Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

EMOTION WITHOUT BIOLOGY
beware the passionate robot 371
Norbert Wiener, whose book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication
in the Animal and the Machine introduced the term cybernetics in the sense
that is at the root of its modern usage, also wrote The Human Use of Human
Beings (Wiener 1950, 1961). I remember that a professor friend of my parents,
John Blatt, was shocked by the latter title; in his moral view, it was
improper for one human being to “use” another. I suspect that Wiener would
have agreed, while noting that modern society does indeed see humans using
others in many disturbing ways and, thus, much needs to be done to improve
the morality of human interactions. By contrast, robots and other
machines are programmed for specific uses. We must thus distinguish two
senses of autonomy relevant to our discussion but which often infect each
other.
When we talk of an “autonomous human,” the sense of autonomy
is that of a person becoming a member of a society and, while
working within certain constraints of that society and respecting
many or all of its moral conventions, finding his or her own
path in which work, play, personal relations, family, and so on
can be chosen and balanced in a way that grows out of the subject’s
experience rather than being imposed by others.
When we talk of an “autonomous machine,” the sense is of a machine
that has considerable control over its sensory inputs and
the ability to choose actions based on an adaptive set of criteria
rather than too rigidly predesigned a program. 5
On this account, a human slave is autonomous in the machine sense but
not in the human sense. Some researchers on autonomous machines seem
to speak as if such machines should be autonomous in the human sense.
However, when we use computers and robots, it is with pragmatic humanset
goals rather than “finding one’s own path in life” that we are truly concerned.
In computer science, much effort has been expended on showing
that programs meet their specifications without harmful side effects. Surely,
with robots, too, our concerns will be the same. What makes this more challenging
is that, in the future, the controllers for robots will reflect many
generations of machine learning and of tweaking by genetic algorithms and
be far removed from clean symbolic specifications. Yet, with all that, we as
humans will demand warranties that the robots we buy will perform as stated
by the supplier. It might be objected that “as adaptive robots learn new behaviors
and new contexts for them, it will be impossible for a supplier to
issue such a guarantee.” However, this will not be acceptable in the marketplace.
If, for example, one were to purchase a car that had adaptive circuitry