Androids and Autism
December 25, 2006 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
- Can androids shine light into the murky world of autism and enable scientists to treat it and other psychiatric disorders?
- What can mechanical beings reveal about how we relate to one another as flesh-and-blood creations?
- And as these humanlike stand-ins continue to evolve, will they form relationships with us and lay claim to certain moral and legal rights?
You can read all about it in a special issue of Connection Science (December, Vol 18, No 4), co-edited by Karl MacDorman, associate professor at the School of Informatics at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, and Hiroshi Ishiguro, director of the Intelligent Robotics Lab at Osaka University. MacDorman is “among a handful of experts in the emerging field of android science, a cross-disciplinary approach to test and, if possible, verify hypotheses about human interaction,” as noted in today’s LaboratoryTalk.com.
I have long been leery of the computer or robot metaphor of autistic persons, though very curious about Prof. MacDorman’s and Prof. Ishiguro’s findings. Charlie is both the most predicatable of boys (his fear of dogs) and the least predictable, his likes and dislikes not to be expressed by any algorithm, axiom, theorem or theory—life raising an autistic child is often a surprise, and always a gift of incalculable value.
What if someone built an autistic android……
We have a couple that are completely predictable and rigid as well, except for when they’re not being predictable and rigid. These two manners of reacting [times two] result in a permanent state of inefficiency in the parents. Cheers
“What if someone built an autistic android…”
Would he dream of electric trains? Better make a cat-bot to keep him company.
And get him an account on SecondLife. Could we tell him from the humans behind other avatars? Remember Alan Turing was probably an aspie…
Your suggestion is intriguing, and the scenario deserves better attemps at absurdity than I can muster right now.
spelling: attempTs