Читать книгу Designing Agentive Technology - Christopher Noessel - Страница 27

No. But holy processor do we love them. From Metropolis’ Maria to BB-8 and even GLaDOS, we just can’t stop talking and thinking about them in our narratives.

A main reason I think this is the case is because they’re easy to think about. We have lots of mental equipment for dealing with humans, and robots can be thought of as a metal-and-plastic human. So between the abstraction that is an agent, and the concrete thing that is a robot, it’s easy to conflate the two. But we shouldn’t.

Another reason is that robots promise—as do agents—“ethics-free” slave labor (please note the irony marks, and see Chapter 12 “Utopia, Dystopia, and Cat Videos” for plenty of ethical questions). In this line of thinking, agents work for us, like slaves, but we don’t have to concern ourselves about their subservience or even subjugation the same way we must consider a human, because the agents and robots are programmed to be of service. There is no suffering sentience there, no longing to be free. For example, if you told your Nest Thermostat to pursue its dreams, it should rightly reply that its dream is to keep you comfortable year round. Programming it for anything else might frustrate the user, and if it is a general artificial intelligence, be cruel to the agent.

Of course, robots will have software running them, which if they are to be useful, will be at times agentive. But while our expectations are that the robot’s agent stays in place, coupled as we are to a body, that’s not necessarily the case with an agent. For example, my health agent may reside on my phone for the most part, but tap into my bathroom scale when I step on it, parley with the menu when I’m at a restaurant, pop onto the crosstrainer at the gym, and jump to the doctor’s augmented reality system when I’m in her office. So while a robot may house agentive technology, and an agent may sometimes occupy a given robot, these two elements are not tightly coupled.