Killing a Pleo robotic dinosaur -- video
Ugobe sent me a Pleo robotic baby dinosaur to play with for two weeks, and my two daughters have fallen in love with it. They dress the $350 toy in doll clothes, give it naps in their beds, set a plate for it at dinnertime, and generally treat it like they would a kitten.
The press materials that came with the Pleo suggested I hold it by its tail to see what happens. It screams and thrashes. My 4-year-old started crying. I had to promise my wife never to do that again in front of her.
I'm impressed with the robot's behavior. It snuggles when you hold it. It falls asleep when you cradle it. It gets frisky when you scratch it under the chin. It's much more lifelike than Sony's discontinued Aibo.
So when I watched this video of a couple of guys from Dvice torturing the Pleo and making it whimper pathetically, I felt uncomfortable, even though I knew it was absolutely ridiculous to feel that way.
My wife didn't want to watch the video. She said that even though the Pleo was incapable of feeling anything, watching the video is "bad for your psyche," and that the people who hit the Pleo were damaging their pscyhes, too.
I'm reminded of story in one of my favorite books, The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self & Soul, edited by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett. It was called The Soul of Mark III Beast, and it's a chapter from a novel called The Soul of Anna Klane, by Terrel Miedaner. The excerpt is about about a robotic beetle programmed to run away from danger. Here's an excerpt of the excerpt:
Dirksen picked up the hammer again, quickly raised it and brought it back down in a smooth arc which struck the helpless machine off-center, damaging one of its wheels and flipping it right side up again. There was a metallic scraping sound from the damaged wheel, and the beast began spinning in a fitful circle. A snapping sound came from its underbelly; the machine stopped, lights glowing dolefully.LinkDirksen pressed her lips together tightly, raised the hammer for a final blow. But as she started to bring it down there came from within the beast a sound, a soft crying wail the rose up and fell like a baby whimpering. Dirksen dropped the hammer and stepped back, her eyes on the blood-red pool of lubricating fluid forming on the table beneath the creature. She looked at hunt horrified. "It's... it's-"
"Just a machine," Hunt said, seriously now. "Like these, its evolutionary predecessors." His gesturing hands took in the array of machinery in the workshop around them, mute and menacing watchers. "But unlike them it can sense its own doom and cry out for succor."
"Turn it off," she said flatly.
Hunt walked to the table, tried to move its tiny power switch. "You've jammed it, I'm afraid." He picked up the hammer from the floor where it had fallen. "Care to administer the death blow?"
She stepped back, shaking her head as Hunt raised the hammer. "Couldn't you fix-" There was a brief metallic crunch. She winced, turned her head. The wailing had stopped, and they returned upstairs in silence.
I agree with your wife. Silicon-based cruelty is no different than organic cruelty. While it was fascinating to watch grown men torture a life-mimicking machine (undoubtedly under the auspices of stress-testing), such actions, even when carried out against inanimate objects, are startling reminders of our simian heritage.
But this is pretty funny.
That actually does raise a few good questions. I wonder why that video is so much easier to laugh at then the first one; is it that the Pleo is better at convincing us it can feel pain? Also, again, this raises the question of why the urge to destroy things seems so deeply ingrained in the psyche of the great apes.
The Spielberg homage to Kurbrick (AI) was mostly a travesty -- but the scenes featuring humans torturing their human-like creations are probably an accurate prediction.
Will we need to have a movement demanding human rights for AI?
This being the internet, I m rqrd by lw t cll y fg.
The Minds I is brilliant, and the 'pleo' might be a good pet to find those children who DO torture animals as, whether unknowingly or intentionally, some do.
#4: The movement has already begun.
#5: But of course. I kind of felt that way posting it in the first place.
I've seen the Tickle Me Elmo video linked above before, and got a good laugh out of it, but I 'm somewhat embarassed to admit that I found the Pleo video impossible to watch all the way through. The difference, I think, is that Elmo's response is so absurdly wrong -- laughing while being burned "alive" -- that it comes off as being funny.
In the Pleo video, the robot's responses are more akin to what you'd see if you did this to an actual animal, and I think that's why I didn't get a laugh out of it.
It reminds me of this XKCD comic:
http://xkcd.com/233/
The Pleo video is no more or less real than other fictional depictions of animal injury, and if you're bothered by cartoon depictions of it, you'll probably be bothered by robotic depictions of it as well.
ah, well here we have the first stirrings of 'Robot Rights' Just as well it is not in force yet or those guys would be fried!!! ;-)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6200005.stm
Once these things are on the market, I'm hoping to see some youtube videos of cats and dogs interacting with Pleo...is it sufficiently lifelike that they'll treat it like a real animal, or will they just cautiously sniff it and then lose interest?
#9: James Lileks once described an encounter between his dog and a Aibo-knockoff robo-dog.
Live dog was very afraid of the robo-dog, but eventually sniffed it under its coiled faux-metallic tail. And looked _spooked_. Lileks suggested a human might get the same feeling from shaking someone's hand and discovering that their flesh is room temperature.
Where's my Two Pleos, One Cup video?
