Exposure to robots in the movies and television could affect our ability to empathise with synthetic beings, suggests a study of the brain regions thought to be responsible for our ability to relate to each other.

The team found that the MNS [mirror neuron system] was activated when the robot performed actions – but only when the actions were robotic, not when the robot’s motion was smooth and human-like.

When they watched the virtual human, exactly the opposite was true – the MNS was activated when the movements were human-like, but not when they were robotic – and the contrast was even greater between these two scenarios.

What, exactly, is this “machine”? A few minutes spent studying the politics of the group who took the coveted Christmas Number One slot in the UK Singles Chart in 2009 (see Rage Against the Machine on Wikipedia) makes it clear that what they’re against is the political-military-industrial power structure, or what’s sometimes called “the system”. And let me say here quite clearly that, in terms of general political orientation, I’m entirely with them, as is anyone who instinctively sides with the underdog and finds him or herself alienated from much of modern culture, in my opinion. But they go too far—not in their analysis, because analysis should be pursued as far as it will go, and if that takes you far beyond the current consensus, so be it—but in their reaction to it. Rage, or anger, is a destructive emotion.

It’s also entirely inappropriate when what you’re dealing with is machinery. I share Philip K Dick’s view (though it took me many, many years to come around to it). In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (filmed as Blade Runner), the only way to tell the most sophisticated humanoid robots from humans—short of opening them up—is to test their ability to empathise, because the robots lack that, though they can fake it to some degree. This aspect of his philosophy seems to have been quite consistent. In 1976, commenting on a story written in 1953, he wrote “It’s not what you look like, or what planet you were born on. It’s how kind you are. The quality of kindness, to me, distinguishes us from rocks and sticks and metal, and will forever, whatever shape we take, wherever we go, whatever we become.” To lack empathy is to be inhuman. And that’s true of all of us: whenever we speak or act without empathy, we are behaving mechanically, regardless of how humane we might be at other times. And for me, as for Dick, that’s not just a metaphor, but the literal truth (see the post No wonder people don’t like Dennett on this).

But what about “the system”? Well, it is a machine, and the people who work within it are just its components, machine parts, as long as they do so, no matter how kind they are to their children when they get home. When I started writing this I intended, after a little web research, to explain organisations and institutions as memetic machines, but my googling has brought up nothing relevant so far, and I have several other things that I should be getting on with (like the good little component that I am).

I’ll say just a little about “destructive emotions” before closing for now. That is the title of a book by Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence. The subtitle of the emotions book is “A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama”, and Goleman’s thinking is very Buddhist-oriented as well as being quite thoroughly science-based. Anger is not one of Buddhism’s traditional “mind poisons”, but Goleman rates it as one of “the big three toxic emotions: anger, anxiety and depression” (see Daniel Goleman on emotions and your health). I must admit I’ve yet to read the book, but I’m fairly familiar with the Buddhist take on this sort of thing, and it looks like he’s promoting his concept of the “toxic emotions” as a modern and more scientific version of the “mind poisons”.

I’m going to have to return to this another time, but I’ll publish anyway, and see if there’s any response.

(Later: if not anger, what’s to motivate us to do the right thing? Compassion: see the next post.)