Look at the Humanoid Robot

If the humanoid robot is in the modern sense of the word a true character, how do you characterize its traits, or characteristics? A number of times we have taken a humanoid robot like ASIMO or NAO, taken a photo and tried to describe what we see. The first thing we get are all the things that the robot does not do. It cannot move independently; it cannot speak or use a mouse. So we try to describe it in terms of its limitations. In a video published by Google, the researchers say, “This robot is no more intelligent than a one year old child, but it is much better than a simple robot.”

Let’s take it a step further and take a very abstract question and say that this robot is no more intelligent than an adult human. What characteristics should we attribute it with? To say it is no more intelligent than an adult human seems to be a fair question. It has two characteristics that most human beings have; one is being able to learn, and the second is empathy. This definition is much more amenable to real life. If this were an autonomous robot, it might be slightly more intelligent than a human in an abstract sense, but the task it would be doing and the tasks it would need to learn would be much more abstract. Let’s say it is an autonomously learning robot, if it does not have this abstract knowledge of empathy, it won’t be capable of understanding when someone is sad.

It seems very clear that the definition of intelligence that is relevant to the task at hand is some kind of abstract knowledge.

The researcher first assumed that the robot is better than a one-year-old child. But maybe it’s actually worse than that. You can test this assumption by looking at the amount of progress the robot is making. But if you have a goal, a hypothesis, a goal to which you are trying to put in action, then that is a much more difficult task. A robot with similar capabilities to the one that has been developed in the last decade is perhaps much better than this goal-driven robot. It has more symbolic understanding, whereas it does not have any intent or goal. It’s not doing anything in particular. It does not have a simple goal like “maintain the water level.”