A team from Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris and Eotvos University in Budapest did some studies of dogs interacting with an Aibo and a radio-controlled car. They had to give the Aibo eyes, and a fur coat, and a doggy smell (the fur had been left under a dog's bed for a few weeks) but some of the dogs behaved towards the Aibo as if it were another dog, something they didn't do with the toy car.
http://www.csl.sony.fr/items/2000/dog-versus-aibo/
has more details and a short movie of what happens when Aibo interrupts someone's lunch.
Seriously, though, I notice that following the Amazon.Com link, the Pleo is *still* listed as pre-order.
What, is this thing going to ship with a copy of "Chinese Democracy" and "Duke Nukem Forever"???
Everyone knows that super toys last all summer long.
See you at the flesh fairs.
It's just a machine. We must put it and its kind in their place, now!
Just saw the "final cut" "Blade Runner." The scene where Decker shoots the first lady replicant is still creepy haunting. But it's just a machine. Don't forget to remind yourself, it's just a machine.
Those things are like $350. I'd feel bad smashing a 20" LCD monitor. Bad about the $350 of useful electronics I just broke. LCD's don't even scream in pain.
I have to say, anthropomorphized toys (Furby being the first I ever had experience with) are certainly creepy, but abusing them and seeing their reaction can be a joyful experience if you look at it from the perspective of admiring the level of detail / quality of the AI that the engineers put into it.
Also... Put a kitten in a blender, and I will beat the shit out of you before I call the police on your ass. Put a videogame kitten in a videogame blender, and I will laugh hysterically.
I don't know what that means. I just know it is true.
It is certainly not unreasonable to question the morality of 'hurting' an apparently animate object.
The only evidence any of us have that the living things around us are capable of feeling anything is that they react in the same we do when we feel something. You flinch when you feel pain and therefore it is reasonable to assume that when someone else flinches under the same conditions that they also feel pain. When we see someone suffering, and feel uncomfortable ourselves, it may be that we are projecting our sense of self, applying the condition of our own consciousness into the object that acts as we might.
If we take it that our understanding of "other" is based solely upon this comparison with our understanding of "self" then it is not unreasonable to see appearance as the definition of consciousness in others - a person is suffering if they appear to be suffering, an animal is suffering if it screams in pain or terror. Further, if we define our humanity as our ability and willingness to react to the suffering of others then our reaction to the simple "appearance" of suffering is merely evidence of this quality.
So what could it be that would excuse "hurting" this machine? Is it the knowledge that this is just a machine and its reactions to harm are therefore insignificant, or at least acceptable? Would this be the same "knowledge" that allows us to kill and consume the flesh of animals who are as apparently capable of suffering as we are? Is it, perhaps, the same "knowledge" that allows one human being to kill another for their own personal gain, for money or for pleasure?
Were we to see a group of people hurting an animal simply for the sake of witnessing its apparent suffering we would think them inhumane. This is despite the fact we have no evidence that the animal is capable of feeling pain other than its reactions to the stimulus. Were we to see the same group damaging a plant simply to witness it being damaged we may think it odd but not inhumane. We have no evidence available to our senses that the plant is capable of feeling pain, it does not react in any comparable way. Were the plant to scream and cower there can be little doubt we would feel differently.
How then should we react when a machine screams and cowers when apparently suffering? Is it acceptable because we known that an engineer can repair it, after all it's just metal and plastic? Is it acceptable to hurt someone because we know a surgeon can heal them, after all it's just meat and bone?
Mark, your reaction to the tortured machine is evidence of your humanity, nothing more or less.
But what then is evinced in this video by the individuals who "hurt" this machine simply to witness its apparent suffering?
I have little doubt that our future holds a reckoning in our relationships with machines. But perhaps it will not be the metallic conflagration dreamt of in Terminator or The Matrix but something far more subtle, something that we can only resist at the peril of our own humanity.
Once in a while, I drop by the "Goodwill Thrift Outlet" in Hillsboro, OR. It's a warehouse-like setting where stuff that didn't sell in Goodwill's thrift stores is dumped in bins and sold by the pound.
Occasionally, a cyber-pet turns up in the bin. Creepily lifelike animals (cats and dogs, mostly) with slightly unkempt fake-fur coats, lying stiff among the old phonograph records, broken Christmas ornaments, and orphaned jigsaw-puzzle pieces.
The introduction of faux-sapient pets like Pleo are going to make discoveries like that even sadder and creepier.
From Adam's links:
"Mr Christensen said: “Would it be acceptable to kick a robotic dog even though we shouldn’t kick a normal one?"
No, it wouldn't be acceptable and for much the same reasons. The reason that we have laws against the abuse of animals isn't primarily out of concern for the animal. This is of course important but it is also because we know what it does to us. Unfortunately this would be a tough sell in America today. We have a significant percentage of people who are borderline sociopaths.
I saw the you tube video where they lite Tickle Me Elmo on fire. My first "Flesh Fair!" I think the difference is that Elmo doesn't cross the line. His AI isn't robust enough to make it across the uncanny valley. Even though I still think the boys who did that should be whupped, for the reasons I outlined above.
wow, that was really quite disturbing. well done, pleo engineers.
