Saturday, March 7, 2009

Toward some Circuitry of Ethical Robots

This one from the archives -- an early paper that somehow we missed in our research for the book: Warren McCullogh (1953) Toward some Circuitry of Ethical Robots:

"I suggest therefore that it is possible to look on Man himself as a product of such an evolutionary process of developing robots, begotten of simpler robots, back to the primordial slime; and I look upon his ethical conduct as something to be interpreted in terms of the circuit action of this Man in his environment – a TURING machine with only two feedbacks determined, a desire to play and a desire to win."


Warren St. McCulloch: Towards Some Circuitry of Ethical Robots or An Observational Science of the Genesis of Social Evaluation in the Mnd-Like Behavior of Artifacts, Acta Biotheoretica, Vol. XI (1956), p. 147-156. Available in at www.vordenker.de (Edition: February 2006), J. Paul (Ed.), URL: http://www.vordenker.de/ggphilosophy/mcc_ethical.pdf .

No comments: