--- On Tue, 11/11/08, Colin Hales <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm inclined to agree - this will be an issue in the > future... if you have a robot helper and someone comes by > and beats it to "death" in front of your kids, who > have some kind of attachment to it...a relationship... then > "crime" (i) may be said to be the psychological > damage to the children. Crime (ii) is then the murder and > whatever one knows of suffering inflicted on the robot > helper. Ethicists are gonna have all manner of novelty to > play with.
Crime (i) is like when a child's favorite puppy is killed in from of them. Yet children that grow up on farms or around hunting regularly see animals killed and make the necessary emotional adjustment of not attributing consciousness to the victim. An important component of this adjustment is to not give the victim a name. In some African cultures with a high infant mortality rate, it is customary not to name babies until their first birthday. One may wonder if people would develop emotional attachments to machines, like that of the fictional Will Robinson to the robot on "Lost in Space", or the actual but weaker attachment of subjects to ELIZA. It is certainly possible. But history suggests we can make the reverse detachment no matter how closely the victims resemble the aggressors. Example include slavery, the Holocaust, Pol Pot, and genocides in Rwanda, Sudan, and eastern Congo. The basic traits responsible for this behavior are in all of us. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment Unlike crime (i) which can be experimentally measured, crime (ii) is a matter of opinion. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