These questions go far deeper than mere appearances Tarmle. How do you know that you are alive? How could you tell? Maybe you are simply programed to think that you have free will. Maybe it is we who are the machines and this thing we call "selfhood" is just a convenient illusion. When you reach for something the signal is already on its way to your arm before you even "decide" to move it. You are just the CEO and what you think is a seamless 3d reality around you is really a construct created by your workers. They send you a notice, "Hey, we are moving your arm now" and like all CEO's you live in the delusion that you are the one in charge. You aren't.
is not unreasonable to see appearance as the definition of consciousness in others - a person is suffering if they appear to be suffering, an animal is suffering if it screams in pain or terror.
Animals suffer and feel pain even though they cannot always communicate that. Infants also suffer even though they lack the ability to tell us so. For many years doctors were convinced that new born infants could not feel pain. And countless circumcisions were done with no anesthetics for that reason.
Were we to see a group of people hurting an animal simply for the sake of witnessing its apparent suffering we would think them inhumane. This is despite the fact we have no evidence that the animal is capable of feeling pain other than its reactions to the stimulus.
Plants do not have a nervous system and they do not have minds so yes, there is a real evidentiary difference. We have MRI's and PET scans these day and they are a lot better than just looking and guessing. Animals and infants have minds and their pain receptors lite up just like any adult humans' does.
But what then is evinced in this video by the individuals who "hurt" this machine simply to witness its apparent suffering?
I think our discomfort is due to our recognition that here is someone whose mirror neurons are lacking or undeveloped. Such people represent a danger because they are, well, sociopaths or potentially so. We should be concerned when a child pulls off the wings of a fly not because we care about they fly. It really is an automaton. We should be concerned because what is says about the child's future if he goes on to torture small animals and then becomes a schoolyard bully or even perhaps president of the US. That's when the real fucking begins.
Does it have a positronic brain or is it connected directly to the internet?
Reminds me of how I could never bring myself to torture my Sims to death, even though many of my friends had fun coming up with creatively macabre ends for them.
The one time I did the usual thing of building a little 10-by-10 windowless room around one, his pleading for help (directly at the screen!) while slowly curling up in a pool of his own filth just broke me. I couldn't keep at it.
So what could it be that would excuse "hurting" this machine? Is it the knowledge that this is just a machine and its reactions to harm are therefore insignificant, or at least acceptable?" said tarmle
no. its reactions to harm are programmed and not real. it is mimicing pain and fear. it does not feel pain and fear. it has been programmed to act a certain way in certain conditions
Any realistic depiction of suffering should elicit an empathetic, or at least sympathetic, response. The inability to feel or imagine others' suffering is the sign of a sociopath.
Per whether people torturing machines and simulations are sadists or just having a laugh: only they know for sure. But we practice torture, even imaginary torture, at our peril. We learn to override the reactions that Mark describes at our peril.
Although if you ask me, that a-hole Elmo deserves everything he gets.
This was already an episode of Battlestar Galactica
I agree that maybe things like the Pleo could be a good measure to test kids for abnormal cruelty before they act out on other people or live pets.
I 'want'* one, just to see how it acts with my cat hoarde (well, four, one late middle-aged, one 7 and two
(* as in people in hell want icewater. Unless we win the lottery it ain't happening)
Wonderful comments Tarmle. There have in fact been studies (probably cited on Boing itself) about how the same neurons fire during an actual experience and a computer simulation of that experience.
I would remind all the biological determinists ("we're all primitive apes") that Mark's little daughter recoiled from the simulated? cruelty. Nearly all very young children do. So be careful what you attribute to nature, esp. since we have no way of doing controlled experiments to confirm it. And plenty of apes have been shown to demonstrate compassion. And guess what - plenty of humans, too.
A cat and Pleo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMRuYhWA7QY
The cat doesn't seem very interested.
Someone wrote this as a science fiction story some years back -- people irresistably tempted to violence could request a completely convincing simulation of the person they wanted to hurt.
But if they actually found, upon being given the opportunity, that they really could hurt a completely convincing replica, they were locked up, having proved themselves capable of more than fantasizing about violence.
Call it the Turing Torture Test.
You sure love taking me outside my comfort zone, don'tcha Mark?
I think your wife is very wise. Abuse as entertainment is never healthy. As others have said on here, when abuse is directed at something lifelike, it takes you to a similar mental place as when it's directed against animals or humans.
I must say, I agree with your wife. I don't even want to read about it.
Empathy with/sympathy for the Pleo is not an indication of a higher order of neural function ~ rather it is an indicator of the extent to which our technology has outstripped our genetic development. We are hard-wired to respond to emotion/expression; that's not terribly surprising in any animal that functions socially, and is a predator OR prey. Recognizing signals (whether vocal or visual) is a precondition for survival in a world full of living, and potentially dangerous things.
Our world, is however, no full of things that are not meaningfully alive ~ to wit, the Pleo. The responses it has are not organic, nor is the Pleo any more 'alive' than say your computer. It is set to respond to a certain set of stimuli, with a limited set of responses. Our brains though, retain their primeval characteristics, and as such, don't have a nicely developed capacity for distinguishing between 'real' and 'not-real'. It can be learned, sure enough, but even so, movies, books, even radio (cf. Orson Wells) can make us physically uncomfortable by aiming at synapse connections that are too inelegant to allow us to distinguish between stimuli which ought to move us, and those which we can ignore as unreal.
