Future Robots
Towards a robotic science of human beings
1st Edition
Published on 26. June 2014
XII, 489 pages
978-90-272-7008-5 (ISBN)
Description
This book is for both robot builders and scientists who study human behaviour and human societies. Scientists do not only collect empirical data but they also formulate theories to explain the data. Theories of human behaviour and human societies are traditionally expressed in words but, today, with the advent of the computer they can also be expressed by constructing computer-based artefacts. If the artefacts do what human beings do, the theory/blueprint that has been used to construct the artefacts explains human behaviour and human societies. Since human beings are primarily bodies, the artefacts must be robots, and human robots must progressively reproduce all we know about human beings and their societies. And, although they are purely scientific tools, they can have one very important practical application: helping human beings to better understand the many difficult problems they face today and will face in the future - and, perhaps, to find solutions for these problems.
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Content
- Future Robots
- Editorial page
- Title page
- LCC data
- Dedication page
- Table of contents
- Preface
- 1. Robots as theories of behaviour
- 1. The problem with scientific theories of human beings
- 2. Theories as artefacts
- 3. Robots as practical applications and robots as science
- 4. One robot, many phenomena
- Body
- Brain
- Environment
- Behaviour as the product of historical processes
- Comparative robotics
- 5. Human, not humanoid, robots
- 6. This book
- Appendix
- 2. Robots that have motivations and emotions
- 1. The cognitive level and the motivational level of behaviour
- 2. Today's robots do not have motivations
- 3. Robots that have motivations
- 4. Robots that have emotions
- 5. Motivations, emotions, and covert attention
- 6. Internal robotics
- 7. Robots with a biological clock
- 8. The two halves of the mind
- 3. How robots acquire their behaviour
- 1. Why learning?
- 2. The neural network of robots that learn
- 3. The genetic predictability of the environment
- 4. Living in genetically predictable environments
- 5. Living in genetically unpredictable environments
- 6. Learning in the experimental laboratory
- 7. Imprinting and learning from one's mother
- 8. The influence of learning on learning
- 9. Learning with an evolved neural architecture
- 10. On the limits of the robots described in this Chapter
- 4. Robots that have language
- 1. The cognitive consequences of having language
- 2. Meaning as co-variation between sounds and nonlinguistic experiences
- 3. Classes of linguistic sounds
- 4. Language helps human beings to categorize their environment
- 5. The invention of language
- 6. Asymmetries between language production and language understanding
- 7. Robots that count and measure
- 8. On the limits of our robots that have language
- 5. Robots with a mental life
- 1. Mental life as the self-generation of sensory inputs
- 2. Mental images
- 3. Robots that predict
- 4. Predicting and anticipating
- 5. Evaluating the predicted consequences of one's actions
- 6. Freedom of the will
- 7. Predicted sensory inputs replace missing sensory input
- 8. Other consequences of the ability to predict
- 9. Talking to oneself
- 6. Social robots
- 1. There is no social robotics today
- 2. Living together
- 3. Why not live together
- 4. Socially damaging behaviours and how to contain them
- 5. Why live together: Groups as information centres
- 6. Living in small communities and living in large communities
- 7. The social environment is very different from the non-social environment
- 7. Robotic families
- 1. Genetic families and social families
- 2. Mothers and daughters
- 3. Grandmothers
- 4. Sisters
- 5. Males and females
- 6. Homes
- 7. Conclusions
- 8. Robots that learn from other robots and develop cultures and technologies
- 1. Learning from others
- 2. The cultural emergence of behaviours
- 3. Staying near to others in order to learn from them
- 4. Should adolescents learn from adults or from other adolescents?
- 5. The evolution of artefacts
- 6. Cultures
- 7. The diminishing role of space in cultural processes
- 8. Cultural globalization
- 9. The expansion of Indo-European languages
- 9. Robot that own things
- 1. External stores
- 2. Individual stores
- 3. Family stores
- 4. Central stores
- 10. Political robotics
- 1. Chief robots
- 2. Chiefs and leaders
- 3. No chiefs
- 4. Historical changes in human settlements in ancient Southern Etruria
- 11. Robotic economies
- 1. Goods
- 2. Value
- 3. Specialization and the exchange of goods
- 4. Merchant robots
- 5. The emergence of money
- 6. Money and the price of goods
- 7. Entrepreneur robots and worker robots
- 8. The increase in the number of things that are goods for human beings
- 12. Individually different robots and robots with pathologies
- 1. Current robotics ignores inter-individual differences
- 2. Fitness is not enough
- 3. Motivations as a source of inter-individual differences
- 4. Learning and inter-individual differences
- 5. Why construct robots that have pathologies?
- 6. Neurological pathologies and psychiatric pathologies
- 7. Prediction, diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy
- 13. Robots that have art, religion, philosophy, science, and history
- 1. Explaining this Chapter
- 2. Robots that have art
- 3. Robots that have religion
- 4. Doing metaphysics with robots
- 5. Robots that do science
- 6. Robots that have history
- 14. Human robots are future robots
- 1. A new science of human beings and its problems
- 2. What has still to be done
- 15. How human robots can be useful to human beings
- 1. Human robots should be practically useful to human beings
- 2. Robots make it possible for human beings to know themselves without being influenced
- 3. Robots can help human beings to identify possible conflicts between biology and culture
- 4. Robots can help human beings to understand the impact of science on their life
- 5. Robotic societies as tools for voters
- 6. Difficult Problems
- References and additional readings
- Living in a "natural" environment
- The embodied and action-based nature of knowledge
- Evolution and learning
- Development
- Motivations and emotions
- Language
- The influence of language on the representation of the world in the human mind
- Mental life
- Sociality
- Families
- Culture
- Economic and political life
- Index
