DQC Week 4 – Robots in our future?

Kahn et al.’s argument that robots will be the future of our society and be detrimental to childhood development was not very compelling to me. Though I agree that technological advancement has accelerated in recent years and we have become increasingly urban towards a “technological nature”, I do not agree that robots will have the capacity to replace “real life” animals and people in our everyday social lives. I am not convinced of Kahn’s hypothesis that children growing up will categorize social robots as a unified entity instead of a combinatorial set of its constituent properties. This ignores the impact of the child’s social environment, which includes a framework for what is human and what is not. Kahn used the color orange as an example of a new ontological category- that children see it as its own entity and not a combination of yellow and red. This is true only to an extent, because children do eventually learn this fact. I think the same holds for the social robot; even if they do see it as its own entity, they will eventually learn that it is a machine with “human” features engineered by humans.

Additionally, no matter how advanced these robots are, they are only able to engage and respond to children to a limited extent. The human brain is incredibly complex, and if we have not yet understood completely how it works, how are we able to create artificial intelligence that can emulate and replace living creatures?