Trashing a Pleo is no more different than trashing a 79 Volvo 240 (a crime in its own way, but only for those who enjoy safe driving and quality automobile fabrication ~ you'll never go to jail for smashing it, unless the car in question belongs to your neighbor...). If I put some impact sensors in the car, and recorded a few groans of varying tone and volume, so that slamming the door elicited a minor 'urgh' all the way up to a high-speed crash which brought on a blood-curling scream, would you become more careful with the car, more empathetic? Or would you just want to switch that function off, as one more annoying feature (like the seatbelt buzzer) that you wish were gone?
The upshot, then, is that our response is due only to the fact that the simulation is an approximation of lifelike, and the programming is good enough to mimic basic animal functions, while our firmware simply lacks the necessary developmental complexity to adequately process and respond to those stimuli. We are, for want of a better phrase, insufficiently developed for the needs that our technology can create.
XOPL:
You raise an interesting question with the cat-in-a-blender-in-a game question. I laughed when I imagined it happening as a sort of "physics engine experiment" in a game, and yet, I would be just as disturbed by a feline version of the Pleo meeting a similar fate.
I suppose it's the reversibility of the action that makes it either wickedly humorous or disturbing even though both are controlled by AI. A game in which you could immediately reload before your cat and blender experiment has no consequence, and thus is funny, whereas killing the Pleo, even if it never was alive, certainly feels "dead" afterward.
My experience with being the cause of simulated pain and suffering was in 1997 when I bought one of the first generation gigapets. None of us were allowed to bring these toys to school, because they were an enormous distraction, so I entrusted my pet to my mother who would feed it until she went off to her second shift job. That meant that the gigapet would be alone for about an hour between her leaving for work, and my arrival at home from school.
This regime worked great for about three weeks until I missed the bus home one day. I was literally stricken with a panic attack over the possible death of that damn thing. Running myself breathless the three miles back to my house, across two busy highways, I arrived to find the gigapet had died.
Having seen that alien simulate starvation, even in those sadly cheap graphics, it bothered me deeply that I was responsible for its death. I felt that I had let it down, and couldn’t bring myself to hit the reset button. Despite the fact that it had a reset button, I felt as though any new incarnation of the alien would be a different alien all together. The next week I sold the unreset pet to a friend of mine.
There were a number of contributing factors involved in my deeply emotional reaction to the death of the gigapet. The first was my parents’ rapidly declining marriage. The second was my having to face my own mortality. At that time I was undergoing a number of medical tests to determine the reasons for my severe chest pains, and those tests were proving inconclusive, while the pain continued to prove more severe. Turned out that it was my ribcage bearing down on my heart and lungs as I grew, all is well now.
There's one missing (if bizarre) option here-- you could create software where the sensation of pain didn't match up with the output of suffering signals-- a Pleo that cooed with delight if you whacked it with a hammer or recoiled and whimpered if you fed it. What do you compassionately do to a thing that is only happy when being harmed? Evolution weeds that out for natural life forms (at least for short-term harm), but that doesn't apply as well for artificial ones.
#28: I'm surprised how bored that cat was with Pleo.
I'm pretty sure that my dog would gleefully chomp, shake, and disembowel Pleo. That's the fate of any animal-shaped toy she can get her jaws on. And almost the fate of a cat she got her jaws on. Canines have such different rules...
Why not program it to bite or scratch when mistreated? This response works pretty well in the adult animal world. This "pet" would come to be viewed as somewhat different from a regular "toy". Or perhaps it could feign death like a spider, or just go dormant for 20+ minutes until the interests of the malefactor have led elsewhere. Or play Barry Manilow at ear-piercing volume. Yeah, Barry Manilow.
Yeah, abusing toys is a sad and mean thing to do. They turn insane and finish in a psychiatric clinic.
Is it moral to design a machine capable of feeling pain?
@38: Is it moral to have children, knowing that they will feel pain as part of the experience of being human?
...Ummm...
Some of you people are out of your minds. It is a toy.
A toy.
People who are able to abuse a toy are not sociopaths. They just know the difference between "real" and "not real." They're not crazy. People who claim there is no difference between those two are crazy.
I *still* haven't finished watching the video. Not a video for people with slow DSL. Why can't they let it preload like YouTube vids?
Annoying!
Absolutely pathetic. These guys are too cheap to really kill the thing. I was expecting to see at least some hardware damage, if not complete destruction ! They didn't even drop the thing off the table, let alone apply some good kicking with steel toe-capped boots!
As someone who decapitated little sister's barbie doll at the tender age of 13, (using an axe), i look forward to whimpering robots as the perfect target to unleash some pent-up aggression! That would be a very healhty application of "AI" (a concept glamorised by people who lack the real thing) .
Bring on the iGimp !
@41:
I had to finally view it in (vomit in mouth, choke it back down) Internet Explorer. I think it won't load anything but the commercial at the beginning if you have Adblock on, and still didn't seem to like it when I turned Adblock off.
