Two Minds Blog

Robot football players at a Valparaiso University College of Engineering event I have been thinking lately about robots, which creates an interesting asymmetry: They almost certainly have not been thinking about me. Nevertheless, I find that I often respond  to robots as though they have thoughts about me, or about their own personal goals, or about the world in which they exist. That tendency suggests an interesting aspect of human psychology, connected to our social minds . We are hard-wired to care what other people think about us, and we very easily extend that concern to robots. Here's a recent article about how the language-learning app Duolingo, which features an owl-shaped avatar (a kind of robot), uses "emotional blackmail" to keep application users engaged:  https://uxdesign.cc/20-days-of-emotional-blackmail-from-duolingo-4f566523e3c5  This bird-shaped bit of code tells users things like "you're scaring me!" and "I miss you" if they haven...

Whichever side of the aisle we were on, the 2024 election results surprised many of us. A lot of people I talk to are simply wondering "what does this mean?" We wonder, as we would in any election, what the results mean for our future. We wonder what it means about our neighbors, whether the things we want are the same things that they want. And because questions of character were important for many people in this particular election, we wonder what it means about ourselves — as in this question that I keep hearing: "Is this really who we are now?" These are deep, existential types of questions, so it's no wonder that many people are struggling to make sense of them. One way to consider the situation is to take seriously the idea (from Eric Schwitzgebel ) that America itself is a conscious entity. Schwitzgebel’s technical argument is about complexity -- America has a structure with a high level of organization, integration among its parts, specialization of func...