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Among the many interesting blogs, the one I most want to discuss is Daphne's To live is to suffer .
It happens that recently there was a topic on the discussion board of the Non-human Cognition class: I feel sorry for the fish, rats, & crabs. There, we discussed whether it was unethical to experiment with pain behaviours in animals in order to determine whether or not they have cognition. I think this discussion applies to this topic as well.
People tend to think that animals have consciousness, while robots do not. So people will find it cruel to experiment on animals, but ignore the fact that robots are being harmed.
But what if robots are anthropomorphic enough? Just like the helpless robots we talked about in the last lecture, when robots take on a human shape or characteristics, people will start to want to help them. I think the essence here is human empathy for our own group.
So I think it is possible to expand on Daphne's hypothesis and experiment with a variety of things.
My hypothetical artificial creature would not only make painful sounds when hurt, but would also laugh or express pleasure when being petted.
We could create a group of artificial creatures, some in the shape of machines, that would only emit vocal feedback to human actions. Some, like the video, the robot hand with artificial skin, have the shape of human body parts and at the same time behave to avoid harm. Others are fully humanoid, like Nao, with sound and behavioural feedback.
Both machine-shaped and humanoid artificial creatures are programmed to get increasingly anthropomorphic expressions that make people want to treat them well. It will make people realise that even if they are machines that don't make a sound, they should also be treated with respect.
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