Excellent news this week that the Spanish government plans to enshrine in law rights for Great Apes - giving them the right to life and freedom from torture and experimentation. Campaigners (for website see here) have argued that the great apes are capable of displaying emotions and have what is known as 'a sense of self'. They understand that they have a past and a future. As regular readers may know, I'm a vegetarian and thus believe that these rights should be extended to all creatures - though I will spare you all any rants on that particular topic ;-)
So again, this has implications for robotics. A sense of self is key to creating robots that are intelligent and self-aware. When I visited MIT in 2003 one of the devices there, Kismet, had been created with 'drives' for companionship (in the form of human presence) and play (through interaction with brightly coloured objects). When people were present and when they showed the robot its toys, the robot achieved homeostasis, and what we might term as contentment. When deprived of company and play, it moved out homeostasis and became what we might term agitated or subdued. Similarly, Sony's Aibo robotic dog calls out for its owner when it hasn't seen them for a while, and asks to be stroked and played with when contact has been withdrawn.
We could debate forever whether a robot can truly feel. Are its emotions programmed? Are they 'genuine'? It could be argued that many human emotions, beliefs and behaviours are merely responses conditioned by different forms of programming, those of social engineering and peer pressure - e.g. music fans fainting in the presence of certain stars, people queueing all night for the latest mobile phone, any prejudice you care to mention, each religion's contention that its view of god is the right one and so on...
Perhaps the important thing when considering the rights of other species is... why do we think it's up to us to decide who or what is intelligent?
(originally published 27th June 2008)
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