Week 4 reflection
I think the comparison between robots and human beings is really an interesting topic. The advancements in Artificial Intelligence can make robots interact and move exactly like humans. They can play games, identify objects, recognize the emotions from voice and facial expressions and so much more. But the main thing that robots will lack is the ability to feel pain. We understand other human beings, because we have been through similar experiences and hence we can imagine what they are going through. We can feed a robot with what we can call a painful experience but that will be exactly like hearing a story. We can’t understand the pain unless we experience it. So, the robots will be merely actors, copying human behaviour. They can be exactly like humans but not humans.
Robots are designed to be intelligent and logical like humans. But there’s so much more in the experience of being human. We are intuitive and sensitive. The most important thing about us is our ability to get involved in the world, and developing skills for acting in those worlds. We learn through our own experiences. Machine learning does employ learning through mistakes but it still has to be monitored to realize that it was a mistake. So robots cannot intuitively judge things. Robots can follow a rule book. But humans can read between the lines, take risks and do things, rules don’t tell you to do. Like Bert Dreyfus says, there are an infinite number of facts in just one room and all these parameters directly or indirectly affect us. How many of these parameters can be fed to the robots? I wonder if the invention of robots will make us think what we are and define bare minimum requirements to be a human. I also wonder, how will the division of work be between humans and robots.
I could also resonate with the metaphor of radio tuning. As the radio can be tuned to different frequencies to play different music, similarly we can also get in the right mood to get tuned with the right kind of world. Happiness tunes us into features of the world that we weren’t paying attention to. And I have practically experienced this. I go on walks to a nearby hill and when I am in a tense mood, all I can notice is trees on the path. But when in a relaxed mindset, I can see a variety of birds, hear different sounds, see flowers and appreciate the sunset. We focus on things according to our moods and emotions at that point. Skills make a person see different things that other people don’t see. My mother being an experienced artist can easily understand textures and minute differences in colors. And on the other hand, my father being an engineer can identify even the difference of 1 millimeter between structures, which is very difficult for ordinary people to understand. Also, one of my acquaintances is a gym trainer and a yoga master. With years of practice he can control his muscles fully as well as control parts of a single muscle. He can also easily point out the mistakes in one’s posture.
The struggle to balance individualism and social conformism is something that we all face in our lives. Mindless conformism destroys our uniqueness and mindless individualism can make us difficult to stay within the society. We are conditioned by the world of customs and practices. An innovator changes the ways of the world without breaking the rules. They open up new possibilities which people have never thought of before.
As I have studied control systems I could relate to seeing the world through cybernetic ways. Feedback loops and error correction are implemented in all the intelligent systems to steer them in the right direction. It was interesting to see how it can be applied to different aspects of the world. Homeostasis is a way by which the error of high body temperature is corrected, biologically. While cooking we taste what we have prepared and we add salt or spices to steer the food taste to what we feel is perfect. Product designing is a goal oriented activity, where the multiple usability tests make sure that the product is user friendly and useful. Cybernetics make the ‘effect’ the ‘cause’ of it’s ‘cause’. Using different types of feedback we can manipulate the effect. If we trace back the causes of global warming, we find one of the root causes is human population explosion. If we want to reduce global warming, we should try to limit the human population and make sure it doesn’t grow further.
