Rise of the humanbot

TL;DR

The paper discusses potential future interactions between humans and learning robots, proposing the emergence of 'humanbots' and exploring their implications for identity and consciousness.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of 'humanbots' as hybrid systems resulting from long-term human-robot interactions, highlighting structural constraints and conceptual challenges.

Findings

Long-term interactions may blur human and robot identities.

Shared memories in human-robot pairs can lead to hybrid consciousness.

Understanding these systems requires second-order neuroscience approaches.

Abstract

The accelerated path of technological development, particularly at the interface between hardware and biology has been suggested as evidence for future major technological breakthroughs associated to our potential to overcome biological constraints. This includes the potential of becoming immortal, having expanded cognitive capacities thanks to hardware implants or the creation of intelligent machines. Here I argue that several relevant evolutionary and structural constraints might prevent achieving most (if not all) these innovations. Instead, the coming future will bring novelties that will challenge many other aspects of our life and that can be seen as other feasible singularities. One particularly important one has to do with the evolving interactions between humans and non-intelligent robots capable of learning and communication. Here I argue that a long term interaction can lead to a new class of "agent" (the humanbot). The way shared memories get tangled over time will inevitably have important consequences for both sides of the pair, whose identity as separated entities might become blurred and ultimately vanish. Understanding such hybrid systems requires a second-order neuroscience approach while posing serious conceptual challenges, including the definition of consciousness.