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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."
Olde News; Commander Bruce Maddox tried to disassemble Data in an episode of ST:TNG entitled The Measure of a Man. It turns out AI is indeed sentient. Of course we all knew that, recall when Data hammers Tasha Yar to multi-orgasmic bliss in the episode The Naked Now. That episode alone proves that AI is more than just a glorified lube-smeared vibrator.
Nothing to see here.. move along.. next story please.
Trolling is a art,
"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.
... 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...
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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