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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,
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.
(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.