From Becky Feirrera at Motherboard:
All stories about robots are, on some level, reflections of human behavior, and Thom’s efforts to flirt like a human—borrowing overheard phrases from others to compensate for his lack of self—is familiar enough in the human dating scene. But by the end of “The Flirtbot’s Condition,” a friendly chat with some barflies seems to temporarily ground Thom in an otherwise flighty world. In exchange, the human characters are reminded that even a malfunctioning robot can stumble across poetry. More.
Isn’t the main problem that the robot doesn’t really want or need a relationship anyway?
Reminds one of something J. Scott Turner said in Purpose and Desire:What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It,
In a nutshell, this is where the crisis of biology looms, because our prevailing modes of thinking about life—the triumphant confluence of mechanism, materialism, and atomism that has made the twentieth century a golden age for biology—do not deal well with the concept of agency: that ineffable striving of living things to become something.</block quote>
See also: Can AI become just like us? Show this to people who are freaked out by pop science claims about AI.
Homeostasis: Life’s balancing act as a challenge to unguided evolution
J. Scott Turner in the Chronicle of Higher Education — ID is asking the right questions! (2007)
News, I have gathered that J.Scott Turner argues that intelligence, purpose and so forth are all emergent *poof* properties of certain arrangements of matter. IOWs he argues for a naturalistic explanation of those things.
Do you have reason to believe otherwise?
Origenes at 1, I am still only 25% of the way through the book. Turner interests me because he is asking the right questions. He has said the same of the ID theorists.
“Poor robot can’t pass Turing test,” far less the much more relevant Lovelace test.