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Robots Could Some Day Demand Legal Rights
Karrde712 writes "According to a study by the British government, as reported by the BBC, robots may some day improve to a level of intelligence where they might be able to demand rights, even 'robo-healthcare'." From the article: "The research was commissioned by the UK Office of Science and Innovation's Horizon Scanning Centre. The 246 summary papers, called the Sigma and Delta scans, were complied by futures researchers, Outsights-Ipsos Mori partnership and the US-based Institute for the Future (IFTF) ... The paper which addresses Robo-rights, titled Utopian dream or rise of the machines? examines the developments in artificial intelligence and how this may impact on law and politics." I'd better get started on my RoboAmerican studies degree.
anyone ever watch Bicentennial Man (or read the story it was based on?)
Why does everyone just assume an AI will be superior to us in reasoning ability? We have zero idea how an AI will be implemented.
...uh... because that's how we're going to implement it?
Your comment sounds a little like a 17th century guy that says "how do we know that flying machines will fly better than humans?". The answer is that this is how we're going to build them or otherwise there's no point in building them in the first place. A flying machine that doesn't fly wouldn't be worth producing.
We may not know up front whether what we're trying to do is possible, but if it is, then it'll be what we're setting out to do.
If the first attempts are basically emulating a human brain it might be slow and dumb.
Is that how we built flying machines? There may have been prehistoric attempts at emulating birds, but flying really "took off" (sorry for the pun) when folks stopped trying to make "something like a bird" and started making "something that flies". Airplanes are very, very, different from birds in every conceivable respect -- and they are useful exactly because they're different from birds. If all we wanted was another bird, we could get a mommy bird and a daddy bird and let them build a nest and do the whoopy...
In the same sense, if all we wanted was another human, there's a fine, time-tested method for doing that. The whole point of making an artificial intelligence is that we'd like to do something that is NOT already abundant in nature. Something that can do things humans can not. Why else would we want to do it in the first place?
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.