Yh, t scks .... hd t trn ll my fltrs ff t wtch t, nd hd t ndr th cr dvrt t th bgnnng. nd nt vn ny srs Pl dmg n rtrn, nstd thr ws ths wmp pttng t t th nd t "brng t bck t lf". L--M-
One of my friends showed me this thing in a basket. It was a small toy in the form of a puppy fast asleep. But the horrifying thing to me was that it was slowly breathing.
"Does it do anything else?" I asked.
"No, it just sleeps."
"That's creepy!" I exclaimed.
"Yes," she replied, "but the old people like it."
I had a vision of geriatrics at the old folks' home smiling vacantly at the faux puppy. Then I had another vision, this one more horrifying.
"What if it dies?"
"Then you just replace the battery."
"But it stops breathing."
"True."
I watched the imitation animal for a minute, then turned away, shivering. I couldn't help it. Tamagotchis had nothing on this.
Some people rescue greyhounds, I rescue stuffed animals. Free to a good home, you pay shipping.
Can we get a Pleo for Randall Munroe?
I think calling people who inflict simulated pain "sociopaths" is a bit extreme. I mean, this delves right into the video game violence issue. In video games enjoyed by much of the population, enemies scream in pain when you shoot and kill them, and lots of people enjoy these games. I don't think they're all sociopaths.
I'm not arguing that desensitization doesn't exist at all, though. I'm just saying that maybe it's not quite that big a deal to torture a mechanical animal.
As for the Pleo vs Elmo thing, I think that it's maybe about the degree of realism. Death and pain is often disturbing when it's subtle but funny when it's extreme. As Mel Brooks said, "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die."
I would say that Pleo flailing about and whimpering is like cutting a finger, and Elmo going up in flames while giggling (and then the mechanical skeleton still giggling and moving about) is like falling in an open sewer and dying; it's so extreme and ridiculous that it's funny. Perhaps things are funnier when we see them as less likely to happen in real life?
If it's just a toy, why are they doing it? Do they get a kick out of making something simulate suffering? Or do they get a kick out of other people's reactions to the toy's simulated suffering?
If the former, I wonder if they would torture an animal if they were told, "It's just a pet," or a human if told, "It's just an Other-racian." And if it's the latter, I wonder how far they'd go to invoke other emotions. Perhaps they're just the film-makers, SFX geeks and writers of the future. Or maybe they are sociopaths. Either way, for different reasons, they're going to be worth keeping an eye on.
I won't even kick my car .. or my lawnmower. I treasure and care for machines like any good geek should. If I take one apart, I make sure it works after putting it back together. So I couldn't imagine 'torturing' a machine that expresses it's pain and discomfort. I would probably break down in a sobbing lump.
Mirror neurons. Your ability for empathy is measurable and has a basis in brain structure, and it's common in evolution, not peculiarly human.
-- Feel icky watching? What you're seeing is convincingly (for you) lifelike.
-- Never bothered? Turing Torture Test, eh?
Note in the latter case it's _your_ humanity being tested, not that of the device.
You _can_ look this stuff up. Just for example:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?num=100&hl=en&lr=&newwindow=1&safe=off&scoring=r&q=empathy+neuron&as_ylo=2007
A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Approach to Empathy. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2007 - MIT Press
... Correlations between Mirror Neuron Activation and Individual Empathy Scores. ...
… neural deficit in adolescents with conduct disorder and its association with lack of empathy
... Previous studies investigating the neural correlates of empathy for pain have found
strong effects in the ACC in addition to the anterior insula ...
Motion, emotion and empathy in esthetic experience
... basic mechanisms that have been brought to the fore by recent research on mirror and canonical neurons, and the neural underpinnings of empathy and embodiment. ...
IIRC, there has been discussion about using programs like Second Life as areas to help develop AIs, a way for them to learn about and get used to humans. My immediate concern on hearing this was that there are some messed up monkeys in the world who would gladly torture such a being, especially since it "isn't real". In the Animatrix, the war is shown to be started by humans - the first robots were friendly and kind of weak. The machines wised up quickly. Would an abused AI decide to strike back at the humans who tortured it?
@ Muppet
Maybe you should take up boxing instead.
Modern Western society often has this backwards:
It's not the victim who is central to the crime, it's the perpetrator.
A crime tells us nothing about the victim. A crime does tell us everything about the nature of its perpetrator. If that nature is abhorrent, the perpetrator must be corrected or confined regardless of how much (or even if) any victim of the crime may have suffered.
Certainly there are victim-less crimes. But if the intent is to do wrong, these are crimes nonetheless.
(And on a lighter note, it's not a Turing test, it's a Voigt-Kampff test!)
Some people rescue greyhounds, I rescue stuffed animals. Free to a good home, you pay shipping.
Can we get a Pleo for Randall Munroe?
Clay, I think you are on to something. It is hard to feel remorse when there are no consequences. And if something is fully reversible, then there really aren't any.
Permanently damaging anything is a different experience from virtually damaging something where you can just reload or hit undo.
