Do robots have feelings?

[Cody Carey]

I'll consider a robot to be living when it won't let me turn it off.

[KenWittlief]

Originally Posted by Cody C

I'll consider a robot to be living when it won't let me turn it off.

you mean like most PCs running windows 95? :^)

[Ashley Christine]

Once a robot can reproduce then it will be living. LOL.

[Mike]

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

1. generate their own fuel or find it

You stated the Roomba, no need for me to reiterate.

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

2. self repair

Hmm. I can't really think of a popular/in production robot that does this now, but I can't picture this being anything beyond a somewhat complex self-debugging system. What are the logical things you do when your finger is hurting you? Rest it. Splint it maybe. Ice it. Etc. The robot would be programmed to recognize a set of symptoms and treatments.

Originally Posted by Ashley Christine

Once a robot can reproduce then it will be living. LOL.

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

3. self replicate (with error detection and correction).

http://science.slashdot.org/hardware...tid=216&tid=14

The Guardian unlimited is reporting that Korean roboticist Kim Jong-Hwan, who founded the robot football (soccer) World Cup, and is the director of the ITRC-Intelligent Robot Research Centre, has developed a series of artificial chromosomes that, he says, will allow robots to feel lusty, and could eventually lead to them reproducing.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.../05/11/2242239

Scientists at Cornell University have created small robots that can build copies of themselves.

As far as "with error detection and correction", I'm not totally sure what you mean by that. What if this robot is programmed with a PID loop of sorts, and when it reproduces the PID is tweaked because it notices that it needs to move slower/etc.

Originally Posted by Cody C

I'll consider a robot to be living when it won't let me turn it off.

Well, instead of that big red switch on the robot, just directly connect the wires. Yes, you could just cut the wires, which are the lifeline of the robot, but you could also cut a living beings lifeline (blood vessels, windpipe, etc.)

As far as sparksandtabs post on adaptation... that is a tough one. Now, if I understand evolution correctly, animals naturally do not adapt to their environment. Instead, an animal is born with a genetic mutation that allows it to survive in a new area. This animal out-lives and out-reproduces all the other "normal" gened animals, eventually becoming the predominant gene type. So now this ties in with the topic of robotic reproduction. Going back to the PID example, would a robot with the better PID tuning not out-live the other robots, with an inferior tuning? This robot will recognize that it does not need to change that aspect of itself, and pass that aspect down to it's children. The children will then find an unsatisfactory aspect of it's programming, fix it and pass it down to their children, so on and so forth.

This post may be confusing and unorganized, but it's hard to organize thoughts like this

[KenWittlief]

Our DNA contains duplicate (redundant) information, which allows reproduction to take place with error detection and correction.

An engineering equivalent is flight control systems, which have 3 or 4 copies of each unit, that constantly cross check each other. If one is found to be operating differently than the rest then it is locked out by the others. Thats error detection.

Error correction (fixing the failed component in real time) would be a little more complex. Our bodies fix themselves without our conscious involvement or awareness. Our blood clots to stop leaks, then our skin, muscle and bones repair themselves from the basic elements present in our blood (from the food we have eaten).

A robotic equivalent would be a fluid that contains iron, aluminum, copper, semiconductors... and nanotechnology that is able to detect when part of the robot has failed or been damaged, and pulls the needed molecules from that fluid, and rebuilds the damaged component molecule by molecule.

Thats the kind of self repair you would need to approach robotic life.

[greencactus3]

well theres those new plastics with "self repair". sumthing about catalysts in them. i forgot

[sciencenerd]

[a little off topic] A very cool program that replicates selection in a population is gene pool. I let it run a few days once, and the swimbots that came out were amazingly well developed.

[lukevanoort]

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

Our DNA contains duplicate (redundant) information, which allows reproduction to take place with error detection and correction.

An engineering equivalent is flight control systems, which have 3 or 4 copies of each unit, that constantly cross check each other. If one is found to be operating differently than the rest then it is locked out by the others. Thats error detection.

A lot of our DNA also contains garbage from previous ancestors that wasn't "overwritten", just ignored. A programming equivalent would be commenting out a bunch of code, and when you decide not to use it, just leave it there and write more code.

[Saru29]

When a robot army comes marching in to force us into body pods put us ina virtual world and lets call this the matrix for some random reason and in the matrix some dude can dodge bullets comes and talks to the machines while being blind...Then i will believe robots are alive.