Human, Not Humanoid, Robots

Abstract

Robots that resemble human beings can be useful artefacts (humanoid robots) or they can be a new way of expressing scientific theories about human beings and human societies (human robots), and while humanoid robots must necessarily be physically realized, human robots may be just simulated in a computer. If the simulated robots do everything that human beings do, the theory which has been used to construct the robots explains human behaviour and human societies. This chapter is dedicated to human robots and it describes a number of individual and social human phenomena that have already been replicated by constructing simulated human robots and simulated robotic societies. At the end of the chapter, we briefly discuss some of the problems that human robots will pose to human beings.Keywords: human robots, humanoid robots, science, technology Human robots as a new science of human beings"Robot" is an ambiguous word. It has two different meanings. Robots can be physical artefacts with practical applications and economic value or they can be a new science of human beings. For robots as practical artefacts, success is that there are people who are disposed to spend their money to buy them. For robots as science, success is to construct robots that do everything that human beings do, because only if scientists are able to construct robots that do everything that human beings do, they will finally understand human beings. Since practically useful artefacts that look like human beings and do some of the things that human beings do are called "humanoid" robots, to make the distinction explicit, we will call robots as science "human" robots. In this chapter, we will be concerned with human, not humanoid, robots.While humanoid robots necessarily are physical robots, human robots may be just simulated in a computer. In fact, human robots are based on the general assumption that the best way © 2017 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.for science to understand X is to simulate X in a computer. If, when the simulation runs in the computer, its results correspond to what scientists empirically know about X, they are entitled to conclude that the theory incorporated in the computer program captures the mechanisms and processes which underlie X and, therefore, it explains X. Computers can be useful to science in many other ways but they are a true scientific revolution if they are used to express scientific theories in a novel way. So far, scientific theories have been expressed using mathematical symbols or using words. Physicists express their theories using mathematical symbols. Scientists who study human beings express their theories by using words-the only exception is economics but economics is not a science but an applied discipline-and words are a problem for scie...