The Organization of Robots and the Chaos of Africa

On the ethics of robots:

"By the 50th generation, the robots had learned to communicate—lighting up, in three out of four colonies, to alert the others when they’d found food or poison. The fourth colony sometimes evolved 'cheater' robots instead, which would light up to tell the others that the poison was food, while they themselves rolled over to the food source and chowed down without emitting so much as a blink. Some robots, though, were veritable heroes. They signaled danger and died to save other robots. 'Sometimes,' Floreano says, 'you see that in nature—an animal that emits a cry when it sees a predator; it gets eaten, and the others get away—but I never expected to see this in robots.'"

No one, I suppose expected the Spanish Inquisition. And do robots "expect" to be poisoned? The Fourth Colony is fascinating, isn't it? Why did they evolve such evil tendencies?

An ethnologist named Colin Turnbull started-off a whole mess of debate by examining the Ik people of Uganda and Sudan. Basically, due to colonialism, these hunter-gatherers got locked into one part of their territory, placed under their native tribal rivals, and thence began a quick decline as a people. So much so, that when Turnbull found them, he described, controversially, a culture so damaged by famine and deprivation, that parents threw their children out into the street where they formed "age-bands", or age cohorts that passed along information, rather than any formal adult-to-child pedagogic system. Writes Turnbull in The Mountain People:

"You also see cruelty at the center of life. When blind Lo'ono trips and rolls to the bottom of the ravine, the adults laugh as she lies on her back, her arms and legs thrashing feebly. When Lolim begs his son to let him in, pleading that he is going to die in a few hours, Longoli drives him away. Lolim dies alone."

While more modern ethnologists have discovered that,

"On a political front, the Ik’s perceived insignificance as cultivators compared to the represented needs of their pastoral neighbours makes changing the situation almost impossible. Governed by Dodoth, the sub county office in Kalapata does not represent the Ik in a neutral light and the district office at Kotido does not even cast its eye over Ik inhabited territory. Language is also a problem for this oppressed people. They speak Icetot which is a Nilotic language. Although it takes much of its vocabulary from neighbouring Nilotic speaking tribes, Icetot is not understood or spoken in the surrounding areas, thus accentuating the existing physical isolation of the Ik. Even when members of the Ik journeyed to Kampala for political ends, they were unable to understand what was being said or the substance of possible solutions. Anything that was discussed was manipulated by the Dodoth representatives for their own benefit, whilst Ik leaders were left in the dark. As a people, the Ik seem to epitomise a population that has been forgotten by its own government. Their isolated existence means they have just two primary schools and have only recently built a medical clinic that relieves them of a 30km trek to the hospital. Diseases such as cholera and malaria dealt a heavy blow to the Ik population during the 1980s, such was the inaccessibility of medical care. A social worker describes the Ik as ‘a real case of deprivation and social injustice’ and explains that ‘no single social facility has ever been erected in the area by the authorities…’ It comes as no surprise that only 4 people amongst the Ik have ever been to secondary school and even doing so has not secured them a job."

The connection: according to the original robot study, "Under individual selection, the ability to produce visual signals resulted in the evolution of deceptive communication strategies in colonies of unrelated robots and a concomitant decrease in colony performance." [emphasis mine]

Pointing out that lack of communication is a problem is nothing new - but, doing it with robots, and then finding that the social malignancies which created the "worst people on the face of the Earth" (according to Turnbull) are replicated on that levels does give one pause in considering just how fundamental the ability to communicate is to the very notion of morality, so much so that one begins to wonder if perhaps the heavy lifting of morality is merely making sure that one can communicate in the first place.

That Is All For Now.