Before we ask why robots should have emotions, it is useful to ask why we have emotions. Although it is usually assumed that robots/computers will not have emotions (unless, as with Commander Data in 'Star Trek - The Next Generation' they are 'programmed in'), it increasingly seems that emotion (whether accompanied by consciousness or not) is integral to the prioritisation of goals.

Emotion is not just about realizing what your goals are; it's also about wanting to act on that knowledge. If you do not have frustration and longing to impel you, then perhaps you will end up doing nothing. Why try and win a mate, gain top marks, make friends or get food if you don't really care? It may be that emotions are so intertwined with drive that an active being couldn't function without feelings being wired in.

The fact that we are conscious may be one of the most remarkable of all.

So: why has evolution bothered to provide us with awareness? I can think of two possibilities. One is that consciousness has a specific role, being intrinsic to higher mental functions (such as formulating a novel course of action, for example). Another - which I favour, partly just through intuition - is that consciousness is simply an 'emergent property'; one which does not actually have a role, but which tends to arise spontaneously in organisms (whether organic or inorganic) which are appropriately organised and sufficiently complex. (It is unclear which is more important - type of organisation or degree of complexity). I suspect that although we are now roughly able to detect where consciousness is at a given time (for example, by determining the location of the ‘P-300 wave’), the answer to why consciousness arises will not become apparent for a while yet.

The mathematician Roger Penrose (outstanding in his own field) has attempted to show that Artificial Intelligence will always lack a ‘certain something’ - consciousness, free will, or somesuch thing - because of the pivotal role of quantum effects. His efforts have been widely lambasted, so my contribution to the admonitory flood will be brief. Simply this: that quantum effects act on a physical level; the functions of our carbon-based bodies can mostly likely be replicated in other media (given time); and therefore, that any interaction between quantum phenomena and our bodies can probably be replicated in other media - those of Artificial Intelligences.

But I haven't shown that all intelligent machines will necessarily be conscious. I don't think that consciousness is necessarily copperfastened to intelligence; I think it could also be linked to the way a brain is constructed. For example, ant nests behave in very intelligent ways, because all the separate ants work together as a unit; but I don't think many people would argue that there's a sort of unifying consciousness hovering between the ants. If a machine doesn't have parts that communicate with each other very quickly and complexly, it might be intelligent, but it might not be conscious. Perhaps consciousness will only emerge from a brain that's internally joined up; perhaps there are other ways that consciousness is dependent on structure.

BLIND AND SIGHTED WATCHMAKERS; Should both be licensed?

'The blind watchmaker' - the title of a book by Richard Dawkins - is evolution. The 'sighted watch-maker' is ourselves.

The above arguments demonstrate that AI is in the early stages of a dramatic life-creating project. So: should we allow it to continue? What are the objections?

One argument is that it is wrong to 'play God'. But evolution, a blind and amoral process, has been 'playing God' on this planet for approximately four billion years. The result: the natural world, which has - at least, perhaps, until recently - been more characterised (among the sentient animals) by pain and struggle than by happiness. It has also, of course, resulted in the fascinating species known rather narcissistically as Homo Sapiens Sapiens ("Wise Wise Man").

Life in the wild, as any naturalist will tell you, is often appallingly cruel; our own lives are not endless merry-go-rounds of delight. However, I doubt whether many of us - bar a utilitarian or two - would argue that it would have been better for life never to arise. If blind processes can have results which we value so much, why should we forbid the creation of an entity whose faculties (creative, emotional, intellectual) could be so much deeper and more advanced than ours? Or to forbid artificial implants into the brain? As noted earlier, every schoolmaster is engaged in changing brain structure. To play the conservative God in this instance would be equivalent to going back 65 million years and deflecting the life-changing asteroid which killed some of the most intelligent (most sentient?) beings then in existence - the dromaeosaurid dinosaurs (raptors). Why do that? In order to prevent the global dominion (among large creatures) of more mentally agile creatures: mammals, the group from which Man [sic], the 'paragon of animals', has sprung. Many of the arguments being bandied about ('we must not play God', 'we must not endanger humanity by allowing robots to develop intelligence') are reactionary and destructive.

SHOULD WE STAY HUMAN?

Eugenics, Designer Babies, and Jerking Knees

Eugenics was the twisted child of Darwinism; it was one of the theories underpinning the barbarities of the Holocaust. Its proponents thought that natural selection (the process which has created all lifeforms on Earth) was being interfered with by the forgivingness of liberalism and the modern welfare state, and that in order for humanity to become truly healthy, the dregs of society would have to be siphoned off. Eugenicists' approach was two-pronged: people of 'good stock' were to be encouraged to breed, and 'degenerates' were to be kept childless. Active policies of discrimination were integral to eugenics: people of degenerate stock (the unemployed, blacks, slum-dwellers, gays, Irish [hurrah!], gypsies, etc. - basically any group that the eugenicist was already prejudiced against) were to be sterilized or even killed. Eugenics was not confined to Hitler's Germany. Here are just a few of the other perpetrators: Sweden, China, Singapore, and the United States. It was a black chapter in the history of ideologies.

