28 August 1996

Wrong End of the Stick

Maureen Caudill postulates that we're very close to being able to build an android. In her book, In Our Own Image: Building an Artificial Person, she argues chapter by chapter--vision, memory, language, et cetera--that we're about there.

I'm afraid she's missed the forest for the trees.

We already have artificial people; soulless bloodless automatons run the world. And Caudill's logical arguments notwithstanding, it's not economically viable to build humanoid robots from scratch. It will always be cheaper to dehumanize homo sapiens than to humanize machines.