This story today about a temple here in Japan ...
...(and before someone asks, Buddhism generally holds that robots do not have "souls", although also holding that neither do people! The question remains open, however, about whether machines will ever be sentient beings. I happen to think they would, and we are ourselves just biological machines become aware).
I just happened to watch this week a Korean SF film (otherwise not so great, but not so bad either) called "Doomsday Book" ...
... including a story about a robot who attains Buddhahood (and his makers want to destroy him for it as a "defective product"). The film is available on Netflix and elsewhere. The following scenes are well worth watching ...
Gassho, J
SatToday
tsuku.jpgtsuku.jpg
Incense smoke wafts through the cold air of the centuries-old Buddhist temple as a priest chants a sutra, praying for the peaceful transition of the souls of the departed.
It is a funeral like any other in Japan. Except that those being honored are robot dogs, lined up on the altar, each wearing a tag to show where they came from and which family they belonged to.
The devices are AIBOs, the world’s first home-use entertainment robot equipped with artificial intelligence and capable of developing its own personality.
...
Bungen Oi, a priest at the 450-year-old Kofukuji Temple in Isumi, Chiba Prefecture, said the AIBO service last month was an occasion on which the robots’ souls could pass from their bodies.
“I was thrilled over the interesting mismatch of giving cutting-edge technology a memorial service in a very conventional manner,” he said.
It is a mismatch that humans will probably become more used to over the coming years and decades as robots with “personalities” become ever more part of our lives.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/201.../#.VO182fmUd8E
It is a funeral like any other in Japan. Except that those being honored are robot dogs, lined up on the altar, each wearing a tag to show where they came from and which family they belonged to.
The devices are AIBOs, the world’s first home-use entertainment robot equipped with artificial intelligence and capable of developing its own personality.
...
Bungen Oi, a priest at the 450-year-old Kofukuji Temple in Isumi, Chiba Prefecture, said the AIBO service last month was an occasion on which the robots’ souls could pass from their bodies.
“I was thrilled over the interesting mismatch of giving cutting-edge technology a memorial service in a very conventional manner,” he said.
It is a mismatch that humans will probably become more used to over the coming years and decades as robots with “personalities” become ever more part of our lives.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/201.../#.VO182fmUd8E
I just happened to watch this week a Korean SF film (otherwise not so great, but not so bad either) called "Doomsday Book" ...
... including a story about a robot who attains Buddhahood (and his makers want to destroy him for it as a "defective product"). The film is available on Netflix and elsewhere. The following scenes are well worth watching ...
Gassho, J
SatToday
tsuku.jpgtsuku.jpg
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