Response Final Draft

In “Boundaries between humans and machines”, Bruemmer discussed the effect and identity
of humanoids(human-like robot). He stated that the emergence of humanoids would truly alter
our society, but will not in a drastic and violent way. As the universal anxiety about robot
uprising is rather chimerical, what we should confront may be a convoluted situation,
intertwining lifestyle, ethnics and responsibility. As a response, two important issues I would
like to talk about are humanoids’ emotions and the future relationships between humanoids.

The first issue concerns to humanoids’ emotions. Bruemmer maintained that “if we want
useful, human-like robots, we will have to give them some motivational system…humanoids
are merely simulating emotion using algorithms whose output controls facial degrees of
freedom, tones of voice, body posture, and other physical manifestations of emotion”, by
which he means humanoids’ emotions can be regarded as a motivational system for a
pragmatic purpose since it merely equals to an imitation of human behavior. This idea applies
to the famous thought experiment “Chinese room argument”, in which a non-Chinese man in
a sequestered room can input and output in Chinese by means of dictionary and without
understanding the meaning. That is to say, artificial intelligence is built on an interpretation of
anthropic behavior and language into 0-1 binary system. This parroting mechanism veiled the
fact that machine-computer doesn’t really construe human profound emotion utterly, its
plausible behavior was merely a deduced conclusion from the data it collects which would
impede its ability to develop of developing a holistic human-like behavior.

The second concept is about the future relationships between humans and humanoids.
Bruemmer harbors a sanguine perspective of foreseeable future that “most likely, humanoids
will never rise up and wrest control from our hands” if we “decide the direction” before it’s too
late. In other words, he thinks we shouldn’t worry about the humanoids as long as we can
control them. Even I agree with the author that humanoids are controllable and predictable for
now, I have to suspect that the author’s argument could contain a tendency of being overly
optimistic and oversimplifying the repercussions. As we all know, developing technology is
not linear, although today’s human-like robots seem unnatural and clumsy, the emerging
technology may reach its technological turning point and undergo a rapid increase with
restructuring and redirecting. Consequently, creature can redefine the creator, if we assume the
intelligent humanoids would be realized someday, the humanoids are going to change humans’
relationship not only with machines, but also with ourselves. The whole identity of human will
be challenged by the artificial intelligence encrusted with metal appearance.

To summarize, despite some negligible discrepancies with the author, generally, I agree with
his view. We should not be too worried about humanoids as long as they only have a pragmatic
“emotion”, emotion that is based on rudimentary imitation. However, when it comes to the
future, it can be either promising or bleak. As we consider ourselves is unique from other
animals due to the abilities to emote and think, given humanoids can also possess theses
abilities, should we redefine ourselves or just embrace them as new members of the human
race?
Examples Explanation/ details
Paraphrasing
Summarize the author’s attitude to the topic I think it would be inappropriate to get
with few sentences, along with my general into details in the first paragraph, so I
response. only use few sentences to introduce the
topic and author’s argument in the first
paragraph. Also, I summarize the topics I
would response to in the following
paragraphs, as it would give a brief
introduce to the reader.
Quoted the author’s words, and paraphrase When I try to introduce the author’s
into my own words. opinion about humanoids’ emotion, I
found that hard to give a vivid picture of
it. So I quote him first and paraphrase his
view as explaining to the reader, so that
they would have a better understanding
about what the author and me are trying
to talk about.
Paraphrasing the author’s idea with partly In paraphrasing the author’s idea about
quotation. the future of humanoids, I try to use a
new method of “partly quotation” since
his view was discrete, separated in many
sentence. Then, I paraphrase his view
again in my words to make clear of what
he is talking about.
Collocations
Emotion(n.) I use emotion for eight times in my
Verb + emotion: passage, as emotion is a major topic I’m
Construe emotion discussing about, but almost all emotion
Adj + emotion: in the earlier draft refer to “human
Profound emotion emotion”, I guess I can improve it by
different collocations.

Technology(n.) The passage is about technology, but in

Adj + technology earlier draft I use “technology” without
Existing technology any collocations, so I changed that
Verb + technology problem in the final draft.
Develop technology

Future(n.) The future is another topic I usually used,

Adj + future but in the passage, “future” was only
Foreseeable future collocated with “the”, so I replaced with
some other adjectives.
Signal phrases/ reporting language
Bruemmer suggested that The following words quoted was more
Into like an argument instead of suggestion.
Bruemmer maintained that So I changed the word.
He argued that In the first paragraph the “stated” will be
Into more formal than “argued”.
He stated that
Bruemmer harbors a sanguine perspective I read this in my miserable GRE
reading…its quite fancy, I decide to use it
in my own passage.