There is some concern that robots will take on human features and take over our lives. But what if humans will take on robot features that will take over our lives?
To sharpen the point, we are not talking about robots as human-likes, but the other way around: humans who have been “enroboted” .
This echoes the use of the word “enslaved” instead of “slave” which would needlessly be a dehumanizing word to describe a person who was in bondage. A counterargument to the use of “enslaved person” for “slave” is that stressing the humanity of African Americans who were in bondage “implies a degree of autonomy that was simply never there,”
With this analogy in mind, we redefine our thinking task as ”What If humans are being enroboted? “
This aside from the question of whether there really exist robots that are indistinguishable from humans, so-called humanoid robots.
What are humans, what are robots, what are hybrids
Some questions immediately arise:
- What does it mean to be a human?
- What makes us human?
- What is the difference between a human and a robot?
- What is the difference between a robot and a human?
- What is an ”enroboted” human?
- What about biases in human, enrobetd humans and robots?
- Are relations between humans the same as relations between robots?
- What is the difference between relations between humans and relations between humans and robots and vice verse?
- When will a “technology-enhanced human” stop being human and be characterized as a robot? Will she become a mulatto? Will he be discriminated by the real robots and the not yet modified humans?
How can we recognize enroboted humans?
Slavery existed long before it was abolished because of its dehumanizing consequences. It has been a long time accepted as completely normal and social and ethically acceptable. Again by analogy, it is conceivable that there are already large numbers of enroboted people living, and that we find this completely normal, ethically unquestioned, socially fully accepted.
If so, we should be able to observe some phenomena of robotized humans. Again, a few pressing questions arise seemingly naturally:
- What kind of observable behavior might indicate robotized ?
- In which situations do we see the dehumanizing effects of actions by possible enroboted humans?
- In what way does this behavior differ from real robots or machines and algorithms?
- Do robotized humans inherit behavior from real robots, inclusive their built-in biases?
- Or is it more correct to say that copying robot behavior by humans is making them robotized.
- In what situations does that manifest itself?
What causes enroboted humans?
- How does it happen: “robotizing humans”
- Where does it happen?
- Who does it happen?
- Under what circumstances does human robotizing occur?
- Which factors promote this?
- Is robotizing of humans inevitable and a normal human phenomena?
- Is the robotization of humans a normal human development, triggered by the advent of modern times?
Next Steps
1. For each of the following categories, add at least three questions under each heading…
– What are humans, what are robots, what are hybrids
– How can we recognize enroboted humans?
– What causes enroboted humans?
2. Then, looking at all the questions under all the headings, both the original ones and the ones you added and select two most exotic and interesting ones.
3. Answer these two questions.
