Online research in philosophy

One of the interesting and occasionally controversial aspects of Dennett’s career is his direct involvement in the scientific process. This article describes some of Dennett’s participation on one particular project conducted at MIT, the building of the humanoid robot named Cog. One of the intentions of this project, not to date fully realized, was to test Dennett’s multiple drafts theory of consciousness. I describe Dennett’s involvement and impact on Cog from the perspective of a graduate student. I also describe the problem of coordinating distributed intelligent systems, drawing examples from robot intelligence, human intelligence, and the Cog project itself.

The first part of this paper explores the general issues in using Artificial Life techniques to program actual mobile robots. In particular it explores the difficulties inherent in transferring programs evolved in a simulated environment to run on an actual robot. It examines the dual evolution of organism morphology and nervous systems in biology. It proposes techniques to capture some of the search space pruning that dual evolution offers in the domain of robot programming. It explores the relationship between robot morphology and program structure, and techniques for capturing regularities across this mapping.

Under what conditions can robots become companions and what are the ethical issues that might arise in human-robot companionship relations? I argue that the possibility and future of robots as companions depends (among other things) on the robot’s capacity to be a recipient of human empathy, and that one necessary condition for this to happen is that the robot mirrors human vulnerabilities. For the purpose of these arguments, I make a distinction between empathy-as-cognition and empathy-as-feeling, connecting the latter to the moral sentiment tradition and its concept of “fellow feeling.” Furthermore, I sympathise with the intuition that vulnerability mirroring raises the ethical issue of deception. However, given the importance of appearance in social relations, problems with the concept of deception, and contemporary technologies that question the artificial-natural distinction, we cannot easily justify the underlying assumptions of the deception objection. If we want to hold on to them, we need convincing answers to these problems.

Noel and Amanda Sharkey have written an insightful paper on the ethical issues concerned with the development of childcare robots for infants and toddlers, discussing the possible consequences for the psychological and emotional development and wellbeing of children. The ethical issues involving the use of robots as toys, interaction partners or possible caretakers of children are discussed reviewing a wide literature on the pathology and causes of attachment disorders. The potential risks emerging from the analysis lead the authors to promote a multidisciplinary debate on the current legislation to deal with future robot childcare. As a general first consideration, the questions arising from the paper are extremely timely since current robot technology is surprisingly close to achieving autonomous bonding and sustained socialization with human toddlers. The evolution of robot technology has been so speedy in the last few years that even if a discipline like Human-machine Interaction has only recently welcomed human-robot interaction within its disciplinary scope, a variety of social robots have started to populate our life and daily activities. In the past five years human-robot interaction has received a significant and growing interest leading to the development of the so-called robots companions, a term that emphasizes a constant interaction and co-operation between human beings and robotic machines. While Noel and Amanda Sharkey in their paper take a critical stance on the consequences of the use of robots as companions or caretakers, others researchers seem more keen to highlight the potential of caregiver robots in particular in educational settings. In this commentary I’ll try to offer my personal viewpoint on the consequences of using robot companions or caretakers of children on learning and education, and the effects of technologies on cognitive skills development, a controversial area of research where different findings show how little is known.

AI needs many ideas that have hitherto been studied only by philosophers. This is because a robot, if it is to have human level intelligence and ability to learn from its experience, needs a general world view in which to organize facts. It turns out that many philosophical problems take new forms when thought about in terms of how to design a robot. Some approaches to philosophy are helpful and others are not.

In the present enterprise we take a look at the meaning of Autonomy, how the word has been employed and some of the consequences of its use in the sciences of the artificial. Could and should robots really be autonomous entities? Over and beyond this, we use concepts from the philosophy of mind to spur on enquiry into the very essence of human autonomy. We believe our initiative, as does Dennett's life-long research, sheds light upon the problems of robot design with respect to their relation with humans.

Assume we could someday create artificial creatures with intelligence comparable to our own. Could it be ethical use them as unpaid labor? There is very little philosophical literature on this topic, but the consensus so far has been that such robot servitude would merely be a new form of slavery. Against this consensus I defend the permissibility of robot servitude, and in particular the controversial case of designing robots so that they want to serve (more or less particular) human ends. A typical objection to this case draws an analogy to the genetic engineering of humans: if designing eager robot servants is permissible, it should also be permissible to design eager human servants. Few ethical views can easily explain even the wrongness of such human engineering, however, and those few explanations that are available break the analogy with engineering robots. The case turns out to be illustrative of profound problems in the field of population ethics.

Utilizing the film I, Robot as a springboard, I here consider the feasibility of robot utilitarians, the moral responsibilities that come with the creation of ethical robots, and the possibility of distinct ethics for robot-robot interaction as opposed to robot-human interaction. (This is a revised and expanded version of an essay that originally appeared in IEEE: Intelligent Systems.).