Somebody said "Do you think machines will have emotions someday?"
No, they won't because that serves no purpose.
I'm going to tell you what I mean by that.
If a woman's in an automobile accident,
with her kids in the back of the car, the car turns over,
and the gasoline starts flowing toward the engine,
which is hot, it'll explode.
If she says "Oh my God, my kids are trapped in the car,
and it's caught on fire; it's breaking out.
I hope that somebody comes to help."
If she picks up wood, smashes the window, takes the kids out,
that's emotions converted to action.
We're not too interested in emotion;
we're interested in what you do with it.
Are we educated yet?
I think I can say this:
Most people really don't know how to raise children.
I wanted to communicate with my little boy
when he was just a few months old.
That's a time when you can't communicate with a language.
But he was in a crib, and I put a ball painted yellow
at one end of the crib, a real ball.
And the kid saw it. It was stuck out, and he grabbed it.
When he grabbed it, lights went on in a circle above the crib,
so he let go. He was so amused by it that he let go
and started [Jacque makes crying sounds] 'cause it stopped.
He didn't know why it stopped. But after he grabbed the ball six times,
he knew that ball made the lights go on.
Once that was established,
I put a different color ball at the other end of the crib
and he crawled over, before he could speak,
and grabbed that ball right away
but no lights went on, on the ceiling. He looked up,
but on the wall lights went up and down this way. See?
So, he knew that that controlled the ceiling lights;
this one controlled the wall lights.
By the time he was three to four months old, he had six panels of lights.
When he wet his pants, he'd squeeze one,
mom would come in and change his diapers.
So, in other words,
children really want to know how the world works.
Kids want to know everything,
and we give them 'Jack and the Bean Stalk' and the Mickey Mouse Club.
Kids are really ready to learn how the body works.
They want to know how the heart pumps blood through...
Parents don't know those things.
So, when you say "Should we educate our own children?"
You can't, unless you're educated yourself.
“He who opens a school door, closes a prison.” - Victor Hugo
You know, a priest said to me
"I don't believe you. I know two people in the same home.
One became a priest, the other a gangster.
If environment is everything, how do you get those differences?"
And I said "The minute you treat one kid different than the other,
you get the differences."
“I pay the schoolmaster, but it is the schoolboys that educate my son.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
You give kids Cinderella, artificiality,
and you tell them to be honest. You always tell children to be honest.
When they say "Where do babies come from?"
"The stork brings a baby." That's a lie.
Then the kids say "Daddy, does Santa Claus climb down every chimney?"
You say "Yes." That's a lie.
And so we lie to kids, and then we tell them to be honest.
You know, we lie about everything, almost everything.
That's the kind of world we live in.
It's so full of shit!
And that's no bad language. It's just that way!
So, if you really want a better world,
you have to know what makes criminals, what makes artists,
what makes great painters.
Environment makes a gangster or a priest.
“Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
I went to a group of psychologists and said
"Do you believe there is such a thing as human nature?"
They said "Yes, one is jealousy."
I said "Give me an idea of what you mean by jealousy."
I always do that to try and understand the other person.
He said "When I reach for my cat and put it on my lap, my dog growls.
That's what I mean by jealousy."
“Learn, compare, collect the facts.” - Ivan Petrowitsch Pawlow
So I said "I'm going to show you some experiments that I've done."
I had a dog and a cat. I always had a lot of dogs and cats
and raccoons and other animals, and I'm interested in their behavior.
“I have found the missing link between ape and civilized man:
it is we.” - Konrad Lorenz
I gave the dog fresh liver - a little bit - and then picked up the cat.
I did that 20 times, and when I reached for the cat,
the dog's tail would wag.
So, if it were inborn, he would still growl. You know what I mean?
If it was conditioning, he wouldn't wag his tail when I picked up the cat.
"Incubator-hatched geese
imprint on the first suitable moving stimulus they see
within a 'critical period' between 13-16 hours after hatching."
- Konrad Lorenz, “Civilized Man’s Eight Deadly Sins”
“To gain a desired prey, a dog or wolf will do things
that, in other contexts, they would shy away from:
run through thorn bushes, jump into cold water and expose themselves
to risks which would normally frighten them.
All these inhibitory mechanisms act as a counterweight
to the effects of learning mechanisms.
The organism cannot allow itself to pay a price which is not worth paying.”
“A closer examination shows that these beings not only do not damage each other,
but often constitute a community of interests.
It is obvious that the predator is strongly interested
in the survival of that species, animal or vegetable,
which constitutes its prey.
It is not uncommon that the prey species derives specific benefits
from its interaction with the predator species.”
“The pace of human ecology is determined by the progress of man’s technology.
It is governed by mechanisms of positive feedback,
defined as a mechanism which tends to encourage behavior
rather than to attenuate it.
One particular kind of positive feedback occurs
when individuals of the same species enter into competition among themselves...
For many animal species, environmental factors
keep intraspecies selection from leading to disaster.
But there is no such force
which exercises this type of healthy regulatory effect
on humanity’s cultural development; all the advantages that man has gained
from his ever-deepening understanding of the natural world that surrounds him,
his technological, chemical and medical progress,
all of which should seem to alleviate human suffering...
tends instead to favor humanity’s destruction.”
Yet...
“A completely new ecology (Economy)
which corresponds in every way to humanity’s desires...
could, theoretically, prove as durable as that ecology
which would have existed without his intervention.”
(Carl Sagan) We were wanderers from the beginning.
When the fruits or nuts were ripe, we were there.
We followed the herds in their annual migrations.
We rejoiced in fresh meat. A few of us cooperating
accomplished what many of us each hunting alone could not.
Making it on our own was as ludicrous to imagine as was settling down.
Working together, we protected our children from the lions and the hyenas.
We taught them the skills they would need and the tools.
Then, as now, technology was the key to our survival.
It might be a familiar progression, transpiring on many worlds.
A planet newly-formed placidly revolves around its star.
Life slowly forms.
A kaleidoscopic procession of creatures evolves.
Intelligence emerges, which at least up to a point,
confers enormous survival value. And then technology is invented.
It dawns on them that there are such things as laws of nature,
and these laws can be revealed by experiment
and that knowledge of these laws can be made both to save
and to take lives, both on unprecedented scales.
Science, they recognize, grants immense powers.
In a flash they create world-altering contrivances.
Some planetary civilizations see their way through,
place limits on what may and what must not be done
and safely pass through the time of the perils.
Others, not so lucky or so prudent, perish.