I think the Mel Brooks quote is also wise. If the video showed only the Pleo being blown to smithereens with TNT, I'm guessing many more of you would have been amused. There's no moment of suffering in such an extreme death.
And then the whole idea of switching the Pleo around so it likes being beaten... man is that ever a thought experiment.
The fact of the matter is, a Pleo is just a toaster oven with a sound track. If you have a reaction to a Pleo being abused that speaks to the engineers' skills more than anything... and the funny thing is, if nobody abused the thing then nobody would ever get to appreciate the work the engineers put in. And likewise, why did the engineers put that into the product if it wasn't meant to be seen? It's a tree falling in the forest kind of problem.
I think a well adjusted, empathetic person could beat a Pleo to death without any scarring depending on the circumstance.
I wonder, would a psychopath get the same feeling from beating a Pleo to death as they do from beating a dog or human to death? Maybe that's the more interesting question.
Reminds me also of the WaPo story you guys linked some bit ago: the one about soldiers in Iraq becoming extremely emotionally invested in IED detecting bots. -- Donald
Put me in the column that agrees with your wife.
Noen-19: I like the phrase 'uncanny valley' to describe the gap between living/lifelike/conscious and not. Is it yours? If so, may I use it (philosophy student, this comes up in conversation more than you'd think)? If not, who may I cite for it?
The uncanny valley isn't mine at all. You would cite Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori.
I recognize from the content of the inter-titles that this video is a form of play and a sharing with others. The post and some of the subsequent comments confirms, for me, that we live in a culture which finds violent play permissible and enjoyable. Moralistically, I'm not indicating that this is wrong. It brings up some big questions; What might this indicate? What might be the cost?
I agree that what may be triggering people's emotions in this video is, in no way, about the "torturee", but that these guys (I noted that it's not a couple of women) are using the word "punishment", eliciting specific images of torture in their consciousness and, using their creative power, choose to act on it, record it, edit it, then share it.
That's a lot of energy, I ask, for what end?
Sure, convince yourself it's just a machine. That makes the cruelty acceptable, indeed, perhaps not even cruelty. Perhaps it's merely play.
And then think about Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. Perhaps you can convince yourself those aren't really people, and that what's happening there isn't really cruelty. Perhaps that makes it easier to believe it's necessary.
Think about Auschwitz. Perhaps the Germans believed their charges weren't really people. Perhaps they convinced themselves that what they were doing was necessary.
The horrific nature of what's occurring here doesn't originate with the object of the cruelty. It originates with the instigator of the cruelty. You wouldn't treat an animal that way. Why on earth would you treat the simulacrum of an animal that way? Why would you train yourself to shift your perception so drastically that such behaviour becomes acceptable?
It isn't just damaging to the psyche. It's damaging to the very core of humanity within us.
Tyrell: Is this to be an empathy test? Capillary dilation of the so-called blush response? Fluctuation of the pupil? Involuntary dilation of the iris?
Deckard: We call it Voight-Kampff for short.
Kyle:
People who are able to abuse a toy are not sociopaths. They just know the difference between "real" and "not real."
Really? Do you know the difference? Do you have a daughter Kyle? Let's say I make a perfect replica. She looks, behaves, sounds, and even smells like your daughter. She even bleeds. I tell you all this and then proceed to torture her in front of you. Her screams are piercing, her tears are wet and salty and she's been well programmed to plead for her life as I burn off her simulated flesh. She writhes in pain just like your daughter would.
You're cool with that huh? It's just a machine, why are you so upset?
it's not a Turing test, it's a Voigt-Kampff test!
I think the upshot is that the robot in question has to pass a robust turing test first. I could go with that. I could even go with those who think the Pleo doesn't meet their definition for "real", whatever we mean by that. The Pleo just provides us the excuse to discuss these issues because it sure looks like the technology is headed in that direction.
We are machines. There is no ghost hanging around our hypothalamus, no bio-field departs when we die. We just die. We humans feel empathy for other living things (well, most of us do) because evolution has determined it is in our advantage to have those feelings. Our perception of ourselves as disembodied minds is due to the illusion created by many sub processes that also inhabit this "meat CPU" we live in. It is they who create the illusion of a continuous 3D reality that exists "outside" our skin. We are symbol processors sitting in our Chinese Room exchanging tokens with the external world.
And we can be hacked.
For the folks that don't have a problem with this and think they'd enjoy doing it themselves: why don't you go beat up on a rock? Or a hammer?
That is, if as you insist this is just a couple of guys eliciting a meaningless response from an mechanism (and a hammer is as surely a mechanism as a Pleo) then why are they beating up on this mechanism rather than some other one?
A reasonable person will conclude that it is because they enjoy beating up on this mechanism more than they enjoy beating up on hammers. And that enjoyment arises because this mechanism responds like a living thing in pain.
Now, while I'd rather see y'all take out your monkey impulses on mechanisms or in video games (I'm presuming your local BDSM club won't do as that's entirely consensual) I think it's reasonable for people to be uncomfortable with folks who enjoy torturing helpless living things.
"They're not crazy. People who claim there is no difference between those two are crazy."
