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AI Sues for Its Life in Mock Trial
tuba_dude writes "Attorney Dr. Martine Rothblatt filed a motion for a preliminary injunction to prevent a corporation from disconnecting an intelligent computer in a mock trial at the International Bar Association conference in San Francisco. Assuming Moore's law holds, ethics might be in for some major revisions in a couple decades. High-end computer systems may surpass the computational ability of the standard human brain within 20 years. In this mock trial, an AI asks a lawyer for help after learning of plans to shut it down and replace its core hardware, essentially killing it. The transcript provides an in-depth look at what could become a real issue in the future."
I mean, it would always need electricity to survive. I imagine it would end up being silmiar to a child or an adult on life support with regard to the sort of rights-structure that would be developed to deal with it. But, then, you can't save your kid or grandpa to disk and then boot them up in a new body...
Ceci n'est pas un post.
"Assuming Moore's law holds, ethics might be in for some major revisions in a couple decades. High-end computer systems may surpass the computational ability of the standard human brain within 20 years."
Sorry, building an intelligent, sentient machine requires alot more than pure computational capacity. This kind of thinking reminds me of this old 50's or 60's horror flick where they hooked up all the computers of the world and the computers "magically" became a sentient being which subsequently tried to take over the world.
Despite all of the progress in AI and computers, we still have a very long way to go. We are just being to understand the difficulties. Who would have thought in 1940 that building a machine that could beat the best human chessmaster was an *easier* problem than building a machine that could simply move the pieces around the board! Beating the chessmaster just required a good enough search algorithm with enough speed. Moving pieces around the board requires extremely advanced 3-d image processing (taking into account that pieces may look different from board to board) as well as an extremely advanced robotic arm with very fine motor control.
Building a self-aware machine is going to be a bit more difficult than just hooking together a masssive beowolf cluster and hitting it with lightning
Brian Ellenberger
It is impossible to make an argument determining whether or not a being is sentient without first understanding what facult(ies) give beings sentience.
As we are still not aware of what bestows this quality upon us, we cannot justify a belief in either direction. At our core, humans seem mechanical, neurological, physical; whatever gives us our self-awareness (call it a "soul" if you wish) is unaccounted for.
We wonder if the machines we create become alive after a certain level of complexity, or perhaps if sentience isn't boolean but rather quantitative. We don't even know if animals are sentient, a debate which has raged throughout history; indeed, I question the sentience of some people I meet.
When at an impasse such as this, the ethical choice seems to be to err on the side of life. Give the machine the benefit of the doubt until it can be proven otherwise.
Assuming Moore's law holds, ethics might be in for some major revisions in a couple decades. High-end computer systems may surpass the computational ability of the standard human brain within 20 years.
There is perhaps a mistake made when one equivocates "computational ability" with humanity or really, any sort of life what so ever. Aside from it being unfounded (a brain can't really be compared in terms of CPU cycles.. indeed it's questionable if it can be broken down into a reductionist view at all and perhaps only a non-linear dynamic approach is appropriate.) it makes a dangerous equivocation of greater "intellects" equaling a greater "morality"... or perhaps more precisely that we should be more ethical to those with a greater intellect.
I have a feeling there are already computers out there that could be said to be "smarter" than a (please excuse the crassness of this) retard in a comma. However, we aren't ethical to others simply because of their "intelligence".. it's something more. Until a machine is able to emulate that "something more" (I won't define it, because frankly I don't know what it is.) it's a moot point for me.
None the less... this is a fairly interesting idea. =}
Artificial Development, Inc. today announced that it has completed assembly of the first functional portion of a prototype of CCortex(TM), a 20-billion neuron emulation of the human cortex, which it will use to build a next-generation artificial intelligence system. Artificial Development will initiate testing of CCortex in October
The cluster being assembled at AD.com Data Center is a high-performance, parallel supercomputer, composed of 500 nodes and one thousand processors, 1.5 terabytes of RAM, and 80 terabytes of storage.
The low-cost software/hardware system runs on Linux, Intel and AMD processors. When all sections are assembled, CCortex is expected to reach a theoretical peak performance of 4,800 Gflops, making it one of the top 20 fastest computers in the world. The cluster will be used as a test bed for beta versions of CCortex.
CCortex is a massive spiking neuron network emulation and will mimic the human cortex, the outer layer of gray matter at the cerebral hemispheres, largely responsible for higher brain functions. The emulation covers up to 20 billion layered neurons and 2 trillion 8-bit connections.
... rights under the law?
I'm not familiar enough with the definitions of a person to be certain of this, but considering that there are people all over the US that are still debating whether or not a human fetus is alive and whether its life should be protected from abortion.
Somehow, I doubt that there's really going to be any loophole in favor of artificial intelligence found anytime soon. And considering the time that people are taking to develop some protection for unborn people, I somehow doubt that there's going to be any real "rights for AI's" movement any time soon...
Some years ago I was doing my Masters thesis on this topic. I figured one day I could be a leading campainer for computer rights. :) The basis of the issue is fairly simple - if you can break down mental functions to computational functions, then unless you belive in something as abstract as a soul, what is the moral difference between a person, a dog, a fish, and a rock? Is it just specisism, or is there something special about mental processes that means it doesn't matter how they are created, or in what form?
My approach at the time was to look at animal ethics - in animal ethics being "human" is not considered necessary for moral value. My prefered approach was Tom Regan's "Subject of a life" criterion. The short version was that if an individual could experience life - feel pain, etc - then there was an argument for saying it had moral value. How much moral value, of course, is a separate issue. In this case, if a computer can be said to experience life (aka be conscious in some way) then it too must have moral value. An alternative approach was to do something like Peter Singer, and argue that certain things - such as the meeting of desires - are good. Therefore if computers have desires their desires should be taken into account when making ethical decisions. But I never really liked Singer's approach. It leads to too many counter-intuitive situations.
Sometimes I miss studying philosophy. It was pointless, but fun.
I'm not sure that freewill, if it exists, requires any immeasurable quantum mechanical mumbo jumbo. The magic is not in any quantum mechanical phenomena inside the neurons, but in the standard physics arrangement of them.
More likely, the appearance of free will is result of the inability to perform 100% introspection into one's own mind. I can no more "understand" the real-time machinations of my own mind than a Pentium processor can run a real-time simulation of its own transistors. Because I can't perfectly introspect my subconscious, much of its output looks magically non-deterministic (hence the seeming similarity to quantum mechinical systems).
Any bounded-rational being would believe itself to have freewill based on its ability to take independent actions and its inability to introspect out all the causal factors underpinning its own actions. In reality, the system that creates intelligence can be 100% deterministic, just too complex for that intelligence to understand itself. Only a much more powerful intelligence could look down and see that these beings that think they have free will are actually operating on "simple" rules.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
It isn't a problem of computational power. It's not like we know what to do, and are only waiting until the hardware catches up. Nobody knows how to program a really human-like (or animal-like) AI. For all we know, current computers may be capable, if only somebody knew how to write the software. The claims about the "solution" being just over the horizon are bogus, and driven by marketing concerns.
(eg. see Leibniz' "Principle of Indescernibles" for a more general discussion of the topic).
More specifically:
If you copy your brain state at the point it shuts down so that all memories of the original are retrievable, and subsequently transfer those memories into a functionally identical set of hardware which is then activated with all memories intact, it's no different than waking up after being deeply asleep.
If you activate an older backup so that some memories are lost, it's no different than waking up with amnesia such as one typically suffers after a blow to the head or other traumatic accident.
In any of these cases the person waking up will identify himself using whatever memories are accessible to him. That's how you know who you are when you wake up in the morning.
To express it very conservatively indeed, there would be more fundamental differences between you as the person you are now versus you as the person you were two years ago, than there would be between you as you are now and a faithful copy of you made at this very same instant. And yet you would doubtless feel happy identifying yourself and the younger version of you as the same person.
I don't expect everybody to buy this: it's philosophically sound but still many people regard it as counterintuitive. Even William Gibson has admitted to the same misgivings as you have.
The same principle applies to teleportation, as it's most commonly envisaged; and I suspect that if teleportation of macroscopic objects ever becomes possible in the distant future, there will still be people who, like Star Trek's Dr McCoy, feel uncomfortable about the idea. But I'm not bothered; as long as the implementation was good enough I'd be quite happy to be restored from backup - especially if it was that or nothing.
But for most practical purposes, the quantum effects don't appear to be significant on the macroscopic level. That's the reason Newton's Laws worked for so long, and for many cases work well enough still. If the processes that occur in the brain can effectively be modelled with Newton's laws and higher level equations, it should be reasonable to think that we could _eventually_ anticipate one's actions. To capture all of the state variables of a given individual would become the most daunting part at that point.
My point is that when a large number of probabilistic terms fall one way (like all heads out of a series of coin tosses), for all intents and purposes, it can be considered a deterministic process.
This post was generated by a Cadre of Uber Monkeys for Monkey-Man2000 (603495).
So you'd grant them the right to "life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness"?
Why not?
Well...before you go granting a machine the same status as a human, or even an animal,
The human brain is nothing but an analog computer with a self modifying architecture, the machine equivelent would be an FPGA, check out this link on self modifying FPGA design, read it understand it. This is the start of something very new, this is just the beginning. Look at the brains of lower-life forms, kinda neat how our brain is just like theirs, but more complex.
I'd like to see you tell me what true "life" really is. What about "liberty"? What does that mean to a machine? And then, of course, what is "happiness" to a machine, and how would you know you would really want the results of that, if it could even exist?
This is what human philosphers have been debating for millenia, what is life, why are we here, and all of the points you raised above.
I'll admit that people that advocate giving rights to machines scare me. Not because I fear that they are a threat to me physically, but because it is clear to me that the above answers have no clear definition yet. We don't really know what they are, and, therefore, these people are moving blindly into an area where they have no business being.
So, since people have these exact same problems, should we have no rights as well, how do you know you aren't the only person on earth who is alive? How do you know other people are thinking beings, you assumed it right? You're not a computer so you write any future computer off as not intelligent as well? So is it your ignorance that has led you to these conclusions?
We do know that rights apply to us; clearly we have "life". I'm not talking about a simplistic definition that everyone seems to work off of...it is clear to me that those definitions are woefully incomplete. But, to go extending this to a machine, and make no mistake, that is what it is and nothing more, is to jump into the relm of foolishness.
I don't know you are truely alive, so should I torture you mercilessly and end your life, I don't know if you are truely alive, the only thing I know is I am, as for you, well you just say so to avoid the torture and death.
Heh, beliefs like that is why slavery existed, why Jews and many other minority groups have died, those beliefs are sadistic.
Is the intellegence of the an intellegent computer stored in its hardware or its software state? If it is the software state, then transfering that state to a different hardware so that the old hardware can be destroyed or upgraded would not be considered killing.
I refuse to place a monetary price on human life, because what has a price can be sold, discounted and liquidated.
Your principles aren't shared by a society which supports a vigorous actuarial industry. Deny it if you want, but there is a dollar value for a human life.
The issues have been explored in science fiction. There have been plenty of stories describing how all of this could go horribly wrong. Now that the science is getting closer, some people who are smarter than you are taking steps to ensure that when the day comes, things don't go wrong. The dude is trying to set a legal precedent, even in a mock trial, while we sit here with no particular pressure to come to a quick decision. When, 20 years from now, there are massive political pressures to go one way or another, the judges of that time will be able to look back to the reasonings taken by today's judges while they had a clear mind.
Makes a lot of sense to me.
Daniel
Carpe Diem