Nobody gets mad at robots; or if they do, the robot doesn't mind.
Robots always do what they are told, and never make mistakes;
or if they do, the programmer shouldn't blame the robot.
But if he does, the robot doesn't mind.
Robots never need to sleep or eat.
They never get bored or lonely.
They never have whimsical desires.
They never feel anything negative;
or positive, but they don't regret this loss.
I wish I was a robot - but a robot doesn't make wishes.
Unless he is programmed to.
Maybe I am a robot afterall? A wishing robot.
PS - I wish I was a different kind of robot.
"I Wish I was a Robot" - Was that existential angst? That is to say, a feeling that all humans feel (or will feel, if they confront life as they should): balking at free will and all the responsibility that it entails.
ReplyDeleteI used to feel like that (Ode to Marvin) alot (such as, when I was a teenager), and sometimes I still do. I didn't want to have emotions. They were too complicated, and seemed to produce endless problems. Perhaps that's one of the reasons I stayed away from people, didn't date hardly at all, had few friends, was very studious, and interested in fields of a technical nature. But it never worked completely. I always had some emotions, and even if I got rid of some of them for a time, it was such a struggle to keep them at bay! Besides, not wanting to have emotions was itself a kind of emotion. Why didn't I want to have emotions? Mostly I think it had to do with avoiding conflicts... with other people's emotions. I felt if I could just focus on the facts, conflicts would evaporate, because how could emotions compete with facts? Slowly I began to learn that they could. My facts didn't convince anybody who didn't already want to be convinced. Even if I knew I was right, that was useless unless other people wanted to agree with me. Usually, the whole reason I would bother to go on a fact finding tour, is because I sensed potential conflicts. I thought having facts on your side was an ironclad way to win any contest. What I found instead is that people's emotions drive them to find the facts they want to find, and argue away the ones they don't like (BF).
"So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do." - Benjamin Franklin
So it was still going to be my emotions(will?) against everyone else's. Well, if that was the case, then I was just as entitled to my emotions as anyone else. But unfortunately for me, one of my emotions was still an extreme dislike for conflict (except at times when I'm tired of avoiding it, and it seems so inevitable, then I sometimes feel driven to go out and provoke it). Still, within my own mind, I was free to stop trying to be a "facts only" robot. I could accept my emotions as valid. I had as much right as anybody to be a subjective "self." And, I wasn't even obligated to explain my emotions to anybody. Then I read
"How We Decide" by Jonah Leher, talking about how emotions are integral to decision making. People can't make decisions without them.
"Your emotions are your emotions." - Rich Dad, Poor Dad
ReplyDeleteAnd you can't avoid actions and decisions:
Tonight it's time
Choose a direction
If you fail
You can make a correction
Slower now
Make life faster
Make your mind
Up for once this time
It's hard
To know
Where I'm
Supposed to go
- Sixpence None the Richer, Tonight
Good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be executed.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
He's a real nowhere man,
Sitting in his Nowhere Land,
Making all his nowhere plans
for nobody.
Doesn't have a point of view,
Knows not where he's going to,
Isn't he a bit like you and me?
Nowhere Man please listen,
You don't know what you're missing,
Nowhere Man,the world is at your command!
- The Beatles
24 “Then the man who had received one bag of gold came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. 25 So I was afraid and went out and hid your gold in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.’
26 “His master replied, ‘You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed? 27 Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest.
28 “‘So take the bag of gold from him and give it to the one who has ten bags. 29 For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. 30 And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’
Many roads are ahead of us
ReplyDeleteWith choices to be made
But life's just one of the games we play
There is no special way
Make the best of what's given you
Everything will come in time
Why deny yourself
Don't just let life pass you by
Like winter in July
- Sarah Brightman, Winter in July
This should be our time: this fertile youth's black soil is ready for rain... - Sixpence None the Richer, The Lines of my Earth
"Why was I not made of stone - like thee?" - Quasimodo
ReplyDeleteI want to do something with my life; I want to be a cyborg. - Kevin Warwick
ReplyDelete"Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills." - Arthur Schopenhauer
ReplyDelete"Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us.... Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become." - EO Wilson
ReplyDeleteExistential Angst
ReplyDeleteRelevant earworm. Those flowers, tho.
ReplyDeleteIt should now be clear why we claimed at the beginning that the problem of engineering artificial humor is AI-complete. Humor is dependent on nearly all the skills and tools of general cognition, but those skills and tools are also, in us if not in all conceivable robots, dependent on the specific architectural structures that underlie our sense of humor. [...] As long as an agent has less than complete information about the world it inhabits, it must proceed heuristically, and the task of maintaining data integrity in the wake of that risky leaping needs to be controlled by some process that can compete successfully with the other demands on the agent’s resources. We are not attempting to prove that there is no conceivable way this control could be implemented other than by something like the epistemic emotions that govern us (perhaps pseudo-emotions that meet the same computational needs), but perhaps this is so. In that case, we would have to conclude that Star Trek’s character, Data, is actually a cognitive perpetual motion machine, not really possible in the universe as we know it.
ReplyDelete- Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind