Are Sex Robots And Self-Driving Cars Ethical? - Sven Nyholm | Modern Wisdom Podcast 287

The main issue that people worry about so far is that sex robots will inspire people to have strongly objectifying attitudes towards sex partners, to sort of make their empathy go away, because there's literally no mind or subjectivity there on the other side for you to be sensitive to. And so one worry would be that one keeps interacting with this robot and then stops caring about the feelings of the other, uh, whether they consent to what you're doing, and then that you would carry over that behavior to a human.

Why is the relationship between humans and robots interesting?

Oh, okay. Um, (laughs) well, uh, it's interesting for a bunch of different reasons. I mean, one reason is that people are, in a certain sense, not well prepared to re- deal with or respond to robots because, uh, our brains, our psychology, uh, developed before we had any robots, before we had any AI. Uh, I mean, it developed during human evolution for hundreds of thousands of years, and then suddenly we have this enormous jump in technolo- logical development and now we have, we have robots, we have AI, we have all sorts of, uh, interesting technology and, but we're responding to it with the brains, the human psychology that developed during this long time. So, that sometimes means that we respond to things that look or act like humans, which some robots do, sometimes in humorous ways, sometimes in ways that might be dangerous for us, uh, but very often in fascinating ways. And so that's, that's one good reason, I think, to, to th- think about the relationship between humans and robots.

So, our current mental makeup is unsuited to interacting with robots. That's the basic sort of foundation?

Yeah, I mean, so we're basically primed to, uh, anything that moves seemingly on its own accord, uh, in a s- apparently intelligent way, uh, our brains will think, "Okay, this is a, this is some sort of agent. Uh, it's an animal, it's a person," and, uh, our s- sort of human social attitudes are triggered. I mean, this can happen at the same time as we're thinking to ourselves, "You know, it's just a robot. It's just a machine. Doesn't have any feelings, uh, doesn't like me or dislike me." But nevertheless, emotionally, we respond to the entity as if it's, you know, another person. I mean, it, not all, all of the time, but, uh, uh, I mean, the interesting thing is that this is not just true of, uh, laypeople, but also experts. They talk about robots as if they have a mind, as if they have desires, beliefs, um, people will say about a self-driving car, for example, I- I- I'm thinking of a self-driving car as a kind of robot, that it wants to go left or right. It has to decide what to do. Um, so we have this tendency to, uh, anthropomorphize, as people say, I mean, so attribute human-like qualities to robots, to technologies. Uh-