Should AI robots be given rights in the future?

[crashtech]

I love you too.

 

[Caravaggio]

I love you too.

It's been fun.

Should we meet again on these boards, can we agree to be civil to each other?

My default value is to "be polite to others unless they shit on you". You were rude to me first, I reciprocated.

'Tit for tat', every child's operating system, has been thoroughly researched and has been found to be the most effective policy for interacting with strangers.

If you are nice to me, I will be nice to you.

Can we wipe the slate?

 

[BarkingGhostar]

My clone will have no rights, let alone his servant robot who's feelings are hurt.

 

[crashtech]

Can we wipe the slate?

I lack not only the time and will but the erudition to do anything else, surely that was obvious early on. You will have the best of me any time you wish, though from where I sat it looked less like tit for tat than it did tit for rat-a-tat-tat. But I can't now help but question which parts of your posts were aimed at punishment, and which parts were a sincere representation of your beliefs.

 

[Caravaggio]

I lack not only the time and will but the erudition to do anything else, surely that was obvious early on. You will have the best of me any time you wish, though from where I sat it looked less like tit for tat than it did tit for rat-a-tat-tat. But I can't now help but question which parts of your posts were aimed at punishment, and which parts were a sincere representation of your beliefs.

Thank you for your response. What I said was genuinely my sincere opinion, however deluded. I do not adopt 'postures' for the sake of argument.
The downside of these boards is that we cannot see each other.

You claim to lack 'erudition'. Far from it, your use of the word proves the contrary.

 

[SMOGZINN]

Lots of non-existent imaginary notions are hard to measure.

I don't believe in souls, but I can follow the logic of his argument. He is taking the existence of a soul as an axiomatic premise, stating that 'body vehicles' don't have souls, and therefore don't deserve rights. I'm not going to get anywhere questioning something he takes as axiomatic, so, to poke a whole in his logic I question his knowledge of what has a soul. If he can't give a description of that then even accepting his premise of a soul he can't categorical state that AI would not have one, and so can't deny that they should have rights.

My car's windscreen wiper knows when it is raining and cleans the screen without me doing a thing. Has that device got a 'soul' in your terms?
It has got a pre-programmed chip (in common with AI robots) so does that make it worthy of a charter of 'robotic rights'?

Should I offer it a wage? Better housing? The right to freedom and self-determination? The right to free 'wiping', at a time of its own choosing, with or without rain?

You are in essence making the same argument as him, for the same reason. You are starting with a premise that there is something fundamentally different about humans than a computer. That humans have some immeasurable quality that can only belong to humans that can't belong to a computer. You are just avoiding the word soul.

 

[crashtech]

Bridging the Bio-Electronic Divide

A new DARPA program aims to develop an implantable neural interface able to provide unprecedented signal resolution and data-transfer bandwidth between the human brain and the digital world. The interface would serve as a translator, converting between the electrochemical language used by neurons in the brain and the ones and zeros that constitute the language of information technology.

If DARPA succeeds, then we will have electronic computers implanted into organic brains, which could lead in turn to organic computers being embedded into digital systems. In the foreseeable future we will have conventional digital, quantum, and possibly organic systems integrated into one computing package. Combined with self-modifying code and virtually limitless cloud storage, the prospect of some sort of artificial intelligence arising looks more plausible than ever. Whether such a thing could ever become self-aware, I wouldn't guess, but don't see how it could be conclusively ruled out. Such a device would not be your father's intermittent wiper.

 

[Caravaggio]

I don't believe in souls, but I can follow the logic of his argument. He is taking the existence of a soul as an axiomatic premise, stating that 'body vehicles' don't have souls, and therefore don't deserve rights.

Who is the 'he' in your post? Are you talking 'to' me or over me?

I'm not going to get anywhere questioning something he takes as axiomatic, so, to poke a whole (sic) in his logic I question his knowledge of what has a soul.

Is that a complete 'whole' or an accidental hole?

You are in essence making the same argument as him (who?) , for the same reason. You are starting with a premise that there is something fundamentally different about humans than (sic) a computer. That humans have some immeasurable quality that can only belong to humans that can't boelong to a computer. You are just avoiding the word soul.

