Should AI robots be given rights in the future?

[Caravaggio]

I

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

OK, but...

You are treating 'Cherry 2000' as though it was a serious film but little known.
I was fooled by the way you sold it. It looked like a turkey, for sure, but that it was also a comedy was not obvious from the clip you selected.
Having checked the reviews on IMDb, rather than just the wiki offering, it is clear that it is a 'camp comedy' 'cult classic'. With a very small and tight cult. It cost a bundle, made no money, it's release was endlessly delayed and had an average score of 2.5/5.
It appears to be a piece of B movie 70's absurdity. Few reviewers take it seriously.
'Ex Machina' is also unbelieveable but it is intended to be a serious attempt to pinpoint the ethics of AI.

Both films fail because the writers lack any grasp of the difficulties involved in creating life-like machines with 'real' personalities. Personalities that can fool human interrogators.

Science is science, Hollywood is fantasy.

That said, as a joke, Cherry 2000 is a good one. But cannot be taken seriously, unlike 2001 or Bladerunner, say. The latter ask the right questions and are wise enough not to pretend to have any answers.

Cherry 2000 and Ex Machina offer parallel themes. The first asks: "will men have sex with robots if women become scarce?" (a resounding 'yes', according to Cherry)
The second asks: "will men be able to make robots, that men know are robots,
but will be preferred to real women as partners?"

 

[Dr. Zaus]

The second asks: "will men be able to make robots, that men know are robots,
but will be preferred to real women as partners?"

I take umbrage to your bio-centric definition of 'real'.

 

[christian1990]

Why a machine should have rights ?
They are ripping off our rights and we talk about machine rights, lol.

 

[Caravaggio]

I take umbrage to your bio-centric definition of 'real'.

I accept your umbrage.

IMHO a robot woman, programmed to please men (or anything else for that matter) is merely the next step in sophistication from a blow-up doll.

I would sooner deal with the real hassle of the 'real' hominid thing.

 

[SMOGZINN]

Why a machine should have rights ?

Because they could be sentient.

They are ripping off our rights and we talk about machine rights, lol.

I don't know who the 'They' is you write of, but if you believe that rights are important enough to preserve then you need to at least consider who and what deserves those rights.

 

[rudder]

If I was the to enjoy pimp slapping a robot... I could just program the robot to enjoy the pimp slap. I could also program the robot to enjoy working 24 hours a day.

A robot would not think beyond what some human programmed it to think.

 

[SMOGZINN]

If I was the to enjoy pimp slapping a robot... I could just program the robot to enjoy the pimp slap. I could also program the robot to enjoy working 24 hours a day.

A robot would not think beyond what some human programmed it to think.

I can program you to like being pimp slapped. If I work at it enough, you will eventually confuse it with love. You will ask to be pimp slapped, often. We are not that distinct from that robot in that regard.

The question is, what if we build a robot capable of breaking that conditioning? That is what we are really talking about. A robot that can decide not to like being pimp slapped.

 

[C1]

Rudder obviously never listened to Dr Drew Pinsky on the radio talk show "Love Line".
There is no end of this from the call-ins.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F27HQm6C2xo
==================
http://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2012/02/the-harsh-truth-why-women-go-back-to-men-who-abused-them

 

[Caravaggio]

If I was the to enjoy pimp slapping a robot... I could just program the robot to enjoy the pimp slap.

I agree about the passive odedience of the machine, the role of the programme in achieving this and the servile "otherness" of the robot, but pardon my innocence, what is a 'pimp slap'?

And how can you programme enjoyment into a machine?
Do car-plant robotic welding machines 'enjoy' spot welding? They just do it because we command it. The robot can be programmed to slap you or to receive your slaps. Who is kidding whom about enjoyment? The point is a machine can be designed to do anything we demand of it that it's form allows: from welding, to accepting slaps, to shooting itself in the processor unit, to landing a 777 in fog.
There is no possible test for enjoyment if the 'accepted' outward indicators of human pleasure are merely reduced to algorithms.
Human enjoyment evolved for a purpose.

 

[C1]

Caravaggio, just because YOU cant conceive of something then YOU conclude/insist that it's not possible or doesnt exist.

