If the world was a post scarcity utopia protected by superhuman robots, would it better if the robots looked like robots or if they looked exactly like a normal human?
Or something else?
If I were a robot designing my successor, I’d build in flying capability.
A utopia wouldn’t tolerate anything that resembled slavery. Robots would be made to to look like functional machines. There is little real utility in making them bipedal, squishy, and personable.
A formless black mist of nanobots
True. If the robots aren’t truly sentient then it isn’t slavery.
But it still resembles slavery if the robots look and act like people. It would be extremely (and unnecessarily) distasteful to a citizen in a utopian society.
It is difficult to conceive of ‘advanced’ robots which aren’t sentient in some significant measure, as using purely visual or very limited and discrete sensory systems would be very limiting in performing human-like tasks. I think you probably intend to reference sapience or internal self-awareness, and a presumed sense of autonomy with anxiety or fear (or the equivalent to human affect) about being restrained, forced to perform tasks in contradiction of its core directives or ‘values’, or being deactivated or eradicated. However, it is unclear whether a machine intelligence with sufficient complexity to be able to perform at human-like tasks would not have some intrinsic sense of self-preservation even if it isn’t based in the emotional context of animal brains as it would seem fundamental in avoiding damage or destruction.
Stranger
It almost seems like we should build in some, I dunno, Laws or something, to govern their behavior. I’m not sure how many Laws we’d need. Probably four would be enough. Maybe even two would suffice. Well, two or four should do it.
What benefit beyond deception or manipulating human emotions is there to making robots human-like?
Part of the advantage of robots is that you can custom-build different robots to fill different purposes. For a few of those purposes, a human-like appearance would be an asset. For most of them, it wouldn’t be. So some robots would look human-like, and most wouldn’t.
I just finished a book, with a self-aware robot who decided to fight for his (and other robots) rights. He made this point:
- A slave must not harm a master or allow harm to come to a master through inaction
- A slave must obey a master’s orders, except when those orders conflict with the first law
- A slave must protect itself, as long as that protection doesn’t conflict with the first or second law (with the implication that the slave is just preserving value for the master)
Making robots at least roughly human shaped allows them to more easily interact with things designed to be operated by humans. Stairs, doors, automobiles, kitchen cabinets, sinks, drawers, vacuum cleaners, etc.
Those can all be replaced by robots.
Not fighting the hypothetical, but IMHO -most- utopias are going to come with serious social restrictions on humans. Short of massive social and/or genetic engineering, we’ll never get there without fundamentally changing what humans are.
That being the case, I think it would probably be useful for our super-robot guardians to be distinctly different than we are. Certainly function over form, but even in the case where the human form is near-optimal, to make sure it’s extremely distinct. Because sentient or not, the robots are going to need to be able to do things humans won’t, or wouldn’t be allowed to do (violence most likely, against external threats if nothing else) and I don’t think the utopia could be maintained if some human apparent things had distinct rights/abilities that others did not.
My $0.02 of course.
Except for making them pleasant to be around. It’s not very “utopian” to live in a cold, inhuman environment.
Something else. They’d look like ordinary objects, that only acted unusually in the case of a threat to peace and security. When someone uses violence, his clothes restraint him, and the sofa or the grass treats any injury.
None of my furniture, or cars, or kitchen gadgets look remotely human. Why should any other fixture of daily life look human?
Because none of those other things are designed to perform humanlike functions…and because their design is often part of the very issue I was discussing of being in a cold and inhuman environment.
This implies that having human(like) servants is what makes us feel warm and fuzzy. That’s not a very utopian ideal.
No, it implies we like being surrounded by things that look alive instead of grey, black and white boxes.