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The extreme cases at both poles are impossible, for
relatively boring reasons. At one end, neither the Wizard
of Oz nor John Searle could do the necessary handwork
fast enough to sustain HAL’s quick-witted round of
activities. At the other end, hand-coding enough world
knowledge into a disembodied agent to create HAL’s
dazzlingly humanoid competence and getting it to the
point where it could benefit froman electronic childhood
is a programming task to be measured in hundreds of
efficiently organized person-centuries. In other words,
the daunting difficulties observable at both ends of
this spectrum highlight the fact that there is a colossal
design job to be done; the only practical way of doing
it is one version or another of Mother Nature’s way—
years of embodied learning. The trade-offs between
various combinations of flesh-and-blood and silicon-
and-metal bodies are anybody’s guess. I’m putting my
bet on Cog as the most likely developmental platform
for a future HAL.
Notice that requiring HAL to have a humanoid body and
live concretely in thehumanworld for a time is a practical
but not a metaphysical requirement. Once all the R
& D is accomplished in the prototype, by the odyssey
of a single embodied agent, the standard duplicating
techniques of the computer industry could clone HALs
by the thousands as readily as they do compact discs.
The finished product could thus be captured in some
number of terabytes of information. So, in principle,
the information that fixes the design of all those chips
and hard-wired connections and configures all the RAM
and ROM could be created by hand. There is no finite
bit-string, however long, that is officially off-limits to
human authorship. Theoretically, then, Blade-Runner-
like entities could be created with ersatz biographies;
they would have exactly the capabilities, dispositions,
strengths, and weaknesses of a real, not virtual, person.
So whatever moral standing the latter deserved should
belong to the former as well.
The main point of giving HAL a humanoid past is to give
himtheworld knowledge required to be amoral agent—a
necessary modicum of understanding or empathy
about the human condition. A modicum will do nicely;
we don’t want to hold out for too much commonality
of experience. After all, among the people we know,
many have moral responsibility in spite of their obtuse
inability to imagine themselves into the predicaments
of others. We certainly don’t exculpate male chauvinist
pigs who can’t see women as people!
When
do
we exculpate people? We should look carefully
at the answers to this question, because HAL shows
signs of fitting into one or another of the exculpatory
categories, even though he is a conscious agent. First,
we exculpate people who are insane. Might HAL have
gone insane? The question of his capacity for emotion—
and hence his vulnerability to emotional disorder—is
tantalizingly raised by Dave’s answer to Mr. Amer.
Dove: Well, he acts like he has genuine emotions. Of
course, he’s programmed that way, to make it easier for
us to talk to him. But as to whether he has real feelings
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