robotlove

Robot love

by Bob on June 26, 2007

Robot love. An interestingly tantalising concept. I read the Japanese researchers, including Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University back in 2005, have made a female robot or android which is very life like and has the physical stature of a real human person. Dr. Ishiguro says "We have found that people forget she isn an android while interacting with her". That's very much cause for pause in our world very much at the crossroads of technological inflation, conflation, or deflation. Or as Dr. Alan Toffler called it in his 1970 book, "Future Shock". And yet another example of Dr. Alan Turing's 1950 "Turing Test" come alive.

What I am concerned about it what has come to be called the global electronic community and its fashioning into what seems to be a real community. But one mildly suspects that the Emperor might not have any clothes. We explore this, seemingly digressing from the concept of robot love. Only seemingly I assure you.

What we have here, in social online interactive electronic networks, such as MySpace, is a global electronic village of people, or we will presume they are people, but any one person could actually be a computer program acting as a person. But we dismiss this possibility for purposes of expediency and the point at hand.

People are really believing it is a real circle of friends and a real village. The illusion comes through regardless of how one hooks into the e-village. It has the reality, of sort, of, almost by habit and osmosis, becoming realistic. The illusion loses its original sense. Everything is real. The people. The train stop know as MySpace. The imagined voices. The portraits. The hopes, confidences, and aspirations of all the townspeople of MySpace.

Dr. Sherry Turkle of MIT has written extensively on the pros and cons of the global e-village. In 1995, Dr. Turkle wrote a book called "Life On the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet" wherein she studied the boundaries of humans and computers. And humans on computers interacting with other computers or humans on computers. It's all still very provocative intellectually. It crosses Artificial Intelligence (AI) with other perceptual disciplines, and psychology. Dr. Turkle also writes about people misrepresenting themselves in such e-villages, and what that entails.

The upshot is that the boundaries between humans and computers is weakening. And between the normal rigour required to make friends. E-friends are easier and the normal societal tests are weaker. And the e-friendships are testy, imagined, real, or just sometimes silly.

The problem here is that what happens if this illusion persists ?

Suppose a real belief is had that people who never have met and are not likely co-located geographically, and have no post office mail addresses shared or phone numbers shared, just how will this village work out under certain conditions and events.

Suppose an e-friend gets physically sick. What will the other e-community e-friends think ? Suppose the person dies. Will anyone realise that independently or will they just think the person is not using the internet anymore. There is a problem in there. In a real village, people would likely run to a person's aid if he were ill.

The illusion of the e-village makes this all very slippery. Not much can be done if human, in-person, tangible, durable help is needed. So one just fades into the e-sunset.

It's all a bit sad as a cornerstone of modern techno-society. There is no reality to it all.

And people drop e-friends quickly enough because there is no context for the real relationship. Webcams don't suffice, of course.

What happened if an e-villager was under physical attack at his computer screen ? What would the other e-villagers do ? Call the e-police ? No. They could do nothing. They have no location. No phone number. Maybe and likely not even an email address for the person or each other. So it falls apart.

How far the illusory nature of the e-village will take us is yet to be unclear, but we do know how people become enamoured of technology in place of other humans (withness the Walkman, iPOD, etc.) and how Narcissus fell into the lake falling in love with the illusion of himself in the water and he drowned. Trouble was Narcissus didn't know that the reflected image in the water was his own.

That's what we have to look out for. When we don't realise anymore that it's a bit of an illusion. And we should give up video tennis and go play some real tennis, lest our legs and arms and feet become vestigial.

One is worried. But hopeful. Cautiously optimistic.