The Speculist

Okay, here's my answer to Phil's answer to my answer to Randall Parker. I'll wait if you need to catch up…

• Eternal Youth, Overpopulation, And Instincts To Reproduce
• Don't Throw the Baby out With the Bifocals
• Virtual Kids

Phil's virtual kid idea is much less…drastic than genetically altering human nature as Randall Parker suggested:

PHIL:

Once there are virtual children that we can talk to, teach, play with and -- through better and better virtual worlds technologies -- see and touch, the desire to have real children will decrease all the more… Virtual friends, lovers, parents, and children will be more reliable and less work than their real-world counterparts.

For now, let's skip one of the more alarming questions that underpins this scenario and assume that these virtual people are not true sentient beings --

A virtual kid would definitely be less trouble. But the trouble is indispensable to the experience. There are definitely times I'd like to pause the four-child reality at my house and leave town for a week. But I can't. And the fact that I can't directly effects the commitment I have to my children and, ultimately, the love I have for them. Where your treasure is – your efforts, your commitment, your time, and your money – there will your heart be also.

And this is a two-way street. Why does anyone love their parents? There are a million answers to that, but what you probably remember is some sacrifice that he or she made for you. Maybe your mother did without new outfits for a year to save up for your prom dress. Maybe you remember your father coming home exhausted from work night after night, but then dragging himself to all your baseball practices. Children from wealthy families probably remember the time their parents spent with them.

Could virtual children inspire the same level of commitment and, ultimately, love? Perhaps. But only if, as Phil suggested, these children could pass a Turing test. To inspire commitment, these children would have to be objectively real within a convincing virtual world.

Perhaps we are already seeing Virtual Kids 1.0 in The Sims, or in Second Life, or in other virtual worlds. Some people have gotten absorbed into these worlds to an unhealthy extent. If a proud "parent" is bragging about their kid, and then shows you a picture like this… run away!

Junior in his Candy Corn Costume, Halloween 2006.

I think the issue of sentience is at the heart of this. To be fully satisfactory as replacements for flesh and blood kids, virtual kids would need to be self-aware. If in looking at your "child" you know that there's no "there there," wouldn't it limit your parental commitment? I could imagine a modern Geppetto – an older childless man – laboring away on a Second Life boy, but ultimately coming away dissatisfied. No matter how real Pinocchio seems, Geppetto knows that he's just a marionette manipulated by programming.

What would it take for Pinocchio to become a real boy? I suspect that you'd need a true A.I. infant capable of growing as a person just like a real child. You'd need a world where a hug seemed just as real as in this world. In short, you'd need a lot more processing power than the Big Blue fairy is able to deliver today.

Turing believed that once a computer is objectively indistinguishable from a person, it is a person. I think he had far too much faith in human discernment. A.I.'s will be able to fool us long before they are truly self aware. With A.I. I'll be a Doubting Thomas - I'll accept an A.I. is a person when I see how the human brain's ability to parallel process is fully mapped out and duplicated in it's programming.

Therefore, I think it will be possible to have A.I.'s that are objectively real before they are capable of subjective experience. This brings us back to the alarming issues that Phil mentioned. Certainly mistreatment of sentient A.I.'s should be prohibited because they should have rights just like real-world people. But I'm also disturbed by the idea that people might abuse objectively real A.I. simulations. Sadism is ugly even in a fantasy world.

And love is always beautiful. But I would be very hesitant to invest that kind of emotion into a simulation. I would need to see how a virtual child is a real person. How it has a mind like a person that is capable of growing and maturing. I would need to know that Pinocchio has a chance of becoming a real boy.

In the original story Pinocchio was a bit of a sociopath in the beginning. He did whatever he felt like doing regardless of the consequences to himself or others. He needed an external conscience in the form of a cricket. It wasn't until he accepted the reality and importance of others that he became real.

A true relationship has to be based on reciprocal subjective appreciation of the other person as a person. Bridging that gap will require alot of effort from both Geppetto and Pinocchio.