If it’s your vacuum cleaner, it’s only a machine and you don’t think twice about it. But make the machine complicated enough, and next thing you know, people who are supposed to be sane, and maybe aren’t quite all there, start treating it like it’s one of the boys. Or one of the girls.
Saudi Arabia has made a robot a citizen. The UPI news report describes the glorified vacuum cleaner as “hot robot Sophia.” (https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2017/10/27/Saudi-Arabia-grants-citizenship-to-robot/5521509080746/) Hot? They’re kidding, right? And the article is peppered with the expression, “Sophia said.”
Can it be that there really are people out there who honestly don’t understand that even the best and most lifelike robot in the world can never be anything more than a simulation? And all this talk about “Artificial Intelligence”–uh, don’t they know what “artificial” means?
Crikey, we don’t even know what real intelligence is; so how are we supposed to produce it artificially?
But i think, judging by all this carrying-on over a robot–who, when all is said and done, is little more than a hi-tech souped-up ventriloquist’s dummy–we can say what it isn’t.