Robots with "soul" | Guy Hoffman 

Haha, must be ironical

Miles tails Prower All it needs is a blue ring around its eye and it'll turn into Wheatley, or a yellow eye and it'll be GLaDOS! Not that I'd expect them to take over or anything and try to kill me with mashy-spike plates or deadly neurotoxin.... Ahem, what were we talking about again?

***** SPAAACE!!

Me.

MrJJandJim me

Who did not

Sleazysadpanda awww

Nah, don't worry, looks more like Wheatley.

galdos? never heard of her

NEVER!!!! GLADOS IS LOGIC!

facebook.com/FastAndFuriousTeam0fficial

LMAO~~~~~~ :DD

***** your comment was amazing sir. Exactly what I was thinking. You is just a clever construct thought up by a very powerful combination of software and hardware (the mind and the brain). Saying that they're just acting is saying that you're only willing to accept human intelligence as intelligence, which is the wrong way to see it in my opinion. Robots may think differently, but when the results are equally or far more powerful in some cases you can't say it's not intelligence just because it's not the way you and I do it.

***** Yep! Actually what you said about it not being seen as 'real intelligence' no matter how good it is, is something I actually brought up in a Artificial Intelligence presentation I conducted a few months back. Yes, it isn't human intelligence, because technically to be authentic it must do the same thing, but also be produced the same way, but the same isn't true for intelligence as a whole, just because we're the only creature we know of that is intelligent to our level, doesn't mean we are the best at intelligence. It fact evolution will have only made us as intelligent as necessary, because beyond the point that our species had to compete, the evolutionary pressures were lifted so evolution slows down, because you don't need higher intelligence than your peers to survive and breed anymore, so we are most likely, as the theory of how far computational power can go by the laws of physics, a far way off what is really possible in intelligence. Its great that we have the sufficient intelligence to create the tools necessary to bridge the gap to a higher level of intelligence.

Morgan Collins ***** I hope you can devote a few minutes of your life to my words, for as many as they can be, to answer to your previous comments. Morgan, I can see your point in your first comment and I can totally agree with you. Also, I looked up split-brain, and I found amazing what results the damage of the corpus callosum can lead to, that really makes us question the way our brain and consciousness work. Despite the fact that what you said was completely right, I was stating another concept rather that “we humans don’t act”, what I was saying is that these robots in the video are taught to act, they are programmed to do what they do and can respond only to a certain limited amount of inputs they receive. You could argue we are taught to act just as well, but while we do it we are Not just following predetermined paths unavoidable because written as lines of code, for the simple reason our mind (omitting every philosophical debate about its very nature) works differently from a computer, (just look up quantum mind or quantum cognition). With this I’m not discriminating what I consider to be or not intelligent (humans or robots) I’m just stating they work differently. It’s Stephen Hawking himself who once said “There is no physical law precluding particles from being organised in ways that perform even more advanced computations than the arrangements of particles in human brains”, pretty clear concise and indisputable. Talking about this point, Morgan, I’d love you not to refer to me as “this guy”, first of all; now, I have never said I believe I have a “soul”, I just quoted that particular word in my comment because it was used in the video. Also thank you for wishing me to get brain damage, very mature and useful to prove your point. John, I don’t know about robotics, but I can see my concept of “intelligence” doesn’t differs so much from yours and Morgan's. Now, cleared that, at the end of your first comment Morgan, you are supporting a theory that really closely reminds me of solipsism. This has nothing to do with acting, and that’s quite a “sly” theory, and you know that because it cannot be neither proven nor disproven. Because, you said it, we cannot know anything outside our own brain.

Matteo Alessandro I'm not sure who you're referring to when you said someone wished brain damage on you, but I can ensure you if it was me I apologise if I caused offence but this would not have been my intention. Now, to your point, I agree with you, other than there is no such things as 'acting' as far as I'm concerned. Is our brain just using neurons to act intelligent, or are we actually intelligent? In that question I suppose you could argue for both parts but I would just argue that the argument is completely pointless from the very beginning. Who cares what you class as intelligence, that isn't science it is just philosophy, and let's face it, a lot of philosophical questions although interesting make little difference to the world of technology, it doesn't bring about much progress and isn't my interest, although don't let that make you think I'm against philosophy, because I'm not, I would just argue in the scientific stand point of what conciousness really is and if true strong AI is possible, the philosophy isn't really relevant. The brain does work differently from a computer, but it is unravelling there are many similarities, we are all just computing systems, and whether our brain uses the same system as our robots do, what does it matter? The brain isn't the definition of what intelligence is as I'm sure you know, so whether a computer acts differently or not means nothing to it's potential intelligence. To your point with robots just acting off of lines of code, you quickly anticipated my reply that we are also merely lines of code, but the intelligence arises from us having very sophisticated code and the ability for the brain to be rewired when new information is found to make a better structure, this is exactly what we do and exactly what the smarter AIs of today are doing, it's how intelligence thrives, in its most basic understanding. In this case the basic AI of a robot wouldn't be unavoidable, it could be rewritten, in the way we are 'programmed' to want to make babies but we do not have to give in to our instincts. Just because some programming is almost concrete doesn't mean there couldn't be a system where there isn't always a specific piece of code that must be run, a computer could decide what to do given it's past experiences and other pieces of information present, it could even derive information from experiences and create complete new ones using logic, and from this starts to arise a conciousness and personality. When you speak of quantum minds, I have heard of this before and although i'm not sure if this is quite true, if it is, we have quantum computers too, although i'm not sure if there is any evidence of quantum minds but by the evidence I have on the subject I am very sceptical of it, the things that are required for quantum minds is very complex, and I would argue that if this was the case our brains would also by much more powerful, although quantum computers are now kicking off so the idea that quantum minds means computer won't match us is irrelevant in that sense. I am a solipsist by the word I would suppose, because the idea is completely sound. I wouldn't say that it means it is really because you can't disprove it but you cannot argue that you can't disprove it, so essentially as far as I'm concern solipsism is undeniable, unless you have proof, which no-one does as far as I know. Although I'm not sure how you are relating that to this topic, because solipsism is not very important at all, as yes its unprovable but its extremely unlikely and it doesn't seem that way and the fact we can't prove it ever so there's no sense in taking time to worry about it, where as this sort of stuff, in a time of more and more AI more and more intelligent day by day is more important. In conclusion, all I was saying was judging by what the word intelligence means, what we know about the brain and the way this AI works, there is no sense in calling it acting, because they are both just complex data manipulators that work in different manners, both created in some fashion, one by a creator and one by evolution (as far as i'm concerned but let's not get into that debate) so the only reason to differentiate between the two is personal bias, because it would mean nothing to us if our brains worked differently but gave the same output, so yeah, it just seems to be completely irrelevant how something works, in the same way there is no right or wrong way to do a math equation given you always reach at the right answer 100% of the time, the only question is efficiency, and given that point, these computers have the potential to being far more efficient one day.

Morgan Collins All in all, I believe that I was a little bit too brief in my first comment (I probably had to differentiate the concepts of “intelligence” and “consciousness” and refer properly to them. Also your point on the usefulness of talking about philosophy and science is completely right, even though, as we have seen here, sometimes the two can hardly be separated), that’s where all the argument came from. I’m saying this because I couldn’t agree more with what you said, and I can clearly see you really put effort and time into answering me which is remarkable for a youtube comment. In fact the only thing I regret is that such an interesting debate couldn’t be led in person. Still, very educated, thoughtful and deep reply, I love meeting such smart individuals like you sir on the internet :)

Take Chances, Make Mistakes.. get MessY! - In the words of Miss Frizzle of the Magic School Bus--- I think these future robots did her proud- and hopefully will do that in the future.

Someone already did, only thing it was missing was the actual compactor.

When the entire population is as obese as it was in the movie, so, soon!

Always enjoyed learning about them. I have a prank done by a robot.

The dilemma of being human and not wanting to be around humans is that since you can't escape being around yourself, you wind up spending most of your time either trying to get away from yourself or else trying to reject your own humanity. These are futile actions, obviously, but that won't stop you from trying. The disadvantage of being around robots all the time is that you tend to think more and more like robots - or computers, or machines. If robots were made so as to act more and more like humans, then in our interaction with them, we would be less and less likely to become like machines and more and more likely to be like ourselves.

***** I would rather be a machine than a human. I'm disgusted by people.

As soon as I saw the musician robot's head, he instantly reminded me of Wheatley :D

#smh ... I hope she does not see this, and you start to appreciate who she is... or she is gone

Damn... These people above (and I'm soon below) me have no sense of humor huh? Gotta remember most of the people here are ultra geeks who cannot compute a joke via text. Gotta have their vocal/facial cues I suppose.

Veilside Shaman No, some people just have a slightly higher standard for comedy.

TheYellowWindow So you're telling me that if I came up to you in person and said (beep boop bop bope bope beep) you wouldn't laugh?

Veilside Shaman Pfff, hahaha!

You do realize the amount of funding that goes into this is massive, right? You really think that guy paid, out of his pocket, the tens of thousands of dollars used to physically produce the technology, software, and especially hardware that went into this? Imagine the current price for that Xylophone robot. How much would you expect to pay for these things? It's probably 100-1000 times that expensive to build just the first one.

***** What used to seperate robots from humans, is that a robot was reproducable in every aspect. As Hoffman says, chessplayers following strict rules. However, with more modern AI, the robots are able to build up their own INDIVIDUAL and UNIQUE experiences that they base their actions upon. In that sense they could be considered identical to humans, as they would become unique individuals that are not replacable. So it becomes a question of feelings. Are only things that can FEEL worth anything? And if so - aren't robots then identical to microorganisms or tiny insects perhaps? (on the assumption that there exists insetcs that don't feel).

Dag Jomar Mersland It is still all math...computer scientist use math to repeat patterns, even random patterns. It has no more soul than my cigarette smoke that is controled by my breath, the heat of room, and objects in the room. Show me making a moral decision, then I will question my own faith.

***** Do not forget that even you are just math... on the fundamental level we all could be simulated...