What Are Little Robots Made of?

I anthropomorphise my stuff.

I talk to my car, a 10 year old Nissan Sentra named "Melanie."  She's named after Melanie Griffith, has a bitchy temper, and very badly wants us to trade her in for a Toyota Highlander Hybrid SUV when winter ends. These are elements the entire family agrees on, not just me. So if I'm nuts, my wife, sister, brother-in law, and niece and nephew are all on the same page of the DSM-IV-R.

I talk to my computer at work, and the laptop at home. I talk to them a lot.  Good things, usually; exhortations to run apps just a little faster, asking them what the trouble is while I go about my attempts to diagnose anything that seems out of order, that sort of thing. When I was a kid, I was pretty sure that these weird  metal and plastic boxes that could follow clever and precise instructions were not actually alive--pretty sure--and I'm still confident about that. But there are times when I wonder.

I also wonder about the people who invented Roxxxy the Sexbot, and the folks who comprise the market that "she" is intended for. I know that given the mental states of those who invent--born tinkerers the lot of them--combined with the pressures of the marketplace and the allure a sexbot would have on the desperate or kinked, that this sort of thing was inevitable.

I'm not going to criticize these people because I'm never positive that I don't share their peculiar ailment (if that's what it is, and not just a wacky coping mechanism.) We've been waiting for robot butlers and servants for a couple of generations now, and items like the Roomba, while cool, just don't stand up to those high expectations.

Roxxxy doesn't squick me particularly because she seems pretty limited in what she can do--she's basically a sex doll with an iPod grafted into her head. A complicated and expensive sex toy is one thing, but a humanoid machine that acts in a truly life-like manner is something quite different. We're very unlikely to see that for a lousy $9,000.

What does squick me is the fact that Roxxxy's inventor seems intent on selling her as a replacement for a human being. I understand that you need to market your product in a way that has a hope in hell of selling it, but might not a better market be individuals with with money to burn and a penchant for weird sex toys? And I know the object is to sell the  sizzle, not the steak, but in this case I think a tiny bit more honesty is called for: market the 'bot for what she is, not for what you think some impossibly lonely guy might be willing to pay to get some.

My heebie-jeebies go beyond that because intelligence--even pseudo-intelligent or purposeful action that suggests a self-programming ability--is not didactic. It's an emergent property of a extremely complex system of neurons. You can't sit down and write a program for self-learning. The closest non-laboratory based research to it I have found is Steve Grand's baby orangutan, Lucy. After years of work and experimentation, Grand got Lucy "smart" enough for her to observe a scene before her and raise her arm to point at a banana. That's already smarter than Roxxxy--although if the sexbot can actually point to a particularly small penis and laugh, then I will happily change my opinion.

And while I'm good with machines I'm nowhere near smart enough to even imagine the intricacies constructing an actual thinking mechanism would require, but I have learned one thing in particular about the machines that run most of our lives at one level or another: they are extremely complex systems. One characteristic of ECS's which I have observed is that they're prone to moods. They have good days and bad days. They respond to different people in distinct ways. They are not alive but they can seem damned life-like at times.

What I have decided over the years is this: I'm sure that none of these creations are alive in any meaningful sense: to me, calling a mechanism alive means assigning it the capacity to be a person rather than a mere device. It needs to respond to appropriate social context, it needs to have a sense of humor and/or horror, and it needs to be able to learn from past experience. If all these tests are met, I'll make the leap and call it a person rather than a thing.

Until then, let's call Roxxxy a pricey sex toy and leave it at that.