Meet Pleo

Here’s a fascinating little introduction to Pleo, a toy dinosaur that responds to its environment and seems to show emotion:

You’ll see Pleo wake up, stretch, show signs of pleasure at being stroked, look miserable when he’s neglected (is it a he?), begin to explore his environment, show fear when he reaches the edge of a table and when he’s lifted up, and then show signs of tiredness.

Of course this is all robotic behavior, but it brings up some interesting questions. Here’s a mechanical device that shows signs of emotion and interacts, and that we can therefore have an emotional relationship with. This is a “true” emotional relationship in that there is a feedback loop between the two parties involved, unlike the emotional relationship we can have with, say, our cars, which (to the best of my knowledge anyway) can’t reciprocate.

I say this is a “true” emotional relationship, meaning that there’s a complete loop (I respond to Pleo’s emotional state, and so my emotional state changes, and this affects Pleo’s emotional state, and so on) but of course we know that Pleo doesn’t actually have emotions, just programming. How does the knowledge of Pleo’s artificiality affect our relationship with him? Probably not much, for most of us, because we’re highly emotional beings, always ready to pick up on an open emotional loop — the signals sent out by another emotional being and even by non-emotional beings, like our cars, or a “cute” pair of shoes.

But I’m reminded of Descartes, who believed that animals were basically Pleos, showing the outward signs of emotions but having no consciousness to actually experience emotion. Pleo has no inner life. He’s not aware that he has emotions. Descartes and his followers used to abuse animals horribly in order to show that they weren’t fooled by those outward signs of emotion. They “knew” that when an animal yelped in pain it was just a “program” doing its thing. It wasn’t any different from your computer beeping when you make an error.

According to Wired,

Pleo begins as a baby, and its personality is forged by how you treat it. If it uses a high-pitched squeak and you feed it, it will learn to repeat that noise to get fed. Be nice to it and it will become mellow and friendly; mistreat it and you will evolve a bitter, annoyed robot. Theoretically, no two Pleos – Pleii? – will end up with the same personality.

What’s on the back of my mind is, what would you do if you saw someone abusing a Pleo? You could take a Descartian position and say, “Hey, it’s just a toy, it doesn’t actually feel emotion even if it’s showing signs of distress or pain. No harm done.” That would be technically correct, but that response would ignore the fact that the human end of the emotional feedback loop is real, even if the robotic end is artificial. Just as Pleos develop emotional habits, so do we.

Potentially I think Pleos are a useful thing: “pets” that children can relate to without the consequences of having animals abandoned or neglected when the kid gets bored (as they usually do).

But if a human being were to mistreat a Pleo, ignoring its “distress” this would lead to a deepening of the emotional pathways in our own minds that lead to cruel behavior. In short, don’t trust anyone who would abuse a Pleo. A child that tortures a Pleo may well graduate to torturing truly sentient beings, and anyone who’s watched any of the TV programs or films or read any of the many novels that exhibit our modern fixation with serial killers will know, psychopaths usually have a history of mistreating animals in their childhood. This lack of empathy becomes generalized as the psychopath learns to disengage from the emotional signals of others and they end up hurting humans.

In the future we may have a new cliche to trot out when a serial killer is caught, to go with “He was quiet” — “I always had my doubts about him: he used to torture his Pleo when he was a kid.”

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