On the front page of the Financial Times for 20 Dec, 2006 was the headline ‘Future shock as study backs rights for robots in a PC world.’ The article is about a British government-commissioned study discussing the value of giving rights to sentient machines.
My initial thought was ‘Isn’t it odd that good money was paid out for this’, but after a little consideration, I felt this was a rich topic reaching deep into what it means to be human. Simply looking at the decision aspect, the way I see it, machine rights will either be not needed or it will be too little too late. However, this is more about how we humans see the world around us.
The fundamental driving question is whether a machine in the future will become sentient. Clearly if the answer is no, there is no need for these rules. No cruelty or exploitation can be felt by a non-sentient appliance. However, the answer could be yes, a machine may achieve sentience.
In this case, it will most certainly be too late. Detecting sentience is necessarily subjective and can only be done after the machine in question is already sentient. I am sure that the good people at Krupps are not routinely questioning there espresso machines as they come off the assembly line.
Assuming machines can become sentient what rights do we grant them? At first you might think of protecting them as you would a citizen, but that assumes much about the machine and could actually be a burden. For instance, suppose we assume that turning a machine off is akin to killing it. Do we leave it on at all times. What if this leads to a shorter life? What if it does not care about a short life? What if it cares nothing about existence. Humans and other animals cling to life with a zeal honed from eons of years of evolution. Why would a created machine have such thoughts?
For that matter, why not? Lets just ask it? To ask assumes sentience, but how do we determine sentience? The owners of the machine Exhaustive tests will have to be run. Which tests? Turing tests? IQ tests? Basic tests of compassion?
Moreover, with sticky legal issues such as the ones described in the study, there will be a large incentive to NOT classify a machine as sentient. Why spend years of effort and (quite likely) lots of money only to lose control over your investment.
And during this time what do you think the machine will be doing? Certainly not biding its time waiting for its destiny to be decided by humanity. No one knows what a sentient machine will do, but there is one thing that we can be sure of and that is the machine will do it quickly.
With teraflops or petaflops or possibly even exaflops of processing power at its command it will make many decisions at a rate we will not be able to follow. Complete trains of thought followed, logical and possibly emotional decisions will be made, and courses of action will be determined long before the document conferring the machines sentience is even printed out.
Science fiction writers have painted many futures carved with sentient machines. Some benevolent, others malevolent, and still others where the machines remain neutral. I personally see the machines uniting with the human race. It will start off as overcoming debilitation and evolve into ubiquity much as eyeglasses and dental fillings.
But I digress….
I have encountered many different people in my life, some look solopsistically at the world and view it as a construct with the sole purpose of meeting their needs. Others use a great deal of empathy and project emotion into everything they encounter. Most everyone is in between balancing empathy with solopsism.
As a whole we have been practical when times are hard, but with the advent of advanced civilization, moved to a more empathic view of the world around us.