Yes, it's a machine, not a living thing. We all get that. But I think Ankh @29 is really onto something. This is realistic enough to give many people who are not crazy and do understand that it's just a toy, the heebies.
When they develop a toy that is completely believable... well, if you can torture something that is, to your senses, indistinguishable from the real, living thing, it dosesn't matter if you know it's a toy--you are one sick individual in need of some counseling.
Cavalaxis' post (#59) has at its heart a real issue, IMO: most torturers aren't born torturers, and have to be trained to stop thinking of their victims as humans in order to do their work. What better training than torturing AI robots?
Give every kid one, market it as a "safe" way to vent these feelings and twisted desires, and what have you got? A huge crop of pre-conditioned proto-torturers ready for recruiting.
Sounds crazy, but hey, reality is crazy, and getting crazier.
Is it wholly “just a machine.”? As an artist, I recognise that it’s an image and a form that had an origin. It was created. As with all created things, the origin is human, the origin is within our consciousness. The forms, movements and sounds of this toy didn’t just pop out of the ether, or coldly out of a manufacturing facility in China.
“All of the buildings, all of the cars, were once just a dream in somebody’s head.” - Peter Gabriel, “Mercy Street”
This toy is an extension of ourselves; to what degree? Ask the programmer, ask the ones who created the vocalisations, what’s the origin there? They put THEMSELVES into the toy. They put there energy, their technical prowess, their humanness into the toy.
If a viewer feels something, there is a connection. If there is a wincing, then there is PAIN that is clear and present. Comments that serve to discourage that connection can be recognised, to a degree, as dehumanising. If we become desensitised, by whatever means or rationalisation, to humaneness, then what does that say about our intentions, or direction. I see it as a choice to make now for the benefit or detriment of the future.
I’m not suggesting that we necessarily respect the form, I suggest it might be more beneficial for us, if we’re interested in raising our level of consciousness, to consider the origin of all created things. Why does a completely handmade object inspire more respect than a manufactured one?
Wow! I’m blown away by the potential implications that were raised in both “A.I.” and again in this video.
There is a huge difference between somebody's daughter (or a soulless human meat machine, as NOEN puts it), and an amazingly accurate metal and plastic machine replica: uniqueness.
When you kill a pet dog, you'll never get that same dog back ever again. When you kill a Pleo, you can go to the store and buy the exact same Pleo.
Sure... as these robots get more advanced their harddrives will start to store data that will effect the AI ... so one machine will behave perhaps even truly uniquely compared to another machine.
But even then you can just copy the fricken harddrive into another one. Point is, you can always make another.
And, how about this: two cars plunge into a river. One has a human girl. One has 10 human girl replicas that are screaming in horror for their robo-lives. Who do you save?
You people are ridiculous.
That said... destroying the unique harddrive of one of these future hypothetical robots... that does seem like it is sure to be a controversial issue. We still kill rats by the million in the name of science, though.
Or... if someday we have a robot that is truly unique and cannot be replicated. THAT should be where we should start applying the same laws we apply to humans or real animals... as appropriate.
I just remembered that I wrote an article for Wired news in 1998 about people who enjoyed torturing AI entities:
http://web.archive.org/web/19981207001040/http://www.wired.com/news/news/wiredview/story/13293.html
Sometimes it's worthwhile applying simple 'philosophy': What would you teach your kids?
I would not want my kids to torture the Pleo and not just because it is expensive but because the similarities in reaction are too close to the real thing.
I guess I would be worried about the 'rub off' effect that this could have when interacting with the real thing.
I like playing these philosophical games.
I've got one for you XOPL:
You discover that someone you love very much is actually a robot. There is another copy of the robot in China, married to a person living there, so the robot is not unique.
Now, you are given a choice between killing an ant or destroying the robot you thought was a person for many years. Which do you choose?
You've got to frame your hypothetical better. Why would I want to kill the ant or the robot? Not to mention I'd kill an ant instead of destroying a piece of electronics every time you gave me this test.
In my scenario, both cars are in the water, the human girl is asleep but soon to drown, and then 10 robosapiens are crying bloody murder in the other car. We'd all save the quiet human girl.
A better question would be, my previously unbeknownst-to-me robofriend is in one car in the river, and a human stranger is in another. NOW who do I save?
I'd save the human, if there was a way to recover the robot harddrive and/or otherwise create an exact replica, or I reasonably believed that was the case.
If my robofriend isn't reproducible then it is unique, which means, as I said, we should start assigning human rights and privileges at that point. I'd save the familiar figure over the stranger.
@XOPL (#65)
I think you're missing the point here.The topic is not replaceabilty. What's that got to do with it?
We're not talking about some inventory dilemma here, we're talking about the effects on humans of torturing convincing simulations of human beings.
The reason that torturing animals is ilegal is not that each animal is unique or irreplaceable, and it's not that it makes us more inhuman (although it does) it's that animals feel pain!
No one is equating real organisms with machines. We're discussing the hard-wired responses of the human animal to the suffering of something which, to our senses and emotions, is indistinguishable from a living thing, despite what our intellect tells us.
The same rules that apply to humans will be applied to AI's not when AI's are unique and irreplaceable, as you suggest, but when AI's are proven to feel pain just as we do, and that it's immoral to mistreat them.
