the robot attitude

A sunny day greets us today on the mountain, a soft wind brushing the trees like the breath of a loved one across one's cheek. I've yet to spot a cloud today, though the newspaper says it will be cloudy by nightfall. We shall see.

In yesterday's post, we talked about the mannerism of robots, and how such "mechanical" and strict-to-law behavior can sometimes provide a valuable example for humans. Today, I would like to expand to upon the idea by discussing a more human-oriented topic regarding attitude.

So to start, perhaps we should consider how one might define "attitude." A dictionary definition describes attitude as a disposition, manner, tendency, or orientation, especially regarding the mind. In this manner, we might think of attitude as the ways in which the mind is both organized and directed toward the appraisal of a particular situation, or the completion of a particular task.

The robots as described in the robot novels I'm reading posess something of an "attitude," in the sense that some robots are programmed to weigh certain priorities differently from their peers. See, the governing logic of robots (aside from the Three Laws) rests on the priority of efficiency. Under certain circumstances, however, maximum efficiency is achievable only by counter-intuitive means, the gains-to-trade idea of economics providing one possible example of this. At any rate, certain robots must be programmed with a certain "values" prioritized over pure logic in order to achieve an efficient result. We might call this a robot's "attitude," because it describes the robot's disposition and orientation on certain issues. Calling it as such, however, is problematic since a robot with "programmed" dispositions cannot in fact act otherwise, and is therefore without choice.

In humans, however, attitude doesn't seem programmed in so much as ingrained more or less into the mind as a collection of habits, beliefs, and experiences.While one's attitude may affect one's choice in a particular situation, a person is not bound by the attitude to choose one way or the other; rather, it would seem they are influenced more or less in one direction or the other. A person's attitude seems to allow for more choice than a robot, because the human is not bound, in most cases, to a fixed program in the mind to choose one way or the other. One might be conditioned to choose a particular course in most cases, but that is not the same thing as programming.

Importantly, both the "attitude" of a robot and the attitudes of people are adaptive and maladaptive depending on the circumstance. Sometimes a "programmed" response in people is quite adaptive for their purposes, such as with activities that must be performed very quickly and without any conscious thought. Musicians practice scales, arpeggios, various other patterns because they appear often in music, and having them well-engrained in the musical intellect allows them to do more as musicians. Law enforcement officers receive specific forms of training with their firearms and decision-making so that even under considerable stress and rapidity of circumstance a police officer can perform the task at hand properly. Percy Cerutty (1895-1975), a famous coach from Austrialia who coached Herb Eliott, spoke of training the body so that it could respond in competition without requiring the conscious mind to act as it should.

In short, people in various professions seek to train themselves in a skill so that they can perform the task without thinking, in effect becoming a "robot" for a moment. For actual robots, every moment would seem to be unconscious, since in every moment the robot operates according to programming. For humans, this would seem a temporary measure, borne out by the need to perform while greatly distracted by various things. As much as we may wish to deny it, the highly-trained individual would seem to be in the business of preparing him or herself to become a robot in the moments of most peril. Isn't that odd?