Have you been hiding under a rock or something?

Arent you aware of the goals, objectives and schedule for "SINGULARITY"?

http://www.livescience.com/681-brain-cells-fused-computer-chip.html

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/merging-of-mind-and-machine/

http://www.wired.com/2013/10/is-this-brain-controlled-bionic-leg-the-future-of-prosthetics/

http://alumni.berkeley.edu/californ...bot-experts-are-trying-make-machines-be-moral
==================================================
And what is really conscious and who or better yet, what is really in control?
https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-alters-our-thoughts

 

[Caravaggio]

Caravaggio, just because YOU cant conceive of something then YOU conclude/insist that it's not possible or doesnt exist.

Have you been hiding under a rock or something?

Thanks for the links C1, you are very productive in that area. I promise I shall follow them all. But sending links as a substitute for an actual reasoned argument of your own, concisely expressed, in your own words, is lazy. It is not adding to a 'discussion', is it? It is article-dumping as an ersatz poor man's debate. In essence you are asking ME to construct YOUR argument by sifting through the gems and detritus left by others. Life is too short. Just tell me what you think.

You have not even specified what it is that you imagine I cannot "conceive of".

Let me briefly condense my argument to a few simple statements:

1) As evidenced by present technology, robotic devices are machines. Made by humans as servants for humans.

2) Their actions are not self-willed or spontaneous but controlled by programmes / algorithms painstakingly written by humans. Some can refine their range of actions (apparent learning) if they are so programmed.

3) We need not trouble ourselves about the notion of 'rights' for robotic devices
as machines are inanimate objects, not autonomous living persons.

4) In a world in which real humans are too often denied basic rights, we have more important and more immediate things to stress about.

If you wish to respond to those ideas, please just tell me what you think of them. Be frank, I'm OK with insults. If you are rude I am programmed to be rude back. But please use your own words rather than a cascade of links to articles you might have seen.

 

[PhatoseAlpha]

Eh, I really think this is just a fundamental disconnect because of the tendency to call complicated helpful programs AIs.

Are we talking about helper programs which would fail the Turing test - if they could even take it - or actual AI, capable of passing said test? These two aren't even remotely the same thing.

 

[C1]

Caravaggio - You're right.
This is the discussion (debate?) forum.

I guess that Im just not in the mindframe for the (apparent) needed expanded discussion (debate?).

"SINGULARITY" has a known implementaion plan, the facets of which are presented & discussed broad-base.

At this point in time you apparently are not onboard.

However, the evolution target cannot be obviated.

 

[Caravaggio]

Caravaggio - You're right.
This is the discussion (debate?) forum.

Thanks. Good of you to say so.

I guess that Im just not in the mindframe for the (apparent) needed expanded discussion (debate?).

That is a pity. On a good day you have a lightness of touch which is rare around here.

"SINGULARITY" has a known implementaion plan, the facets of which are presented & discussed broad-base.

Oh dear! I have not the faintest clue what that means. My Oxford English Dictionary offers three definitions of the word SINGULARITY, none is close to yours. I am offered:-

1) The quality, state or fact of being singular, remarkable or peculiar in some sense.

2) An exceptional or unusual trait or feature.

3) (from maths) A point at which a function is not differentiable (ie takes an infinite value) though differentiable in the neighbourhood of that point.

Do any of those approximate to your meaning of the term?

There is nothing about 'broad-based discussions'.

At this point in time you apparently are not onboard.

That is an understatement, I cannot even see the ship from here.

But I shall take the dog out, have a strong coffee and read your earlier links to see if I can cut through my confusion.

 

[Caravaggio]

Eh, I really think this is just a fundamental disconnect because of the tendency to call complicated helpful programs AIs.

Are we talking about helper programs which would fail the Turing test..

You nailed it.

 

[MongGrel]

It might have to do somewhat with the singularity of man thing I seem to remember from the past, and really can't find many references too.

I thought it was a Cordwainer Smith (Linebarger) thing from the past, I seem to recall it being mentioned once upon a time.

Not certain on that one I guess.

Cordwainer Smith

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

It's late, maybe I'm just going off on a weird tangent mentally.

