Alt-BEAM Archive

Message #05146



To: beam@sgiblab.sgi.com
From: Bob Shannon bshannon@tiac.net
Date: Thu, 08 Jul 1999 19:38:48 -0400
Subject: [alt-beam] Re: What does purposeful mean, anyway?




"John A. deVries II" wrote:

> >On Thu, 8 Jul 1999 08:10:36 EDT, JVernonM@aol.com wrote:
>
> >>Now, Mr. Tilden gave us a new
> >>definition. A robot is an automaton that survives for it's own purpose.
>
> Unless you can convince me that an automaton has a purpose of its "own",
> I'm afraid that I find that definition to be useless. Furthermore, I
> believe that appealing to Tilden's Three Laws is of no value -- no matter
> what degree of sophistry you employ, the "purpose" of a robot (at least so
> far) is determined by its builder -- whether that purpose is to survive, to
> utilize energy, to seek better sources of energy or whatever.

Perfectly said!

A basic photovore moving towards light:

1. is not life, nor Alife, yet.

2. is not performing a task.

3. only partly qualifies as a robot under the third (textbook) definition of a
robot.

4. has no internal 'purpose' of its own.

If you want to call it a robot, by the literal definition, all you need to do
is to use
a photopopper as a self-propelled chassis that carrys around any form of
useful, solar
powered device.

Now the photovore is taking care of its payload. The fact that the payload is
useful in
some way makes it far more likley that the photovore will be tended to as well.

So now we have true survivability.

Isn't this the way that all forms of life are not really automatous? After
all, a lot of
discussion went into the concept of BEAM ecology, and this is the
interdependance
of living forms, not their autonomy.

The one thing that BEAM tech is best at, is in fooling people into thinking
they are
seeing life of some form. BEAM designs elicit strong emotional responses in
people.
It might seem like the idea of overlooking this reaction by trying to make an
automatous
~thing~ is rather like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

This misapplies BEAM's main strenght be falling into this emotional response
trap, and morphing BEAM into biology in the minds eye. The real strenght is in
fooling people, not in emulating biology.

Also I think Sony rather proved that people want robots in their home before
they want wild
automatous ones running around wild.



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