Michael Tritter
Interview to Rudy Rucker
for Web Site to Promote the Movie AI. New York, 5/22/2001
Q: We're positing that, at some point in the future, man will have
created robots which are indistinguishable from you or me, and they'll
be capable of loving their creators. Do you think that you would be
able to love the robots in return, as you would a child?
A: [Note, my original answer, as printed here, was deemed a little too
mocking, and I edited it down for it’s actual appearance on the AI
promo site.]
This feels like an odd question to be answering. It's like I'm being
set up to try and guess the plot of the AI movie your web site is
promoting. There's an odor of Hollywood hokum coming off your use of
the world "love" in this context. "Love" as in an ad for safe cars,
for instance, or for life-insurance and family-style dining? The
subtext of your question suggests that children are comparable to
valued possessions. Is there a subliminal message that buying things
might in some way be as rewarding as carrying out the ancient and
divine imperative to physically give life to new human beings? To
acquire machines instead of having children? And you're talking about
"love?" You're talking about S.U.V.s, my friend, about oversize attack
dogs and monster homes, about P.A. systems turned up too loud, about
consumption and greed, about, in short, the zombified coast-to-coast
Mall of the Amerikkkan dream.
Flame-mode off. "Can a person love a robot as much as a child?" People
fall in love with all sorts of things, so it's easy to imaginethat
they might love a robot. As it is, people love animal pets, and many
even love their cars. So, sure people can love robots. But might a
person love a robot as much as a child?
One's love for a flesh-and-blood child is a very strong kind of love,
non-relative and effectively absolute in its intensity. This is no
accident, it's something wired into us by biology so that evolution
will work. According to one way of looking at things, we are
biomachines that our genes use for reproducing themselves. From this
point of view there is nothing more precious than a child, which is
not only filled with your own genes, but is also much younger than you
and therefore likely to live longer. Children are the ticket to
genetic survival. As such, their value is wholly incomparable to that
of a robot.
Another thing that seems to make robots less valuable than children is
that it seems very easy to copy a robot. If the robot using standard
hardware, one would imagine that it's simple to make a hardware copy.
And one might suppose that the robot's software is readily
downloadable for back-ups. So if someone offers me a million dollars
to kill my robot, why wouldn't I just buy a new body for, say, a
hundred thousand dollars, hook up some kind of broadband cable to copy
my old robot's software and parameter settings to the new robot body,
and then cheerfully let the old robot get trashed. I'd have the new
one, and it would presumably behave just the same as the one that just
died.
Of course, I'd have to steel myself to the piteous screams of the old
robot being immolated upon a mound, let's say, of free AOL CDs. But my
Ed McMahon million would make up for it. Maybe the new robot would
even help me through this little patch of grief, light-heartedly
mocking the cries of its dying predecessor.
To make the proposed question have some bite, we'd have to suppose
that there was some reason why you couldn't copy your robot. Maybe its
architecture is biological or quantum-mechanical or in some other way
so intricate that there is in fact no practical way to do a coredump.
In this case you might compare the robot to a laptop computer whose
contents you haven't backed up, a laptop which, for whatever reason,
has no ports of any kind, no web access, no Ethernet, no floppy disks,
and so on. A valuable block of info that you can't copy.
To heighten the drama, suppose that your laptop holds your new
screenplay for a savagely tear-jerking movie about a pet robot who's
just like a real boy. You've put everything you've got into the
script, it expresses the very core youniqueness of you. In addition,
your laptop, which has a digital camera attached, has gigabytes of
irreplaceable photos of things you find fascinating. Your financial
records are on the laptop as well, your journal, the software you've
been working on, the music you've been composing, all the most
interesting products of your mind. A robot who's your collaborator
might be comparable to such a laptop.
Imagine your terror, your horror if you were now required to install a
new operating system on this laptop! OS X, say, or perhaps Windows XP
or a new Java virtual machine. Your dear robot friend, your
simulacrum, your other self doomed to be nibbled to death by cryptic
bogosity, to die the death of a thousand incompatabilit
< Unrecoverable context error. Have a nice day. >