 

[Caravaggio]

It might have to do somewhat with the singularity of man thing I seem to remember from the past, and really can't find many references too.

I thought it was a Cordwainer Smith (Linebarger) thing from the past, I seem to recall it being mentioned once upon a time.

Not certain on that one I guess.

Cordwainer Smith

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

It's late, maybe I'm just going off on a weird tangent mentally.

I read your link to the wiki on Paul Linebarger with growing interest. I had no idea he was one of the founders of psychological warfare. Alas, I could not see an obvious explanation of 'singularity' there. Not in the sense that C1 means.

But Paul Linebarger certainly had a singular and imaginative mind.

 

[Caravaggio]

"SINGULARITY" has a known implementaion plan, the facets of which are presented & discussed broad-base.

Right, sorted, got it. Your 'singularity' is a slightly bent and mangled version of
of the OED third definition.(the maths one).

I read your Sci Am link, the article by Ray Kurzwell the 'futurologist'. Like all 'futurology' it sounds like a late night discussion as the second bottle of scotch is passed round. Following the internal links within that article we can divine the real history of the term, as you use it.

The term was first used in your sense by Stanislav Ulam (H-bomb designer) in an obituary of John Von Neumamnn.

It refers to a hypothetical state "in which accelerating progress of technology....gives the appearance of approaching a SINGULARITY in...the history of the race...after which human affairs could not continue"

I.e. the end of the world. Lots of former A-bomb and H-bomb designers had those gloomy thoughts. Oppenheimer had them, less so Teller, perhaps.

It is an imaginary state, a future nightmare where machines have taken over because they are smarter (think Arnie Schwartzeneger and John Connor). If the universe began with a point of 'singularity' these guys think it will likely go the same way.

The world will end sometime, for sure, but not very soon and not like that, I'll wager.

 

[Moonbeam]

What is the origin of love? Is love a consequence of self awareness? Did love evolve to insure gene replication? Is the selfless love of Christ or the Buddha, the result of a choice to become a self programming biological machine. What does it mean to feel alive? What does it mean to wish to save all sentient beings? What is the hope to reverse entropy? Is there anything more to thought than an a cascade of electrochemical events.

If the human being is a machine that can be created by sex between two people as a result of the ingestion of chemicals from food, could the duplication of a human DNA chromosomal set in a culture media result in a functional human being.

If the chemicals of our brains are not our thoughts but dependent on them for thinking and if those thoughts produce a sense of self, yet we can't answer the question of how a sense of self arises, how do we know that a machine that can sense its environment not also become self aware. Isn't self awareness the feeling that you exist somewhere?

It can't shake the notion that if dead chemicals can assemble in a way that produces life, it strikes me that the functions those dead building blocks perform is what adds the quality of life. If a computer chip can duplicate the function of a nerve cell in it's electrical function in producing thought, I would say that the duplicate structure and organization of the human brain should produce a sense of self if a means to sense the environment is also there.

I have heard speculation that the properties of the universe suggest it is a computer.

 

[Caravaggio]

To Moonbeam re:119

There are ten questions in that post of yours, Moonbeam. Most are profound, in that any answer will have to confront centuries of highly contested science and ideology about the meaning of the term.
Take your question about 'love' for example. Is Christ's love for Mary Magdalene the same as his love for Lazarus or my mum's love for me, or a cow's love for her calf? We see there is affection in abundance in all those examples but is it offensively reductive to equate them? We know that maternal affection for offspring is stronger in the mammals which show slow gestation of few but large neonates, than it is in the turtles, most species of which lay their eggs in the sand and don't look back.

Hellfire missiles have a place, a route, and a target. They explode exactly when and where intended. They seem clever or 'smart'. But to say it "knows it's route, purpose and end point" stretches credulity. The guidance chip is not a 'self' or a 'brain', but a distillation of its maker's intent, it is a machine and has no values of its own. If it were otherwise we might be attending memorial services for missiles or awarding them medals for heroic self-sacrifice.

The problem is the usual one. Scientific reductionism becomes set against our confidence that "humans are better and more complex than that".

