From: Amara D. Angelica (amara@kurzweilai.net)
Date: Tue Aug 20 2002 - 03:17:15 MDT
http://www.kurzweilai.net/news/frame.html?main=news_single.html?id%3D1191
'Cute' robots could take over, warns ABC Nightline
ABC Nightline, August 19, 2002
With robots getting cuter, like MIT's Kismet and Sony's Aibo puppy, and
people playing less with real people and more with fake ones, "one day,
adorable robots could do us great harm and we are not ready," warned ABC
science correspondent Robert Krowlich on Nightline tonight, August 19.
"The people designing these little devices are very, very cunning and
exploiting psychology for all they're worth, with faces with winning grins
and eyes that they can bat at you," said New School For Social Research
psychology professor Nicholas Humphrey.
"It's increasingly difficult not to treat these machines as people. They
will have their own interests "independent of those that made them, and
there will be ways in which the robots will basically get us to do their
work for them ... by getting people to form relationships with them to love
them.
"If one day, they wish to do us harm, we will not be able to resist, because
if they assume the form of adorable bunnies or puppies or an adorable human
infant, we will embrace them."
"We will have to be very clever about how smart we allow them to be or they
will succeed humans as the next species running the earth," warned Stephen
Petranek, Editor in Chief of Discover magazine.
"We'll probably never see it coming," added Sim City game developer Will
Wright, whose cute Sim City and The Sims computer games have already become
highly addictive with some players.
However, artificial intelligence has been a tremendous failure, Petranek
claimed. "Robots are really stupid. We've been working on artificial
intelligence energetically for about 30 years and now you couldn't find ten
people in the world who are working on AI any more because nobody has been
able to get very close in trying to mimic the human brain."
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