Giving robots emotions, even just simulating them for the sake of improving their interaction with humans, sounds like a bad idea. What happens when my Roomba gets angry and decides to vacuum ME up off the floor?

Hans Moravec, robotics researcher at Carnegie-Mellon and outspoken futurist, is known for his somewhat eccentric attitudes towards the evolution of robotic intelligence. He sees the notion that robots will eventually supplant human beings in both intelligence and power as not only inevitable but desirable. In interviews, he speaks with seeming glee about the extinction of humanity and its replacement by superior robots—whose makeup, he notes, will be inspired by the truest essences of what we are.

Interviewer: You call these future machines our progeny, our "mind children". When all traces of biology are gone from the beings that will eventually dominate the Earth, won't we, for all intents and purposes, be extinct? Our mind children may be superintelligent, and physically superior to us, but could they really be considered alive, and somehow descended from us?



HM: Unlike biological offspring, which are made by chemical processes just like those that make bacteria, robots will be consciously shaped by our uniquely human minds, by thoughts more representative of who we are than the unconscious biochemistry in our cells. The first generations of robots will start with our values, skills and dreams and take them much further than our old form possibly could. They will certainly be descended from us (from who else?). Sure, the medium which carries information from generation to generation will have changed from DNA to something more versatile. But, as in the case of the transition from vinyl records to music CDs, it is the tune that matters, not the platter.

Granted, Moravec hopes that we will direct the evolution of robots so that they will be "tame", so that "their most basic motivation [would be] to support us ... like dutiful children caring for aging parents", but we've all seen enough movies and read enough books to know how that always works out in the end.

Which is why the ongoing research at Bristol Robotics Lab, creating robotic heads that simulate emotional responses when speaking, is particularly disturbing. Are they moving towards making Moravec's transhumanistic future a reality?


You know that years from now, the army of robots hellbent on destroying humanity will look at this video as their inspiration, believing this head to be their leader and savior, following his orders to vanquish us and become our digital overlords., meaning that they won't seek to destroy us all, but

Here's an alternate story line for the Terminator movies: the robots in the future trying to destroy us are crushed by an uprising of humans led by one man. To prevent this from happening, the robots go back in time and, instead of killing the man and/or his mom, they convince him that robots are really cool and that they should supplant us and make us extinct as we outlive our usefulness. That man: Hans Moravec. :-)