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A comment on Robot With Broken Leg Learns To Walk Again In 2 Minutes.

Re:Robot With Broken Leg Learns To Walk Again In 2 Minutes by jimworm on Tuesday July 29, 2014 @08:19PM (#8105749)
The "ground contact" parameter while walking sounds functionally very close to the "proprioception + pain" parameters for animals in a hobbling situation. An animal (me, specifically) quickly discovers a hobbling strategy by experimentation and a continuous sense of pain levels.

I think that pain will become a major part of the design in learning robots of the future.

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Re:Robot With Broken Leg Learns To Walk Again In 2 Minutes by nitrogen on Tuesday July 29, 2014 @10:53PM (#8106158)
I think that pain will become a major part of the design in learning robots of the future.

This is something that Hollywood has been warning us about. We do not want to program robots to "feel" pain. We should build in avoidance algorithms, but not pain.

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Re:Robot With Broken Leg Learns To Walk Again In 2 Minutes by hyperion2010 on Wednesday July 30, 2014 @01:55AM (#8106632)
The problem is that anything that is "aversive" in the sense of avoidance may ultimately be perceived as pain. Whether we need to associate a emotional valence with pain in the way evolution has (because evolution coopted existing systems) is an open question. We may not need to, but any function that takes multiple pain like inputs and associates with with a conserved set of behavioral responses is likely to result in something similar to our perceived experience of pain.
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Re:Robot With Broken Leg Learns To Walk Again In 2 Minutes by Qantourisc on Wednesday July 30, 2014 @03:29AM (#8106813)
Feeling "pain" is not the problem. The displeasure experienced due to the pain is.
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Re:Robot With Broken Leg Learns To Walk Again In 2 Minutes by bottled_poe on Wednesday July 30, 2014 @02:36AM (#8106727)
Hollywood? :-(
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Re:Robot With Broken Leg Learns To Walk Again In 2 Minutes by nitrogen on Wednesday July 30, 2014 @11:49AM (#8108907)
I believe fiction plays an important role in shaping the philosophy of science. Forward-looking science fiction, especially, considers issues that have yet to be encountered by society, providing the opportunity to decide how to handle or avoid those issues in advance.

In the case of robots, I was imagining a line from the less-than-serious The Simpsons, when a robot flees a flaming building, asking, "Why was I programmed to feel pain?" ( http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nQ-ggzfdsMs ). Indeed, why would a robot be designed to suffer when enough suffering exists already? We should design our non-sentient robots now with that thought in mind, in anticipation of the possibility of creating self-aware AI.

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