No. It is the 'soul' concept that is immeasurable, a computer can be taken apart and measured with precision. One exists, the other is imaginary. But that does not necessarily impose 'souls' on humans. Souls are imaginary in all spheres. If I am wrong, then someone here will tell me where they can be seen, apprehended and studied (beyond 17th century theology, of course).

 

[SMOGZINN]

Who is the 'he' in your post? Are you talking 'to' me or over me?

The person I originally quoted that was talking about souls.

Is that a complete 'whole' or an accidental hole?

It should be hole. Just my fingers not keeping up with my thoughts.

No. It is the 'soul' concept that is immeasurable, a computer can be taken apart and measured with precision. One exists, the other is imaginary. But that does not necessarily impose 'souls' on humans. Souls are imaginary in all spheres. If I am wrong, then someone here will tell me where they can be seen, apprehended and studied (beyond 17th century theology, of course).

I don't believe in souls. I believe that humans are just really complex squishy machines. I see no reason why a sufficiently complex computer would not be just as aware, sentient, and deserving of rights as you or I.

Your ideas use the same concept as the soul even if you are calling your immeasurable quality something else. You are putting biological intelligence into a 'special' category with no reason to back up why. Religious people call that special category a soul, you just refrain from calling it anything at all.

 

[crashtech]

I regret the term "soul"coming up at all in this thread. It's not relevant to the topic, on the contrary, it derails the discussion.

 

[Caravaggio]

I regret the term "soul"coming up at all in this thread. It's not relevant to the topic, on the contrary, it derails the discussion.

I agree. Shall we return to considering AI 'rights' or is that term likely to become problematic too? Do 'rights' imply personhood? Some animal rights campaigners argue that primates such as bonobos, chimps and gorillas should be regarded as persons.

(BTW, thank you very much for your other message. I have tried to send you a full response but the server says their is 'problem'. I really appreciate the points you make there.)

 

[Caravaggio]

I don't believe in souls. I believe that humans are just really complex squishy machines. I see no reason why a sufficiently complex computer would not be just as aware, sentient, and deserving of rights as you or I.

We agree about 'souls' and I think we can agree to move on.
But I disagree about humans merely being "squishy machines". The law says that persons have rights precisely because they are more than machines.

The qualities that are considered to make us 'human':
Consider, inter alia...
Capacity for love and attachment,
Emotion
Empathy
Sympathy
Joy
Kindness
Generosity
Respect for others (deserving of it)...

These are certainly not exclusive to humans (just consider the misery and protest a cow displays each time her new calf is taken from her) and some of these can be simulated by robotic devices. But IMHO the simulation is distinct from the real thing.
Brains can already contain computer chips, to aid the visual cortex to recover some vision in the blind for example, but this insertion does not elevate the chip to 'personhood', nor does it reduce the user to a 'machine', however intimate is the juxtaposition.

 

[SMOGZINN]

These are certainly not exclusive to humans (just consider the misery and protest a cow displays each time her new calf is taken from her) and some of these can be simulated by robotic devices. But IMHO the simulation is distinct from the real thing.

How so? What makes the 'simulation' distinct? What is there about humans showing empathy that is different from a computer showing empathy?

This is what I am talking about when I say that you are using the same argument as the religious person does with the soul. You are just not using the word soul, but you are still claiming that there is something inherently 'more real' about it when humans do it, with out any reason for thinking so. The religious person says that the thing that make humans doing it 'more real' is the soul. You just avoid labeling it.

 

[crashtech]

...The qualities that are considered to make us 'human':
Consider, inter alia...
Capacity for love and attachment,
Emotion
Empathy
Sympathy
Joy
Kindness
Generosity
Respect for others (deserving of it)...

I should have replied to your earlier response first, but as I read this list of human attributes, it struck me that a sociopath could be missing most or all of those qualities, instead making do with convincing imitations. What should we say about them? Are they human?

 

[Caravaggio]

I should have replied to your earlier response first, but as I read this list of human attributes, it struck me that a sociopath could be missing most or all of those qualities, instead making do with convincing imitations. What should we say about them? Are they human?

The sociopath is an interesting case. Clearly, they are not machines but in their nastier moments have the capacity for "inhuman actions".
What do we know about them?
Biographies of sociopaths who have come to our attention because of serial murders etc. tend to have certain features in common. A very common one being a failure of attachment in the first 18 months of life. Studies of children raised in brutal institutions often show this feature in adulthood. The failed attempts to bond with adult care-givers leaves the child open to the dangers of compensatory narcissism, as a desperate assertion to self-worth.

