Sometimes it's more useful to view a person as a robot than as a personage with coherent intentions and intact comprehensions of surroundings.  The usual viewpoint sometimes strains credulity, as the following news story illustrates.  In reading it, try imagining what might happen to the behavior of a robot if a random piece of its brain were damaged.

Steven Allen Abrams crashed his 32 year old cadillac Eldorado into a preschool playground, killing two and injuring more.  His big car came to rest "smashed against a tree, its windshield wipers flaping."  Paramedics ignored him while he remained seated in the car, for two children were pinned underneath who needed rescue.  A newspaper account (Los Angeles Times, May 9, 1999) reports that "Toddlers waiting for their parents to pick them up from preschool began screaming.  Teachers were crying.  And still Abrams said nothing.  Was he drunk?  Had he suffered a seizure and veered off the road?"  After 15 minutes Abrams began talking.  "I was going to execute innocent children." he stated.  He said he'd thought about killing other people - police, firemen - but they were too inconsequential to make his point.  And what was his point?  "I don't know."

OK, you may protest that this could merely be a case of an old man suffering a stroke, who became seriously disoriented and commited an act that should not be held against him, or impugn the integrity of his personage.  I can agree with that defense, but it does not challenge my assertion that the poor fellow was a robot, a "living" robot, subject to all the faults and potential failings of a non-living robot.  If he suffered a stroke, then indeed a piece of his brain was damaged and unforseen consequences ensued.

Some living robots are flawed at conception, and are born flawed, and live lives with quirks that defy explanation - unless they are viewed as flawed robots.

Which raises the question, "Are we not, all of us, flawed robots?"  Which requires that we define "flaw" - which raises fundamental questions, like "with respect to what?"  From my perspective, from the perspective that views individuals as a creation by the genes for the service of genetic longevity, it should be expected that some designed behaviors are flawed if we use "individual welfare" as our measure.  The entire concept of an "individual" must incorporate implications of this gene-based design process, which has to produce flawed products when measured by individuals.  This theme appears over and over in the writings found on this web site.

This site opened:  May 10, 1999.   Last Update: May 10, 1999