There is a superficial similarity between eugenics and some of the genetic modifications which are being mooted at present; but I think that many debates on humanity's future have been distorted by this. If you listen to a discussion of the role of genetic engineering in humanity's future, you will probably hear the talking heads bandy about terms like 'designer babies' and 'eugenics'. (A designer baby is one whose parents have chosen to engineer what it will be like: for example, they might decide that it will be blue-eyed and good at sports, or black, tall, and very intelligent.) I think it fair to say that most people are extremely wary about making any 'improvements' to the human race. After all, wouldn't such alterations return us back to the bad old days of Hitler and of the depraved Nazi doctor, Joseph Mengele?

Well, what is the difference between the medical procedures that everyone (bar a few Jehovah's Witnesses and perhaps a smattering of others) accepts today, and these ideas of designer babies and eugenics?

• At present, we accept that medicine can be used to tackle 'deficiencies' (illness, disability) which prevent people from living normal lives. But with eugenics and designer babies, the 'betterment' of the human race is also sought.
• With eugenics, people who aren't considered to 'measure up' cannot be allowed to reproduce. In the worst incarnations of eugenics, these degenerates are earmarked for murder. Note, however, that we can have designer babies without thinking that non-designer babies should be discriminated against.

It is obvious that eugenics is a repulsive doctrine. Yet I would question whether designer babies should be placed in the same category. Here, the aim is to make some mental or physical improvement; it need not involve discrimination.

I think a comparison with education is instructive. Imagine two parents. One decides to have a designer baby with a superb brain; another decides to have a normal child, and give it a superb education. A third child will have neither incredible brains nor a great education. In both the first two cases, the child's mental ability will be enhanced. The designer baby will have greater skills no matter what the training; education, by providing the other child with greater language skills and theoretical tools, will increase its practical mental ability. The third child will lag behind both. The downside of education (and technology) is closely analogous to that of genetic modification: it creates class differences between those who have access to the techniques, and those who do not. Children who leave school at fifteen are generally less likely to end up with top jobs; similarly, we can expect that if we engineer super-smart kids, they will generally take the cream of the jobs on offer.

Q: But isn't designing babies somehow worse than education? Deliberate genetic manipulation is more invasive, less natural.

A: Well, if we used naturalness as our guide to living, we would have to abandon almost everything that distinguishes Western life.

Q: What about the invasiveness?

A: Well, although teachers do not physically insert knowledge in their pupils' brains, they are undoubtedly engaged in changing the structure of their pupils' brains 'for the better' (think of the reaction that phrase would arouse in the context of designer babies!). The effects of education are usually as permanent as those which would be brought about by manipulating the genes of an unborn child.

I am not attempting to argue that the effects of education are necessarily as wide-ranging as those which genetic manipulation (GM) might have. For example, whereas education creates differences in actual learning, GM (and given time, AI), by altering the capacity to learn, can create far more dramatic differences between haves and have nots. However, this is a difference of degree rather than of kind; it appears to me that one should either be against all such changes, or against none. If we are willing to accept one form of brain alteration, why shouldn't we accept the other? The central issue is not whether we should allow people to improve themselves mentally and physically, but that the people who remain unchanged - whether by education or GM - should not be discriminated against.

Whilst a certain amount of information can be readily transferred from an entity before its death, the vastly complex interactions which constitute that entity are harder to replicate - or to keep replacing while it is alive. Although replication is not survival for a Self - if you copy a cassette you end up with two, not one*, I refer to it because of the curious difficulty in locating the dividing line between replication (without proper integration into the organism being copied) and sustenance. I inhabit (indeed am) my body; but a number of years ago, I inhabited a body whose constituents are now far away from me. So:

CONSCIOUS BEINGS IN INORGANIC MEDIA:
Anthropomorphism, Anthropocentrism and the Constriction of Ethics

"These [software entities] are not models of life, but independent instances of life . . . Because everything we know about life is based on a single example, our every conception of life is highly parochial. For most people, it is impossible to separate our concept of life from the material in which our one example is embedded. Organic, wet, material, etc., are integral parts of our conception of what life is"

It is not only with regard to other animals that humans are biased; although advocates of eugenics are often seen as (and quite often are) racist weirdos with aspirations to Godlike status, scarcely a whimper is aroused by the efforts of the AI community to realize its primary goal: computer programs which aren't mere idiot savants, but can reason intelligently about a wide range of things, be wise, and all the rest of those things which humans are so far best at (on Earth, at least).

If the AI people do achieve this - and I think it will eventually happen - I would guess that the resulting intelligences stand a good chance of being conscious* - probably far more so than ourselves. If you think about your own consciousness, it is (like mine) fairly limited most of the time; the novelist Milan Kundera was right when he spoke about the 'lightness of being' (although I'm not sure whether he should have called it unbearable). Something that strikes me as I go about my life is how unthinking and automatized I am a lot of the time. Obviously, this kind of living - where you're not all that conscious of anything much - is the result of instincts, and of well-memorized behaviour sequences such as the one for tying shoelaces. During emotional or exciting experiences, my consciousness is at its most activated; but most of the time, my experience of the world is a fairly low-level thing. I can easily imagine an AI having a far more intense, awake life than humans have.

* This is not a scientific statement, because we don't know how consciousness arises. If it's mainly due to how the brains of 'higher' animals are organised, then perhaps it will not arise in machines/computers. But I suspect - without much evidence - that complexity is also very important, and that many different types of structure could give rise to consciousness.