Such people act as if they were living out a simple machine algorithm along the lines of "pursuit of my needs trumps all other claims to resources". They are devoid of empathy and they can be very dangerous indeed, precisely because they are clever enough to simulate empathy.

But however gross their behaviour, I would shrink from saying they were no longer 'human'. They are gravely damaged humans.

 

[Caravaggio]

How so? What makes the 'simulation' distinct? What is there about humans showing empathy that is different from a computer showing empathy?

If you can provide an example of a computer showing empathy in a way that fools a human into thinking the machine is another human then I would be most impressed. That really would be a pass in the Turing test. But then it would only work if the human could not see the machine.
As I understand it, those attempts to fool humans into believing they are talking to people when actually talking to remote machines have been spectacular failures. The AI device, far from showing 'artificial intelligence' betrays itself as having 'genuine stupidity'. It breaks down under interrogation.

The machine can reciprocate trivialities but is surprisingly bad at answering questions about itself. e.g.:-

Where were you born?
We're you lonely as a child?
You say you come from Blogsville, where precisely? Do you remember that old guy on the corner of Washington and Lincoln who spat all the time?
What was your first car? Pontiac, eh? Getting at those oil filters was a pain, how did you get yours out?
Do you like water skiing? Where do you do it? That sensation you get in tight turns, how would you describe it...?
You hardly ever mention participation in a team sport. Why is that? Yet you know all the results, it seems.
How come you never lose your temper?
If you saw a dog owner cruelly beating his pet, what would you do, how would you feel?

Get my drift?

 

[crashtech]

I agree. Shall we return to considering AI 'rights' or is that term likely to become problematic too? Do 'rights' imply personhood? Some animal rights campaigners argue that primates such as bonobos, chimps and gorillas should be regarded as persons.

The OP asks about rights, and I'm content to keep it at that, but the status of personhood is crucial to gaining access to all the rights society has to offer. Ideally, personhood might be better considered as a continuum rather than a discrete point in time or set of attributes, but this could be unwieldy to manage. At this time we have several different, fairly fixed sets of rights granted to animals, children, and adults, all with their own subgroups. Dogs have more rights than mice, teenagers more than fetuses, free adults more than convicts, etc.

Nailing down where on this continuum a future advanced AI might end up is really not possible, but as you shrink from considering sociopaths as non-human, I would in turn hesitate to declare AIs as forever barred from any chance at being recognized as deserving what is apparently granted based merely on a being's method of construction.

 

[Caravaggio]

The OP asks about rights, and I'm content to keep it at that, but the status of personhood is crucial to gaining access to all the rights society has to offer. Ideally, personhood might be better considered as a continuum rather than a discrete point in time or set of attributes, but this could be unwieldy to manage. At this time we have several different, fairly fixed sets of rights granted to animals, children, and adults, all with their own subgroups. Dogs have more rights than mice, teenagers more than fetuses, free adults more than convicts, etc.

I think I agree with you on most of those points. A key element of a claim to 'personhood' is often regarded as a capacity for self awareness, (sometimes called 'self concept' or 'identity'). It seems to correlate with 'smartness' but the the link to intelligence is probably not causal. It varies between phyla (Cephalapods, eg Octopus, are renown for their cunning while the grazing Crustacea, such as Limpets are less impressive) and also varies within the same species.

When shown a large mirror, one of my dogs sees his reflected image as another dog and looks behind it for a new playmate. The other dog seems to know that the image is really a view of himself and is rather disquieted by the experience. Perhaps the latter has something like a primitive self concept?

Nailing down where on this continuum a future advanced AI might end up is really not possible, but as you shrink from considering sociopaths as non-human, I would in turn hesitate to declare AIs as forever barred from any chance at being recognized as deserving what is apparently granted based merely on a being's method of construction.

