Robotic Free Will

A Thought…

We round our numbers. Nature doesn’t.

— Bill Appledorf

Robotic Free Will

Posted on 2026-May-17 at 19:14:00 by Phil

In the 2012 (Season 7) Futurama episode titled Free Will Hunting (a pun on the movie title Good Will Hunting), Bender is troubled by the proposition that as a robot, he does not truly have free will. That is, his actions are strictly controlled by his programming, and he (and all other robots) are incapable of freely choosing a course of action.

This brings up the interesting question of whether some deterministic “machine” (not necessarily a “robot”) can act in a manner which would convincingly imitate their having some sort of “free will”; that is, not the same choice or response each and every time, nor acting in a completely (unpredictable) random manner. Think of it as something of a behavioral Turing Test.

I believe that it is possible to do this, to make a computer (or the like) behave in a manner which cannot easily be told apart from human free will. First, there must be two or more choices (courses of action) to choose from. If there is only one thing that can possibly be done (else the laws of physics would be violated, for instance), that “choice” must be made. Note that this does not preclude ridiculous, illegal, or fatal choices — real people make those all the time! But your robot cannot choose to fall upwards.

Second, the robot needs to assign some sort of weight or likelihood to each possible choice, adding up to 100%. Just as people could assign different likelihoods to different choices, based on their emotional makup, life experiences, education, genetics, family dynamics, and societal pressures and taboos; two different robots could assign different values to their choices, especially if they have near-human emotions and situations like the robots in Futurama. If you and I were asked to go bungee jumping off a bridge, I might assign 5% chance to “yes” and 95% to “no”, but you might be far more adventurous and reverse the weightings! 19 times out of 20, I would not jump, and you would.

So now we have two (or more) robots faced with the same choices, but weighting them differently for whatever reason(s). The third ingredient is to randomly generate a number between 0.0 and 1.0, using it to pick the choice, according to which choice's range it falls within. The robots need not order the choices in the same order, nor do they need to share the same random number. The most random choice would be something like watching radioactive decay, but a good pseudo-random number generator, evenly-distributed, with a very long period should be just as convincing. However it’s arrived at, this should give a good imitation of free will — not making the same choice in every single run, but not behaving in a totally random and chaotic manner. Plus, “good” (reasonable) choices should be made much more often than bad choices (for most people or robots), but making a bad choice once in a while will happen, and that’s a very human thing to do!

So, will Bender truly have Free Will? If the random number generator used is quite good, and choices are weighted in a reasonable manner, I think it will be a sufficiently good imitation of Free Will. After all, how do people decide what to do? It may very well be much the same process!

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A Thought…

Robotic Free Will

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