| dr_malaki | 01-01-2004 02:07 AM |
| quote: | ||
Originally posted by Zola
Now to me, that would be horrid. The idea of something showing emotions that it didn't feel.... |
Yeah. I may have mentioned before that when I was little kid I had what almost amounted to a kind of mild phobia about things like mannequins, big dolls, and ventriloquists' dummies -- things that *looked*, or in some cases even *acted* human and alive, but really weren't.
That for me was the source of the horror in, say, _The Stepford Wives_(1975). When I saw it at 18 the feminist subtext largely went past me, but just enough of my childhood aversion or phobia still lingered for me to really get the creeps from it.
There was another movie that really gave me the willies at one time: a low-budget black-and-white picture from about 1964 called _The Nightwalker_. It had a dream/nightmare-sequence wedding scene of a widow being compelled to re-marry her recently deceased blind husband (who was not only merely dead but really most severely dead, as in being all burnt-up to a crisp worse than Schwarzwald), who came tap-tap-tapping down the aisle with his white cane to the musical accompaniment of a mannequin that played something monotonous and discordant on a church organ. Ugh! The sight of those mannequin hands moving stiffly on the organ keyboard actually did give me bad dreams for a while.
I can see how just such an almost instinctive aversion, rather than faulty upbringing, might be the root of much of the prejudice that might be directed toward even relatively human-like androids -- a perhaps primitive but no less real feeling that such things *simply ought not to be*. (I was never altogether consistent about this, though: I didn't mind the Tin Woodsman or the Scarecrow in _The Wizard of Oz_, for instance. They never seemed at all monstrous to me.)
Yet when I saw Dorothy's hands on the piano keyboard for the first time I felt none of the old superstitious horror and revulsion. It seemed a beautiful, and even, paradoxically, a *natural* thing. From the first she always seemed like a living person to me, not a thing merely animated by some false semblance of life.
However, just because we *can* do something -- just because it's technically feasible -- doesn't men it would be right to do it. Even If I could create an android that was really conscious and self-aware, I don't think I'd *want* to. One resason I have no children or pets is that I don't want the responsibility for them, and I wouldn't want the moral responsibility I would owe to such a created being, or the responsibility for his/her/its actions in the event of a Golem/Frankenstein-style fiasco.
I suspect that we are not far now from *some* sort of genuine artificial intelligence, though I think lifelike androids are still pretty far off in the future (assuming there is a future I mean).
It could be either a beautiful or a dreadful, monstrous thing, depending on who does it and how and why it's done. Even good intentions are no guarantee of a good outcome. There's actually a biblical passage which could easily and plausibly be interpreted as a prophecy of some type of humanoid robot or android -- and not a nice one, I regret to say. I don't think I'll cite the specific passage tonight, since I've already cited/quoted two biblical passages (in other contexts) here in the last day or so, and I don't want to get accused of turning the board into a Sunday School class. If you want me to cite chapter and verse p.m. me about it and I will.
Doc