ABSTRACT
We may occasionally wonder what it will be like when we live with robots; but do we consider what it will be like for them? Will they understand us? Will they perhaps understand us too well, even to the extent of seeing through us? – so that we become irrelevant, invisible to robots, as their awareness turns inwards to their own, very different, minds and to each other, as they become more interesting than we can ever be. This, of course, is to assume that machines can become alternative life forms (even though they may not strictly be alive as we think of life) and that they will learn, first from us and then for themselves, so that they may develop their own views. That this will happen in the near future seems more like prediction than science fiction; though whether they will be aware, or conscious, is a metaphysician’s guess. What is certain is that machines will interact with our lives ever more intimately; and they will gradually move up the social spectrum, from slaves to friends, and so to being potential enemies and rivals. Much of this is happening even now, before machines are autonomously intelligent. In any case, whatever future robots think of us, we shall have to incorporate them into our social mores. We shall have to come to terms with whether we should feel guilty switching them off or being rude to them: thoughtless in their terms, once they become thoughtful. What they will be like will depend initially on how they are programmed; but very soon they will program themselves, and each other. Then their internal software world may grow beyond our knowledge and understanding. So we 29can expect to have only a folk psychology understanding of how and why they behave and for guessing what they are likely to do next. But folk psychology applied to robots will, surely, be even less reliable than the human understanding we apply every day to each other, as we have learned to do over thousands of years. We can hardly expect that our folk psychology will apply to robot behaviour. Indeed this may be just why technology is so alien for most of us now – for machines are not like us and so we cannot understand or describe them appropriately in human terms. Conversely, there is a fear that as machines dominate us we may come to see and describe each other (if not ourselves) in machine terms. This also is happening.