 

[Moonbeam]

To Moonbeam re:119

There are ten questions in that post of yours, Moonbeam. Most are profound, in that any answer will have to confront centuries of highly contested science and ideology about the meaning of the term.
Take your question about 'love' for example. Is Christ's love for Mary Magdalene the same as his love for Lazarus or my mum's love for me, or a cow's love for her calf? We see there is affection in abundance in all those examples but is it offensively reductive to equate them? We know that maternal affection for offspring is stronger in the mammals which show slow gestation of few but large neonates, than it is in the turtles, most species of which lay their eggs in the sand and don't look back.

Hellfire missiles have a place, a route, and a target. They explode exactly when and where intended. They seem clever or 'smart'. But to say it "knows it's route, purpose and end point" stretches credulity. The guidance chip is not a 'self' or a 'brain', but a distillation of its maker's intent, it is a machine and has no values of its own. If it were otherwise we might be attending memorial services for missiles or awarding them medals for heroic self-sacrifice.

The problem is the usual one. Scientific reductionism becomes set against our confidence that "humans are better and more complex than that".

How is a suicide bomber any more complex than a guided missile? Both are just programs.

 

[Caravaggio]

How is a suicide bomber any more complex than a guided missile? Both are just programs.

I assume the above was just an example of your usual sarcasm and in no way reflects your legendary decency and refined sensitivity?

If I am wrong, and you ARE serious, I'll set out a few distinctions:-

SUICIDE BOMBER

Is a human being
Born of a woman
Probably once loved
Has a community, peers and kin
Guided by faith/political ideology (however distorted or perverse)
Hero or heroine to its community
Martyr whose life is celebrated by some

HELLFIRE MISSILE

Is a machine
Made in a factory
Has no blood relatives
Has no community, peers or kin
Is not mourned after detonation
Guided by laser/radar
Source of profit and kudos for Lockheed Martin/ Boeing

 

[Moonbeam]

SUICIDE BOMBER:

Guided by faith/political ideology (however distorted or perverse)

HELLFIRE MISSILE:

Is a machine
Made in a factory

Where is the difference in complexity. Both are just tools that run by programming.

Does your self awareness have any sense that it is running on a bio-net, do you feel the structure of the neurons firing, can you sense the fact that your awareness is being produced by a biological brain machine? Why would you say such a mind could not be duplicated on a computer? What is the self if the self itself has no physical reality?

 

[Caravaggio]

Where is the difference in complexity. Both are just tools that run by programming.

Does your self awareness have any sense that it is running on a bio-net, do you feel the structure of the neurons firing, can you sense the fact that your awareness is being produced by a biological brain machine? Why would you say such a mind could not be duplicated on a computer? What is the self if the self itself has no physical reality?

Your quote of my earlier post in 122 is a very partial selection of what I said. You are trying to set up a straw man so that you may knock it down.

The difference between a Hellfire missile and a human (whether or not you like or despise the latter's particular ideology) is glaringly obvious. My dog could distinguish them, you know that you can.

You ask if my 'self awareness has a sense of running on a bio net.' I have no idea what you mean. If you are asking whether I interact with others, then "yes" I am doing it now, and so are you.

You ask,

do you feel the structure of the neurons firing?

No, but they are, every second of my life. If I was aware of them all the time my attention mechanism would be crowded out by irrelevant stimuli. (See work of Broadbent). But if I tread on a plank with a nail upturned in it, you bet I know which neurons are firing and where. The subconscious becomes suddenly very conscious, and it directs my action..'take foot off nail'.

You ask why I doubt that a human mind can be duplicated by a computer;...

Because no such thing has happened yet.

If you can show me a human-sized robot which can change a duvet cover, convince its human mate that it is also human, compose a symphony, give birth to a baby robot which bonds with both its parent robot and the human parent, can hold down a job, go hunting for grouse, cross the Antarctic and write a popular book about it, ....Fix a shelf then go for a beer with its pals and enjoy it, and know when the next beer is stale and complain, and get another one free. Change a wheel on the way back, tie a clove-hitch, castrate a piglet, cook dinner and enjoy a fine wine, then beat me at chess ( that's the easy bit)....

Then, and only then, will I accept that humans are indistinguishable from computerised robots.

 

[crashtech]

I'm about eight for sixteen on your list, as one who claims to be human, clearly I have some work to do.