Domo Arigato Fearful Roboto

Here it is the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and one day before the inauguration of Barack Obama and what’s on my mind?  Robots.  Ok, not robots per se, but machines that have been given nascent human qualities.  Daniel Roth’s essay in this month’s Wired asks a stunning question– As machines become more like us, should they be given human rights?

I know that given the current state of humanity, worrying about “lifeless” hunks of metal seems like a luxury; but Roth has picked up on something.  He details the “plight” of the TMX Elmo doll.  Fisher-Price goes out and makes a cute little doll that reacts to outside stimuli, it moves, it shivers, it goes through a range of programmed “emotions”.  Well no sooner do they put out this little tech wonder, then the sadists come out of the woodwork and begin to torture the dolls–  because the technology reacts; its like that freak down the street when you were a kid who used to get his kicks hurting animals.

Roth echoes my own uneasiness:

Slamming my refrigerator door never leaves me feeling guilty. Yet give something a couple of eyes and the hint of lifelike abilities and suddenly some ancient region of my brain starts firing off empathy signals. And I don’t even like Elmo. How are kids who grow up with robots as companions going to handle this?

Its the kids that worry me.   Kids are screwed up now as it is, because everybody is special and a winner.  They don’t have afterschool TV specials anymore. They’re desensitized to violence.  Some parents are loath to take responsibility for their kids’ actions.  Mom and Dad can’t put their Blackberries down long enough to see that little Timmy has a mean streak not A.D.D., he watches snuff films online, he enjoys Grand Theft Auto on his X-Box 360 way too much, he likes to beat up the other kids at school– and he’s only eight years old.   Its the hundreds of homegrown little Timmys, the Eric Harrises and Dylan Klebolds in this country that scare me, not Al Qaeda.

So what do we do with prepubescent and grown up sadists now that there are more increasingly life-like “objects” out there for them to torture?  Roth nails it again:

This question is starting to get debated by robot designers and toymakers. With advanced robotics becoming cheaper and more commonplace, the challenge isn’t how we learn to accept robots—but whether we should care when they’re mistreated. And if we start caring about robot ethics, might we then go one insane step further and grant them rights?

I don’t have any answers.  I guess– pray for more attentive people to procreate, like the Goths.  I’m just a television executive feeding this absurd frenzy of carefree violence in our culture.   If we look to science fiction we know this ends badly, because  in the not to distant future the machines go Howard Beale and Bruce Banner on us… see Terminator, Battlestar Galactica, et al. for the end result of machine uprisings.