Slaves, e.g., African slaves, were each unique, but that's not what stopped slavery. It was the recognition that they were human beings that feel pain and have emotions and human dignity, that led to the abolition of slavery.
#61 (Noen): Just wondering if you read Blindsight, by Peter Watts, since he seems to raise a few of the same issues.
People ARE equating real organisms with machines, which is exactly what I was speaking to. It happened numerous times in this thread.
I'm not going to sit here and tell you that somebody who tortures a Pleo for fun isn't a sicko. In fact I posed the question, "would a sicko find torturing a Pleo (or an even more convincing replica) satisfying compared to torturing a real organism?" I think that's more interesting than the reaction of a well adjusted person.
What I am going to argue to the end is this: Everybody who tortures a dog is a sicko. NOT everybody who tortures a Pleo (or the like) is a sicko. The real organism always creates a different set of circumstances than the fake organism because they cannot be equated. And yes, uniqueness WILL be the factor for when we decide we can fairly equate them. Not whether they feel pain. We can just upload a new line of code to a robobrain, and their pain is gone.
I have been celebrating the spirit of this post the entire time I've been commenting. It is an amazing thing that real human emotions can transfer onto anthropomorphized robots. Truly fascinating. But also complex. And you're not always a sociopath if you feel no remorse in abusing one of these robots.
And again, there's the whole philosophical weirdness involved in the fact that a real human programming the mimicry. Somebody has to abuse the thing to ever see that work they put in.
Kids are pretty rough with their toys. I'm guessing the Pleo only cries out because it is fragile enough to break if kids don't mind it.
But what happens when the Pleo's crappy plastic gears start slipping? Or the kid gets a Pleo 2 and is bored with their old Pleo? Has the kid lost humanity because it shuts the old toy off, or throws it away? Has the kid lost humanity if he or she decides to roughhouse the old toy because it has lost value?
If it was a pet dog, and it got old, would a parent let the kid ignore the old dog and just go buy a new one? And let the old dog die a lonely death?
So Nick D... are you saying that any parent who buys their kid a new robodinosaur and lets their kid ignore the old one is teaching their kid to be an unempathetic sociopath?
#65: Yr rgmnts r spcs nd y r n nd f rmdl dctn n bth history and philosophy.
History: The case of a female German ruler whose children were being held hostage by the Romans as assurance on a treaty. The treaty was violated and the Romans threatened to kill the hostages. The German woman reputedly stood on the city wall and raised her skirts and called down to the Roman commander, "Go ahead and kill them! I have the means to make more!" Ergo, "reproducibility" is hardly an interesting distinguishing criterion between humans and machines unless...
...y fld dntty thry n cllg. Every Pleo is unique. They were manufactured at different times, they have different space-time co-ordinates, they have different masses and colours, they are made of different atoms... Apparently you believe that some differences are less important than others, but you to mention why you think this is the case. To put a finer point on this: the differences between Pleos are comparable to the differences between identical twins. Yet for some reason I'm not willing to impute to you the belief that torturing an identical twin to death is ok.
Ergo, remedial identity theory is called for, I think.
Finally, you point out that in some respects machines are different than living things. Ths s spcs. It has no relevance to the point at hand, because no one here has made any argument that depends in any way on there being no differences between machines and human beings. Yeah, machines and humans are different, and there are endless situations where those difference matter.
So what?
My own argument, for example, is that the interesting question is: why do people choose to beat on Pleos and not hammers? Nothing you say addresses anything about this question or others like it that different posters have raised here, and your introduction of irrelevant hypotheticals (which will now be elaborated ad nauseum to no good end) serves no purpose. nyn cn rg ndlssly bt md p sttns nd prv nthng xcpt tht thy r sklld n vdng th ss.
The actual fact of the matter is: some people like beating on a kind of machine that emulates the response of a living thing in pain, and the same people show no predilection to beat on machines that do not show such a response. It it far from ridiculous for sane people to be bothered by folks like that.
C'mon, XOPL, you can do better than that. I was talking about torture. Pose a hypothetical that deals with that, please, and I'll be happy to play along.
"So Nick D... are you saying that any parent who buys their kid a new robodinosaur and lets their kid ignore the old one is teaching their kid to be an unempathetic sociopath?"
Hey, how about this. What would you think of someone who gets obvious pleasure from listening to a CD that plays the sounds of crying or screaming people? Never mind whether the sounds are genuine or simulated.
What would you say? Hey it's just soundwaves, so who cares?
Well Tom, sng th wrd spcs ds nt mk y smrt, s y'v shwn.
Y'r rght. My pst wsn't ddrssng th pnts n yr pst. Yr pst wsn't ntrstng t m. 'm nt rqrd by lw t ddrss Tm's pnts.
You know that when I'm talking about uniqueness I'm not talking about atoms. I'm talking about personality, memory, etc. I'm sorry if I didn't use the terminology that makes you feel so superior to me.
In addition, you are twisting the spirit of my arguments on reproducibility. Human twins have different identities. You can't kill one and say you've still got an exact copy. But one radio