Robots, Chimps and Us

I think that we can tolerate robots to a point. Robots who think and feel for themselves are threatening because we, as humans like to think of ourselves as the most superior beings we have ever interacted with. Robots embedded with laws like Asimov’s are still untrustworthy to us and for no reason. Logic tells us that robots who have these unbreakable laws will never commit murder. But since we know human capabilities to break any law ever created, which is the reason the law was created in the first place, assumptions are made to think that robots are capable of such lawlessness as well. Look at Baley clinging to his fleeting idea that, first Daneel is not a robot and second that he is capable of committing murder. What he does not realize is that the human and robot brain are different. “A human brain or any mammalian brain cannot be completely analyzed by any mathematical disciple now known. No response can therefore be counted upon as a certainty. The robot brain is completely analyzable, or it could not be constructed. We know exactly what the responses to given stimuli must be. No robot could truly falsify answers. The thing you call falsification just simply does not exist in the robots mental horizon” (Asimov pg 180). Because of our tendency to irrationalize behavior and forget these simple logical truths, we will forever fear, like Lije, robots who threaten our superiority. We will fear, to an even greater degree, those which threaten our exclusive existence as superior beings on this planet; human-like robots.
The closer the machine looks to a human the more we perceive and therefore react to them as humans. I believe now and in the near future when robots begin to get more sophisticated, our brains will have to adapt to notice subtle details that we cannot currently pick up on, to notice the distinction between humans and robots. An example would be the eyes. There are so many muscles on and around the eye that humans can notice and through that can perceive what that person is feeling. Humor is something that robots with logic engrained into them would have a hard time processing and even harder time attempting to create. Humor is based on sarcasm and human heuristics. Sarcasm is illogical and follows no set of codes. The robot would have to throw out his logic based mind and ‘think more like a person’ in order to have humor.
In human’s ever present attempt to relate and connect to things slightly resembling human form we go so far as to treat chimpanzees and gorillas as near human or humanlike people. In essence they are almost human. Which leads me to wonder what it is that makes us human? Sophisticated communication, capacity for love and hate, and a multitude of other advanced traits only humans seem to possess are some close guesses. The tendency to anthropomorphize is engrained in our perception because we see a bit of humanity in these lower primates. They can love and hate, they can communicate and even make tools to fulfill needs. It’s fascinating to watch gorillas form families and communities even. I can’t tell you how much I want a chimpanzee of my own, but then that would be unfair to my perception of their closeness to humanity if I kept him or her locked up in a cage!