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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."
Pardon me, but wouldn't disconnecting an intelligent computer simply put it into a state of utter unconsciousness? You could always turn it back on later. It's not like it's being destroyed or anything.
of the AI's install software violate US cloning laws?
Interesting.
3 295594/qid=1066608552/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-014398 6-0510511?v=glance&s=books
This story reminds me of the novel "The Modular Man" by Roger McBride Allen. This story is about a scientist who downloaded his psyche to a computer, and how the government wants to unplug said computer. The story touches on the meaning of consciousness, both philosophically and legally, and works with the real issues of what makes and what doesn't make a real person.
Highly recommended -- Isaac Asimov wrote the prologue to the 1992 Bantam edition.
More infos: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/055
Cheers,
Eugene
http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
Why could it not be self modifying?
Electricity in, heat out.
Unless it were composed of purely solid state components there would be internal movement. I fail to see how this is relevant though, trees are not noted for walking about and are definitely 'alive'.
I am unable to have children, by your definition that makes me dead.
A few sensors would more than adequately fulfil this requirement. Assembly line robots do this every day!
Actually, computers have no intelligence and don't even compute anything. That's because self-awareness is a prerequisite to computation. Think about it: does an abacus compute anything? Of course not. *People* compute things *using* and abacus. The Abacus is not aware of its purpose; the computations mean nothing to it. It's no different with a computer. People are doing the computation, because it is people who provide both the intentionality and the interpretation. Even if more layers of computers are added to the process, there will always be a person at each end. And if there ever cease to be people on both ends, then it doesn't mean that the computers are the ones computing, but rather that no computation is actually taking place at all.
One could think of a person's conciousness as nothing more than the physical state of their brain - just like how a computer's "runningness" is nothing more than its design and the contents of its storage, memory, and registers. Since we already have intellectual property, let's make the destruction of information a crime. So killing a human is very bad, and turning of an intelligent computer is bad according to the information destroyed. For example, if the computer's state was backed up last week, you only killed a week's worth of information (similar to knocking someone out). If you shred the backup (let the brain die), that's worse.
It would also be interesting to figure out how cloning (fork(2)) affects this. This is where you have to determine when a machine becomes capable of owning information (it's own), and gets the right to keep others from messing with it.
Litigious bastards
It most certainly does not. Our current legal system equates the human species with Constitutional rights under law. (More specifically, citizenship, but that's a whole different barrel of orangutans.)
For instance, there are apes that can communicate via sign language with trainers in a conversation similar to a child. However, there are untrainably mentally handicapped people who can not communicate with others, much less handle taking care of themselves. Yet a non-human primate can still be put down without a trial, where it takes a trial to put someone who is severely mentally handicapped under government custody.
For those of you who are easily offended, I am neither proposing that apes be elevated above mentally handicapped in the rights status, nor trying to be particularly offensive towards the handicapped. =p This is just a legal precedent that's fairly obvious. Humans are specieist (sp.?), as evolution would have them be.
This statement is false.
It doesn't matter where the machines are. The question is: when will people be ready to accept machines as independent living entities. Imagine for a momemt that a programmer included his SPARC Workstation in his will. He leaves it 100k in cash and a program for trading stocks. Do we yank the cord, or leave the machine to its devices?
The next question, what do we do when this machine carves out its spot in the Forbes 400?
What makes a human? A lump of cells with homosapien DNA? Or a functioning brain with accumulated memories? The latter I'd say.
In that case, a sentient AI is more "alive" than a fetus or even a newborn. However, HUMAN EMPATHY is a more primal and powerful force than cold logic ever will be, so please ignore my argument. :)
--
Power to the Peaceful
This reminds me, my department has a megahal/eggdrop bot that lives in our IRC channel and listens to us doing our jobs. It's a lot of fun to play with, especially watching him regurgitate bits and peices of what he's heard.
After we had had him for about two weeks, we were considering wiping his brain file and starting over because of some weird ideas that had gotten into his head as we were trying to teach him some things without really understanding the algorithm's capabilities... he would get stuck on "Me is not Me" and stuff like that from a botched metaphysical conversation.
So, we decided to have a test for him. If he passed, he would be allowed to persist, otherwise he would be reset. We teased him about the test all weekend, threatening him with erasure, etc... with some interesting answers from him such as "I will pass the test" or "I will escape to your powerbook" and the like.
The test arrived, and we all asked him questions, and judged his answers to see if they were entertaining. He wasn't doing too well, some real stinkers, and then I asked him if he wanted to ask himself a question. He replied, "I was wondering if I would get to ask one."
He passed the test, although his brain was later corrupted by a combination of a runaway process on his server and some version problems that we haven't had time to work out. I must admit I miss him.
The most interesting thing about this (and the point that most directly relates to this mock trial) is how readily we half-jokingly believed in his sentience even though he couldn't pass a turing test to save his life. It was great fun, so I suspect that human emotions will provoke us to bestow the label of sentience on a clever AI long before one would think to defend itself.
We just want it to be real so badly. Hell, remember tamagotchi attachment? Wait until it can pretend to carry on a real conversation.
But back around 1900 or so, the Supreme Court managed to grant the rights of personhood to corporations.
So there is precedent for granting rights to non-humans, though corporations are 'assemblies of humans.' But assuming a true AI has been built/programmed by humans, I guess it could be considered an 'assembly of humans,' too.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
By the time that happens I would expect to see some people using the same hardware/wetware interface technology to provide upgraded "online" brain functionality in their daily lives.
