The rise of smart machines puts spotlight on 'robot rights'
The rise of smart machines puts spotlight on 'robot
rights'
Are computers on their way to becoming people?
by Dan Falk / Dec.04.2017 / 6:20 AM ET
You probably wouldn’t have any qualms about switching off
Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri — or Amazon’s Alexa or Microsoft’s Cortana.
Such entities emulate a human assistant but plainly aren't human at all. We sense
that beneath all the sophisticated software, there’s “nobody home.”
But artificial intelligence is progressing swiftly. In
the not-too-distant future we may begin to feel that our machines have
something akin to thoughts and feelings, even though they’re made of metal and
plastic rather than flesh and blood. When that happens, how we treat our
machines will matter; AI experts, philosophers, and scholars are already
imagining a time when robots and intelligent machines may deserve — and be
accorded — some sort of rights.
These wouldn’t necessarily be human rights, since these
new beings won’t exactly be human. But “if you’ve got a computer or a robot
that’s autonomous and self-aware, I think it would be very hard to say it's not
a person,” says Kristin Andrews, a philosopher at York University in Toronto,
Canada.
Which raises a host of difficult ethical questions. How
should we treat a robot that has some degree of consciousness? What if we’re
convinced that an AI program has the capacity to suffer emotionally, or to feel
pain? Would shutting it off be tantamount to murder?
After centuries of treating our machines as mere tools,
we may find ourselves in a strange new world in which our interactions with
machines take on a moral dimension.
ROBOTS VS. APES
An obvious comparison is to the animal rights movement.
Animal rights advocates have been pushing for a reassessment of the legal
status of certain animals, especially the great apes. Organizations like the
Coral Springs, Florida-based Nonhuman Rights Project believe that chimpanzees,
gorillas, and orangutans deserve to be treated as autonomous persons, rather
than mere property.
Steven Wise, who leads the organization’s legal team,
says that the same logic applies to any autonomous entity, living or not. If we
one day have sentient robots, he says, “we should have the same sort of moral
and legal responsibilities toward them that we’re in the process of developing
with respect to nonhuman animals.”
Of course, deciding which machines deserve moral
consideration will be tricky, because we often project human thoughts and
feelings onto inanimate entities — and so end up sympathizing with entities
that have no thoughts or feelings at all.
Consider Spot, a doglike robot developed by Boston
Dynamics. Earlier this year, the Waltham, Massachusetts-based company released
a video showing employees kicking the four-legged machine. The idea was to show
off Spot’s remarkable balance. But some people saw it as akin to animal
cruelty. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), for example,
issued a statement describing Spot’s treatment as “inappropriate.”
Kate Darling, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, observed something similar when she studied how
people interact with Pleo, a toy dinosaur robot. Pleo doesn’t look particularly
lifelike — it’s obviously a toy. But it’s programmed to act and speak in ways
that suggest not only a form of intelligence but also the ability to experience
suffering. If you hold Pleo upside-down, for example, it will whimper and tell
you to stop.
In an effort to see just how far we might go in extending
compassion to simple robots, Darling encouraged participants at a recent
workshop to play with Pleo — and then asked them to destroy it. Almost all
refused. “People are primed, subconsciously, to treat robots like living
things, even though on a conscious level, on a rational level, we totally
understand that they’re not real,” Darling says.
While neither Pleo nor Spot can feel pain, Darling
believes it’s worth paying attention to how we treat these entities. “If it is
disturbing to us to behave violently towards them — if there’s something that
feels wrong about it — maybe that’s a piece of our empathy that we don’t want
to turn off, because it could influence how we treat other living things,” she
says. (This is a key question raised by the TV series Westworld, in which
guests at a theme park are encouraged to treat ultra-lifelike humanoid robots
however they please.)
CONVERSING WITH ROBOTS
For now, of course, mistreating Pleo or any other
existing robot is no crime — as long as you’re the owner. But what about
mistreating a bot that we believed really had some form of consciousness? And
how would we be able to tell if a machine has a mind in the first place?
Computer science pioneer Alan Turing pondered this
question half a century ago. The way Turing saw it, we can never know for sure
what a machine is feeling or experiencing — so our best bet is simply to see if
we can carry on a conversation with it just as if it were human (what we now
call the Turing test).
Given the complexity of human conversation, building a
machine capable of engaging in lengthy verbal exchanges is a daunting task. But
if we could build such a machine, Turing argued, we ought to treat it as though
it’s a thinking, feeling being.
Mark Goldfeder, an Atlanta-based rabbi and Emory
University law professor, has reached a similar conclusion: If an entity acts
human, he wrote recently, “I cannot start poking it to see if it bleeds. I have
a responsibility to treat all that seem human as humans, and it is better to
err on the side of caution from an ethical perspective.”
The obvious conclusion is that rights ought to be
accorded not on the basis of biology but on something even more fundamental:
personhood.
WHAT RIGHTS?
If we wind up recognizing some intelligent machine as a
person, which legal rights would we be obliged to bestow on it? If it could
pass the Turing test, we might feel it would deserve at least the right to
continued existence. But Robert Sparrow, a philosopher at Monash University in
Melbourne, Australia, thinks that’s just the beginning. What happens, he
wonders, if a machine's “mind” is even greater than a human's? In a piece that
appeared recently on TheCritique.com, he writes: “Indeed, not only would it be
just as wrong to kill a machine that could pass the Turing test as to kill an
adult human being, but, depending on the capacities of the machine, it might
even be more wrong.”
Maybe that makes sense from the perspective of pure
logic. But Ryan Calo, an expert in robotics and cyber law at the University of
Washington in Seattle, says our system of laws is unlikely to bend that far.
“Our legal system reflects our basic biology,” he says. If we one day invent
some sort of artificial person, “it would break everything about the law, as we
understand it today.”
For Andrews, the key issue is the entity’s right to have
its own interests recognized. Of course, it may be tricky determining what
those interests are — just as it can be hard for people from one culture to
understand the desires of people from another. But when we recognize something
as a person, we’re obligated to at least try to do the right thing, she says.
“If we realize that something is actually a ‘someone,’ then we have to take
their interests into account.”
And perhaps it’s not so far-fetched to imagine that those
interests might include continued existence — in which case we might want to
think twice before reaching for the off button.
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