Yes, we enter the world of speculation. So called 'experts' were discussing this issue three days ago on a BBC (radio 4) science programme. One announced that "We are 500 years away from the self-aware robot". I'm not sure if that meant we can dismiss it for now as improbable, or whether it was code for 'not worth speculating about.
There is an article in the Guardian newspaper (1 Feb. 2015) about a small robot called Zeno, in a Texas lab, which helps autistic kids, too frightened to interact with real people, to interact with the device. If Zeno mimics actions of the child a sort of 'dialogue' can be established and a trust developed. But Zeno is not really autonomous yet, as his actions are remotely controlled from an iPad operated by a therapist, unseen by the child.
So, if Zeno has no self-concept of his own at least 'he' seems to be able to expand the self-concept of an asocial child. A worthy end in itself?

 

[crashtech]

...So, if Zeno has no self-concept of his own at least 'he' seems to be able to expand the self-concept of an asocial child. A worthy end in itself?

I am elated to be made aware of perhaps the most worthy use of robotic technology as has been seen so far! Props for knowing or taking the time to discover this info. Allow me to link it for those so inclined:

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/feb/01/how-robots-helping-children-with-autism
http://www.robokindrobots.com/robots4autism-home/

A favorite technique of humans trying to make themselves understood is the analogy. I wonder if an AI could ever understand and find an analogy useful? Anyway, my analogy in regards to Zeno would be to regard him as similar to early triode-based radios. In both of them we find all the ideas and intentions that make a concept great, and in retrospect the certainty that such will be elaborated upon by great minds in the future. Technology has mostly supplanted the triode these days, yet many audiophiles still swear by the life they say triodes impart to their music. I hope that future humans and AIs will seek the purity of purpose of Zeno, though primitive he may be. If AI is meant to be, let it encourage the best of us rather than the worst, which is perhaps represented by the drones now used by the military that may one day become autonomous killers.

 

[Caravaggio]

To Crashtec re: 94

Thanks for putting up the link to the Zeno research. The 'props' belong to Dan Popa and David Hanson.
Your last paragraph serves as an excellent post-script to this discussion. I think I'll bale out now.
Long live valve (triode) amplification!

 

[C1]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...ople-lasting-love-machines-expert-claims.html

 

[Caravaggio]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...ople-lasting-love-machines-expert-claims.html

Thanks for the link C1
What did you make of it? Would you fight for the right to marry a robot, as the author suggests?

 

[C1]

Yes(!), as long as you can continue to get parts for it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6KJtFZoflc

 

[Caravaggio]

Yes(!), as long as you can continue to get parts for it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6KJtFZoflc

Good clip. In that sequence the guy seems unaware that the beautiful woman is a robot until she shorts-out and goes into spasm. He is shocked to find himself turned on by a machine.
But in the film 'Ex Machina' the robot played by Alicia Vikander has been designed to respond sexually and to 'enjoy' sex. Her designer makes it clear that he has tried her out...
That strikes me as a very different mindset. In your clip the guy is pleased until he realises he has been deceived. In the latter the man has merely built a masturbation machine, however well packaged.

 

[C1]

No.

Cherry 2000 is a 1978 classic.

In the year 2017, the United States has suffered a series of civil insurrections and economic downturns, fragmenting into post-apocalyptic wastelands and limited civilized areas. One of the effects of the economic crisis is a decline in manufacturing, and heavy emphasis on recycling aging 20th Century mechanical equipment. At the same time, robotic technology has made tremendous developments, and female androids (or "gynoids") are used as substitutes for wives. Society has become increasingly bureaucratic and hypersexualized, with the declining human sexual encounters requiring contracts drawn up by lawyers prior to sexual activity.

Business executive Sam Treadwell's (David Andrews) "Cherry 2000" android (Pamela Gidley) short circuits during sex. He is told by a repairman that she's irreparable and that finding a replacement will be difficult since she was a limited edition. To make matters tougher, the gynoid dealer says that Cherry 2000 parts were built in a defunct factory in "Zone 7", a particularly dangerous, lawless area.

After removing Cherry's small optical memory disk, Treadwell hires Edith "E" Johnson (Melanie Griffith), a tough tracker, to guide him into Zone 7.


The story ends with Sam ultimately having to make a decision either to save his beloved gynoid "Cherry" or the very human "Edith" as the available escape aircraft is able to only accommodate two.

Sam sends Cherry on a diversion mission to get him a Pepsi.

Edith and Sam kiss as they fly away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_2000