
Do Kids Care If Their Robot Friend Gets Stuffed Into a Closet? - eguizzo
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/do-kids-care-if-their-robot-friend-gets-stuffed-into-a-closet#.T56lSyNVoKY.hackernews
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sethg
80% of the children surveyed said it was OK to buy and sell the robot, while
50% said it was not OK to put him in the closet. The authors of the study
speculated that “we are creating a new ontological being with its own unique
properties”, but this could just be an extension of a very old ontological
being. Back in the ancient world, it was considered perfectly OK to buy and
sell slaves, but there were moral and legal limits on what masters were
allowed to do with their slaves.

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evincarofautumn
Slaves come readily to mind, but also pets. We buy and sell dogs all the time
(under the guise of “adoption”) and expect them to be obedient and helpful—but
also do our best to treat them well. For a being of lesser intelligence than a
human, I think that’s fine; still, we should treat our equals equally, and
robots _will_ someday equal us.

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eurleif
Dogs are animals like us, so they have, or might have, consciousness. Robots
most likely won't, regardless of how intelligent they may be, unless we
discover what causes consciousness to occur and use that knowledge as the
basis for implementing robot AI.

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jdietrich
It's a specious argument - we have no testable definition of "consciousness"
or even any evidence that such a phenomenon exists. Slavery was often
justified with the argument that black people didn't have souls. It's just as
baseless as arguing that computers are unlikely to have "consciousness".

Without evidence that there is some fundamental difference between a
biological and artificial mind, we must assume that a self-aware AI is
entitled to the same rights as any other self-aware being.

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eurleif
>or even any evidence that such a phenomenon exists.

You have evidence of your own consciousness, just as I have evidence of my
own.

>we must assume that a self-aware AI is entitled to the same rights as any
other self-aware being.

What's your testable definition of self-awareness? Is the 'top' command self-
aware because it can see its own process?

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true_religion
I do not have evidence of your consciousness. As far as I'm concerned you're a
biological robot.

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evincarofautumn
Here’s the really interesting thing: thanks to this kind of empathy, if an AI
is indistinguishable from human intelligence—that is, it passes the Turing
test—then we’ll be obligated to endow it with equal rights. _Even if_ we fully
understand how it works. I predict strong opposition to robot rights on that
basis alone, because I really don’t think most people grasp that the mind is
physical.

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AerieC
I really hope I live to see the day that "robot rights" is a legitimate
political issue.

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ck2
Reminds me of that video where the child refuses to hit his party pinata that
looks like spiderman, instead puts down the stick and goes over to hug it.

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dudurocha
Can you find this video? I'm very interested.

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Lewton
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxNvkmTWCLc>

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dudurocha
Thank you so much.

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stephengillie
Since corporations are people, can robots be people as well?

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anamax
> Since corporations are people, can robots be people as well?

Corporations are aggregations of people. Are robots?

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lurker14
That's not true. _Conspiracies_ and _cohorts_ and _partnerships_ are
aggregations of people.

Corporations are legal entities _owned_ and _managed_ by people.

(LLPs are a weird in-between thing.)

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stephengillie
So corporations are slaves?

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tensafefrogs
This reminds me of a Radiolab episode where they asked kids to hold furbys
upside down (vs. a barbie or other doll) to see if they had feelings for the
robot vs. the doll.

<http://www.radiolab.org/2011/may/31/furbidden-knowledge/>

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dyeje
I'm interested in seeing how the dualist/monist debates. If one thinks that
the consciousness is separate from the body, how does that position stay
defensible if we are able to create something which is, for all intensive
purposes (that is to say, it acts indistinguishably from a conscious being),
conscious? I imagine that someone would argue that you create a soul somewhere
along the process of creating such an object/being, I think it would be
interesting to see where people draw that line.

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GuiA
For more research in this topic, I highly recommend Latitude's "Robots @
School" report, which investigates how children perceive robots on a number of
points:

<http://latd.tv/Latitude-Robots-at-School-Findings.pdf>

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adventureful
Children will emotionally relate to stuffed animals as well, such that they
will get upset if you mistreat their favorite teddy bear. As a child, I
remember getting extremely pissed off at my brother when he intentionally
threw my teddy bear into a bathtub full of water, nearly ruining the bear.

There's nothing particularly unique about the robot scenario. Even if a
stuffed animal doesn't interact like a robot might, a child will often fill
that void of personality with their own imagination, bringing the stuffed
animal to life in their own mind. Children are obviously capable of intense
creative projection.

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goggles99
Teleoperated robots? All this proves is how easy kids are to influence by a
staged illusion. Pull the veil back to let them see the wizard (the person
with the remote control/microphone) and we'd see far different results.

What a waste of time/money. Any parent (or someone who has been around kids
for any length of time) could have given you this same information.

