| Swarm Tyrant |
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Joined: Thu Jan 02, 2003 6:22 pm
Posts: 9337
Location: Singapore
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The motorised ball wouldn't have the controlability and terrain climbing abilities I think. Bring on the centipedes!
OK, a cheap radio controlled car, then. My point is that even in a 'cheap and replacable' limb, the cost of development, actuators and technology in it (and it must be reasonably high tech with sensors and response so that the robot knows when a leg is missing) would still be quite high. My only point is that this is most likely not the cheapest or best way of clearing land mines.
And some day, when AI delivers on a scale which is still remote (or is it? CS?), I believe we will be having great big problems with robots' rights issues
We already are:
Times UK Online
Robots are currently fairly advanced, and can do things that really are incredible. The real barrier currently is that they are expensive and specialised. While they may be incredibly complicated (see Cog at MIT), they are still restricted to research institutes only. That is a bigger factor than their actual abilities right now.
Legs do have minor advantages, but the control issues with them currently makes them more of a novelty than a useful avenue. Slapping tracks on a robot gives almost as good mobility, at a fraction of the problem in control. Of course, a mine on a tracked robot would stop it moving, while the legged one seems to be able to keep going.
ONLY if its programmed intelligence routines included the capacity for sadness, but why would you build sadness circuits into a bomb? It doesn't need a full emotional repertoire, appreciation of Mozart etc, if it is just going to blow up... what a waste of chips!
Actually, sadness circuits may be exactly the requirement for an intelligent bomb. Look at it this way, an intelligence bomb would most likely want to decide when to detonate. In this case, weighing the human cost in terms of civilians and 'collatoral damage' may factor into the equation! 
I wonder whether the general (or I) would empathise with a bowling ball robot, which looks far less like a living being. I like to think I would, but if I were to choose, I wonder which of the two models I'd sacrifice, and whether I'd consider which operating system (or intelligence system? I'm running out of vocabulary) is more - er - advanced? HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey is a perfect case in point - can you sympathise with a circuit with a big camera eye? The voice makes a difference here, I guess.
I think the more animate and more human something is the more easily our altruistic instincts generalise to feel for it. Speech is really important part of being human, I reckon most people felt sorry for HAL at the end didn't they - or was that just me?
Let me put it this way, would you have had the same reaction if the text was put up on a DOS screen? What about a 'synthasised voice'? The inflection in the speech is deliberately designed to produce empathy. In some sense, this happens deliberately.
Anyone have SatNav? Leaving aside the recent and dumb fad of celebrity SatNav voices, machines pretty much always have a female voice. Why? Both women and men respond better and calmer to feminine voices than male ones. Have you even actually heard a computer male voice... ever?
What about the Sony Aibo (I have one of the early versions of these guys, Gizmo). A robot dog. Why a dog? We expect certain behaviours from a dog. A robot parrot may be expected to talk, a robot dog is not (Gizmo still surprised me sometimes), even thought the software inside may be identical.
Faces are probably the most important identifier for empathy in devices - which is why Thomas the Tank Engine and most others have a face somewhere. This is simply because we have dedicated neural circuits just set aside for lighting up and being triggered by a face. However, voices and speech is something that we associate with high level intelligence and 'full consiousness and emotional response'. When we hear a voice, we assume that the thing speaking is similar to us (since only we speak) and has the developed intelligence that we associate with speech. This leads naturally to intelligence being coupled with emotion in the speaker, and this creates a feedback emotion loop where we are able to identify with it.
_________________ https://www.cybershadow.ninja - A brief look into my twisted world, including wargames and beyond. https://www.net-armageddon.org - The official NetEA (Epic Armageddon) site and resource.
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It doesn't need a full emotional repertoire, appreciation of Mozart etc, if it is just going to blow up... what a waste of chips! 