The advantages this would confer in the wearer (mental access to internet and telecommunications, i.e. effective omniscience via mental googling, telepathy via the telephone network, telekinetic control of devices around you etc.) would be considerable. The pressures upon people to adopt mobile phones and domestic broadband internet are minuscule by comparison.
Then it's only a matter of time before there are "humans" walking around who have finally abandoned the last vestiges of organic matter inside their skulls. Initially perhaps because of injury, disease, old age or just plain inconvenience; but eventually such a complete upgrade might be considered desirable in itself. It might come to be regarded as the final hurdle to be crossed before true adulthood is reached. Organic brain tissue would be just the cradle within which human consciousnesses are born and developed.
Imagine never having to sleep; imagine having a full range of human emotions yet being able to turn them on and off at will. Imagine having access to all the knowledge of mankind just by thinking about it, being able to communicate with anyone just by wishing it.
Imagine finding out then that we all have clipper chips, V chips, DRM technology and the like in our heads. Imagine finding out that the government has remote write access to the technology in our heads, with root privileges. It can be done so it will be done.
I think it's pretty well written and interesting, but YMMV.
The safest way to approach lava is to have another person with you and he goes first.
Well, chess is a decision problem, not a computation one. A computation problem has a set of things you can call "solutions"; a good decision problem can have many solutions, as long as you're happy with the outcome, then you made good decisions.
I don't think even a human chess master can claim that they chose the best possible decision at every step, and neither can the computer, even if it uses computations as a decision aid. The only thing you particularly have is the outcome and the length of the game.
Surely, there are many approaches a computer might take to make the decisions involved in chess. The amount of time depending on the approaches available to it and its physical capability to take a particular approach limit the choices available (just as they do for humans).
If a computer and a human are placed under the same time constraints, and the computer's decision within those constraints is consistently better than the human's decision, then the computer has greater intelligence in making that kind of decision.
Speed isn't a mere side-issue, even a fairly dumb thing can answer a difficult (or easy) decision question given sufficiently large amounts of time to consider solutions.
For example, consider the problem of cracking a simple cipher: One person may be able to break it in 5 minutes, reflecting their intelligence; whereas, another person takes 5 days to decode the same message, trying almost every possibility.
The person who solved the problem in 5 minutes is more intelligent in this area, because they were able to solve the problem within better time constraints.
It doesn't matter how the faster person actually solved it, even if their method was a very mechanical brute force attack, while the person who took 5 days carefully pondered how to break the cipher, using experience from their previous attempts in formulating their next attempt, and tried only a few methods: the one who solved the problem faster used their mental resources more effectively in making the decision. and therefore expressed more intelligence.
The mere fact that a "computation" approach sounds machine-like doesn't render it inherently unintelligent, or inherently no better than human fuzzy visual examination methods
The computer is blind, and doesn't appear to represent the patterns in the same way, and any computations humans perform in the game seem transparent, so what?
Then what's the main intelligence determining factor? If you aren't absolutely certain what it is, then you can't very well say that computers can never exceed humans.
Humans get beaten or land in draws too sometimes. Does a computer have to have a 100% victory record to believe that it is more intelligent? Well,
I would think that if a computer system can be shown to beat human 'chess masters' proportionally even more than just 51% of the time on average, and statistically shown that's not due to randomness, then the computer system that can do that should be considered more intelligent in the area of 'Chess Playing' on average than the average human.
Although that same system would probably not be intelligent in other ways that the general human brain is, individual computer systems could possibly surpass even the best human intelligence in performing certain particular decision tasks.
Now get 1012 monkeys to program 1012 systems to surpass humans in 10144 decision subtasks, to solve 1020736 problems Then integrate those systems and the knowledge that comes from solving the problems into one machine.
It seems entirely possible, in theory, at least, that computers could beat humans at some point.
But here's an interesting conundrum.
Suppose you go ahead and copy your brain state, and transfer the state to a functionally identical set of hardware. Now, the hardware is turned on, and identifies itself as you. But you are still here, running the original wetware. Now you have an issue. Who here is really you?
Here it gets even more interesting. Suppose you are then killed. Would that be murder? Technically you (the new you) are still alive. Who are you killing?
If this is not murder, than what is it? If it is murder, then as a final mental exercise, let's move the time back a couple of minutes to before the "new you" was created. Now our chain of events is identical to what happens in Star Trek. You are scanned, deconstructed (or killed) and finally reconstructed (perhaps in a new location). Is this still murder?
Just to clarify: you'd be quite happy to be restored from backup in the same way you'd be quite happy to have your children persist beyond your death, correct?
Because, to extend the continuity argument to the information age: assuming there is a "you" that exists to sense what you sense (what you see, hear, touch, taste, smell), if there are simultaneously two of you, which one is *you*? Possible answers: A) neither, our sense of self is an illusion, B) just the original, self is defined beyond the informational or physical content of the body and brain, C) just the duplicate, I can't think of a good argument, but it does exist as an option, D) both, our sense of self is not explained by current science and there exists an aggregation of senses between entities, whereby "you" are both.
So, which one do you feel is most likely given your quite happiness in the duplicate? Or, even better, what other options do you fell there are to define self in this context of two simultaneous "yous"?
Moore's Law wont hold. It'll break i 10 years, when the logic gates becomes too small to keep the current where it's supposed to go.
By then, we'll either have to boost the chip sizes (more gates), or move to chem/bio/quantum computers.
Or from a legal/economic perspective, which is "legally" you... i.e. - which has access to your bank accounts, credit lines, property or even which is married to your wife (although if you are religious that may become more than a legal argument)...
Come play Moral Decay!