Thread by @stilgherrian

Shortly I’ll be tweeting a bit from the @Sydney_Ideas event “Why should the perfect robot look and think just like a human? Rethinking human-machine relations” sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/s… I’ll try to thread all my tweets, but will also try to tag them #SydneyIdeas.

Decent crowd. #SydneyIdeas

Our MC (missed his name, sorry) is setting the scene by talking about ethics, safety, and whether robots really should be artificial humans and interchangeable with them, or something else. #SydneyIdeas

I assume he’s the boss of the University of Sydney Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems (SIRIS), where it event is. #SydneyIdeas

Minoru Asada, apart from the bio on the web page, is president of the robotics society in Japan [check name] and founder of the RoboCup competition. Great name. RoboCup 2019 is here in Sydney in about 3 weeks. Attn: @dobes @ashabeeeee. #SydneyIdeas

He is currently showing us the da Vinci android (2015) and it is creepy. huffpost.com/entry/this-rob… #SydneyIdeas

Minoru-san just said he has only 20 minutes and 50 slides, “So I’d better hurry up.” Yes. #SydneyIdeas

So yeah, 20 seconds per slide and they are very dense slides indeed. I’m trying to grab photos but this is insane. In a good way. #SydneyIdeas

Here’s four of the slides. #SydneyIdeas

Four more. I can’t possibly trim them in time. #SydneyIdeas

OK, there’s basically another 12 slides after them, and we’re not anywhere near the end of the first of the six topics. He is chuckling, we are laughing with him, and we are all appreciating that he’s delightfully mad. #SydneyIdeas

There was also much laughter when he showed us the research on artificial soft tissue and how to recreate the concept of pain by hitting the robot skin with an improvised club. #SydneyIdeas

He has a first edition of “I, Robot” because of course he does. #SydneyIdeas

Minoru-san has wrapped up quickly with the ideas of artificial moral machines (AMM) and his thoughts on how that relates to Asimov’s Three Laws. #SydneyIdeas

Raya A Jones has been speaking a while, at maybe half Minoru-san’s mind-frying pace. I won’t tweet much of her because I have absorbed SO much already. #SydneyIdeas

I was wondering when we’d get here. #SydneyIdeas

Empathy, eh? #SydneyIdeas

And this is where we are now. #SydneyIdeas

Jones ends by saying that you may agree with her, or disagree, or not care, but the fact that you can take a stance on this means you’re not a robot. #SydneyIdeas

Panel discussion time. #SydneyIdeas

MC: “Raya, how can your work [in the psychology of cognitive development] inform robot designers?”
Jones: [Laughs] “I’ve no idea.”
MC: “OK, next question.”
#SydneyIdeas

Do we actually want robots to make moral choices, asks Jones. We want and aged-care robot to have empathy, but maybe if it has too much moral understanding it might decide “I can’t be bothered taking care of this person”. I know how this robot feels. #SydneyIdeas

Jones cited the work of Kaspar with autistic children, but of course it’s not intelligent. abc.net.au/news/2018-06-0… #SydneyIdeas

In response to audience Q about us making robots in our own image being like God creating humans in His image, Jones reminds of the legend of the Golem. #SydneyIdeas

Maybe we just want to be able to control our companions, says Jones. #SydneyIdeas

Minoru-san says that God created humans, who are imperfect, and we create robots, which will be imperfect. His angle is clearly to indicate this is all very difficult and we’ll get things wrong, and he accepts this. #SydneyIdeas