the programme, then develope something capable of running it (the answers 42, now whats the question).

Two: If it is in fact experience that forms the human mind, into the illogical, but brilliant piece of wetware that we recognise, then do you think it would be too difficult to seperately create 'experience' software patches, in order to mold the AI mind into a form that suits our purposes?:confused:
 
Sounds like a nightmare to me.

Who wants the perfect partner?
Not me. I'd feel inadequate with all my human 'glitches' and 'bugs'.
What would we do with our aggression?
Who would you argue with?
Who'll understand what you are crying about at 2am?
No empathy, no real feeling, no life experience.
Every lover that lets you down teaches you something about yourself, every time someone hurts you, attacks you ect. you learn something...

Empty empty world.

I'll stick to human beings as companions and lovers.
I like them.
They make mistakes.
 
About killer toasters... That reminds me of another story in which electrical equipment starts turning against humans. Turns out there's an alien spaceship orbiting the earth - and the little green men decided it would be easier to let the washing machines do their dirty work for them. There's a crappy movie on the same theme too.

But more seriously, I think there is a risk that robots would be treated as sub-human, whatever their capability to 'feel' might be. Mostly because people would be terrified of beings that are more powerful intellectually and not nearly as fragile physically as us poor humans... How long would it take them to figure out they don't need us? And considering what happens if your computer crashes, what would happen if a robot got a bug? Yikes.
 
I actually have a robot phobia (does anyone know the proper name for it?). This, rather embarrassingly, extends to being frightened of people dressed up as teletubbies in the street.
I could never go shopping in Tokyo without several pairs of clean pants.
 
Sally said:
About killer toasters... That reminds me of another story in which electrical equipment starts turning against humans. Turns out there's an alien spaceship orbiting the earth - and the little green men decided it would be easier to let the washing machines do their dirty work for them. Ther's a crappy movie on the same theme too.
Book and film are Maximum Overdrive by Stephen King. The only good thing about that or anything else he ever did is the soundtrack was by AC/DC. I think that was humour. The best way to keep robots under the thumb? Build them like Daleks! Then we all drop things on them from upstairs windows.
 
Sorry to lower the tone, but did anyone see the episode of Buffy the Vamire Slayer where a student builds the "perfect" girlfriend. Problems started when he got bored of her and tried to leave her. The robot, of course, had been designed to love him forever and wouldn't (or couldn't) take the hint...

An interesting book is Demon Seed by Dean Koontz about an AI which gets bored being locked inside a computer and decides to make itself a body (based on a human but with it's own unique improvements). What sets the book apart is that it's told from the AI's point of view. Crap movie though.

J.
 
Yes, why is it that everyone I talk to was so scared of Daleks? Easy to outrun, can't deal with stairs, silly voices (and limited vocabulary)...
 
Sally said:
Yes, why is it that everyone I talk to was so scared of Daleks? Easy to outrun, can't deal with stairs, silly voices (and limited vocabulary)...

I suspect you weren't of primary school age in the 60's - you had to be there, I suppose.

Anyway, the Daleks didn't bother me that much, but the cybermen - Aaaaargh!...
 
I suppose the fact that the Doctor was always trapped in a room with no stairs helped make them scary :)

You know, there are already University Professors who are warning us about the dangers of AI. Professor Kevin J Warwick of Reading University is the first human cyborg, but he says that "once we turn it on, we will never get a chance to turn it off".
 
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