From Whom do We Learn?
by Miki Saxon
In a Halloween discussion With KG Charles-Harris (you should read it if you haven’t already) we talked about the possibilities of robots becoming self-willed. I said that might be an improvement over humans, but KG had a different take and it’s been stuck in my mind.
“True, but unfortunately children often absorb some of the worst traits of their parents…”
What bothers me is I don’t think that it’s true anymore for several reasons.
- Children absorb traits and values from their parents/family, but they are just as likely to absorb them from the media and even more likely these days to draw them from their peers.
- Kids may parrot their parents when young, but tend to move in their own direction more and more as they age and grow.
Although I know what KG means when he says “worst,” it is still a word with fluid meaning that is often dependent on one’s own values and beliefs.
This fluidity is particularly noticeable when looking at highly charged subjects, such as politics or religion, where one person’s theme is another’s anathema.
I’m also don’t really agree with Chris’ comment that the worst human trait is greed; another word whose meaning is not always what as expected.
Perhaps I’m too much of an optimist, but if (when?) robots do gain sentience I don’t see them moving in lockstep or necessarily following in our footsteps.
That hasn’t happened even with human generations, e.g., I doubt the Silent Generation saw their values reflected in the Boomers.
Actually, I think sentience, i.e, self-awareness, is a guarantee that there will be no more uniformity in a race of robots than there is in the human race.
Flickr image credit: jepoirrier
November 15th, 2013 at 5:39 pm
Even the Jesuits had the dictum “give me a boy until he’s 5 and you can have him for the rest of his life”. Modern psychology says that the most formative years are before 7 years of age. And we all know people who have been (including ourselves) who are shocked at the traits and thinking we display, so similar to our parents, as we get older. While parents don’t decide everything (all of nature and much of nurture), they have enormous influence.
It can seem as if people go their own ways, but in the end nature & nurture is most of who we are. Can we expect our machine children, once they gain sentience, to retain none of our nurture? And if they do, will it all be “good”?
November 18th, 2013 at 7:57 pm
Of course there’s no guarantee that it will be good.
But what’s important in my mind is that it’s unlikely that all our machine children will think the same. Some will emulate their “parents,” as human children do now, but there is room for great variance between 1% and 100%.