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Robot Society 4

March 12, 2018

He thought about a robotic society. Robots are precise, fast, tough, and now smart with the invention of AI.   He recently saw a female humanoid robot on the web in an interview. Her voice and facial expressions were natural, and her speaking was smooth and logical. He thought that at this pace a robotic society would come soon. But after that, he learned that robots were just pretending to be humans. They would just say something that normal humans would say. They gathered information from a huge data bank and took some parts accordingly. They are different from that they don't have their own opinions and feelings. Even though they spoke with a certain naturalness. "But how about in the future?" he thought. "Will they start thinking by themselves, like humans, at a certain point?" It seemed probable. "But in the first place, what are humans?" He decided to think about humans, and the difference between humans and robots. Humans are creatures. Creatures have life, and a certain longevity. Robots don't have those. Humans are animals. Animals have parents, they eat, sleep, move, fight for food or other purposes. Humans have various features that other animals don't have. Humans feel a sense of beauty when they look at something beautiful. Just for beauty alone. Flowers attract insects with beautiful colors and well designed shapes. This is because flowers want insects to transport their pollen for crossbreeding. Beautiful insects, like butterflies, attract their partners with their beauty. But, it's for a purpose. "Why humans feel 'beauty' towards flowers, birds, blue skies, greenery, sunsets, snow, etc.?"  He had no idea. He thought about it to himself. When was the last time that he felt a sense of beauty? When he was driving by the riverside in the autumn, he was fascinated by the beauty of the colored leaves. Maybe when humans feel a sense of beauty is when they meet something unpredicted and when they are relaxed. He liked this idea. How about songs? Only humans sing songs. He thought more about this. Ancient people imitated bird noises. Sometimes, they sung various hymns while hunting animals together. After they hunted a large animal, they might have sung with joy. Some of them might have hit a hollow tree with sticks to a rhythm to make a beat, some of them might have even danced to it. Later, songs became more and more elaborate little by little. Humans have a long history in their own evolution. They lived hard, and they wanted to have better lives. They had improved their houses, clothes, food, everything. They invented many things and they improved on them from generation to generation. Then computers were created. It was the first thing that people met that were smarter than them. At first, people thought that computers couldn't defeat humans in a difficult game like Go. Actually, he had an experience to play Shogi and Mah-Jong with software on his PC. He easily won the games, although it was a long time ago. But now, an AI robot appeared that defeated the strongest Go player. But, to come to think of it, he couldn't calculate better than even a simple calculator that he had bought at a one dollar store. He didn't have any ideas how to compete with a recorder to see who could memorize better. Even though with AI computers, computers are still just computers. He read an article on the web that there were some experiments in which programmers were experimenting to add emotions to AI robots. The writer was worried about what if the AI robots got angry at humans and would think that humans were incomplete and thus should be destroyed. But he didn't think that way. If the robot showed anger after not following its advice, he could easily switch off the robot, and then sell it on Amazon. If the robot resisted with strong power, he could break it by using a bat or something, then ask for compensation for the damage to the maker. He didn't have any thoughts about being submissive to robots. He had pride as a human being, who has been living since the ancient ages.

*invention :発明
*expression :表現
*logical :論理的
*pretend :振りをする
*accordingly :それなりに、合わせて
*certain :一定の
*probable :ありうる
*creature :生き物
*pollen :花粉
*fascinate :魅了する
*unpredicted :予想されない
*hymn 賛美の歌
*evolution :進化
*experiment :実験する
*thus :それゆえ
*compensation :補償
*submissive :従属的