A Personal Pantagraph

How could we get it more wrong! Recently, I’ve been reading or rereading classic science fiction stories. And I ran into The Quest for Saint Aquin, a short story by Anthony Boucher that first appeared in 1951. Although not evident at first, the story has all to do with robots and how we will interact with them. I think it nailed many of the concepts, but it fails an interesting test.The story features a “robass,” some sort of motorized robot that transports the main character in his quest. What intrigues me most about the robass is its inherent contradiction. As a robot, it has problems expressing its feelings. Unable even to intonate a question properly, it resorts to adding punctuation marks to its speeh, as in “are you happy question mark.” However, that the robass is capable of actually having feelings is essential to the story!

This is almost a cliche in science fiction. Even HAL, with its monotonous voice, was wracked by emotions internally. So how is it that we are quite willing to accept feeling robots, just not emoting ones? In reality, it is far easier to pretend to have emotions than to actually have them.

Computer science research into projecting emotions is very far along. There are computer-generated faces that can display emotions. There are computer-generated voices that display emotions. Virtual boyfriends and girlfriends are just around the corner, and their prototypes are already here. Yet we are no closer today to writing software that actually feels love (or any other emotion, for that matter) than we were 50 years ago. Or are we?

We may never have machines that truly “feel.” I believe this, not because I think feeling is inherently intractable, but because I think our definition of feeling precludes mechanical implementations. Another science fiction story comes to mind. When a character in Watchmen worries that her husband pretends to care but no longer really cares, her friend and future lover answers, “If he’s still pretending, he still cares.” Pretense is reality.

If robots today (or soon) can pretend to care, pretend to have feelings, pretend to be human, who’s to say they don’t care, don’t have feelings, aren’t human? Would there be a difference?

This entry was posted on Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Computers, Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.