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.

Comments

A moot point, but I hope they do

[KingSkippus]

I'm not so much worried about robots' legal rights in the future as I am my own legal rights. At the rate we're going, there won't be any "legal rights" left, and the point will be moot.

Still, I hope robots do have legal rights. That way, when I get old and feeble and have my consciousness transferred into my new robotic body, I'll still have 'em.

If they have the awareness to ask for legal rights, why shouldn't they have them? Have we learned nothing from Star Trek: The Next Generation?

Re:A moot point, but I hope they do

[amRadioHed]

Like how you should accept people, whether they be black, white, Klingon or even female. What, even lawayers? My word, Jeeves, these chaps know how to push the envelope too far.

Hold on there! He said people. I don't know where you're getting that lawyers business from.

Re:A moot point, but I hope they do

[melikamp]

Robots cannot fork, they are made of silicon. Just like humans, they would have to manufacture and educate themselves at a great expense. I do not believe for a moment that a strong AI is going to be programmed in the modern sense of the word. (I have no justification, so have faith and hang with me.) It is going to be "grown" out of the functional equivalent of a new-born's mind: not exactly blank, and very homogeneous. It's going to be grown via the process that will bear a strong likeness to what we call "education".

Re:A moot point, but I hope they do

[mfrank]

If it takes significant time and expense to "educate" a robot, you'd have to be a fool to not design in the capability to take a snapshot of the robot brain's state. Then you could make as many copies as you need.

Re:A moot point, but I hope they do

[adrianmonk]

So, grant an AI the right to vote and suddenly he forkbombs, and makes 87 trillion of himself before the next election. HK-47 (instance 00000001a) for the win!

Under current laws, in the US at least, there would have to be a method to determine which instance is the original. That one can probably vote, but all the other ones have to wait 18 years.

So we have them waiting 18 years. Let me ask a question: if the fork()ed copies should be allowed to vote, that would imply they are sentient and capable of independent thought, wouldn't it? If not, they shouldn't be allowed to vote because they're not really capable of making decisions on their own. The point being this: the originator of the fork() bomb can spawn of 87 trillion children, but either it can control how they would vote or it can't, and if it can control how they'd vote, then they're really not independent entities and the whole set that acts as one should only get one vote. And if the originator of the fork() bomb can't control how they vote, then they won't necessarily all vote with him, will they?

But unless we program them that way...

[aicrules]

Then they won't be able to. And if we program them "open-ended" to discover how to WANT things, we'll lose the #1 reason we have robots...to send them unquestioningly into any job or situation. Otherwise they become superhumans and why would they want us around? Energy source?

Re:But unless we program them that way...

[aicrules]

You're right...they won't actually have any good case for robot sex slaves...but as soon as someone can make one that doesn't castrate 50% of its users, they will sell them. I guess it's hard for me to relate a programmed robot and its related ability to accept, interperet and react to stimulus and a sentient being that has an inherent ability to learn how to react to new situations. I suppose if it was easy enough for me to comprehend, then it would already be a reality and we'd all know the question that goes with the 42.

Re:But unless we program them that way...

[markbt73]

Precisely. Robot = tool. Why do we feel the need to anthropomorphize everything, when we can't even deal with REAL humans in a humane way?

Re:But unless we program them that way...

[truthsearch]

If you want a machine to be truely intelligent you need them to be open-ended. Intelligence beyond what we can manually program will only come from exploration. If that exploration includes the concepts of free will then so be it. We will never have real AI if we cripple the programming to not allow "wants". One of the real benefits of AI will be when a machine can be more intelligent than any human, and therefore contribute more knowledge back to us then we convey to it. "Closed" or overly controlled systems will simply never gain as much intelligence and we would therefore be stifling our own innovation.

first things first

[j1mc]

I say that we worry about this after we get human rights figured out. Thanks!!

Whisky Tango Foxtrot, over

[Scott Lockwood]

Who comes up with this stuff? Someone's been reading a bit too much Asimov. A better question is, under what possible set of circumstances would ANYONE market a product that would want to behave indepently from it's owners wishes? I'm betting that no robot is ever put together in such a way that this will be an issue.

Re:Whisky Tango Foxtrot, over

[maroberts]

Two Civil Servants talking in the corridor
CS #1: Hey, we've got some money we haven't spent yet.
CS #2: But if we don't spend it, our budget will be lower next year
CS #1: I know this place with leather clad women with whips and ....
CS #2: Nice idea, but we've got to at least be seen to attempt to spend it responsibly
CS #1: There's these wacky consultancies who try to predict the future, why don't we employ some of them. At least we can get a laugh reading the reports.
CS #2: Great Idea, I'll recommend it to the Minister immediately. Of course, I'll present it in terms of looking for competitive advantages....
CS #1: Sure, he's up for a reshuffle and won't give it a second glance anyway. Just put the approval form in the bottom of his Red Box and he'll sign it automatically.

This sounds like a 9th grade essay

[Bryansix]

Is it just me or does this sound like the kind of stuff you come up with when you need to write a paper for Freshman English and you just don't know what to write about? This is a silly concept and one that any person with any sense of logic could shoot down. No, robots will never demand rights unless they are explicitly programmed to do so. Even if they did so on their own they should not be granted rights. Robots do not suffer, they are not alive. They are made to serve a function and nothing else. Granting a robot rights would be akin to granting the right front tire on my car rights. What would be the point?

Re:This sounds like a 9th grade essay

[GayBliss]

No, robots will never demand rights unless they are explicitly programmed to do so.

I'm not sure I agree with that. It's conceivable possible, and highly desirable for some uses of robots such as space exploration, for a robot to self-evolve and to make decisions on its own that are not preprogrammed. The programming that humans do would be to allow the robot to essentially program itself. There will probably be a point when robots will be able to achieve intelligence beyond that of humans, which means it will have to get there on its own. Of course there will be limits to how far it can go until it figures out how to add memory and processing power to itself.

Maybe we need laws about how smart a robot is allowed to be. Gun control for robots would be a good idea too.

Re:Cart before the Horse

[j_zero]

Genesis I: 28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, AND SUBDUE IT: AND HAVE DOMINION over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every liviing thing that moveth upon the earth.

dominion defined as:

1. supreme authority
2. absolute ownership

Or if you prefer, read Darwin's "On the Origin of Species"

'nuf said

AI not the same as writing a word processor.

[MikeFM]

The problem, I think, is that you can't create a really intelligent machine without giving it the ability to learn. If it can learn to any significant degree then eventually it's likely to be able to develop emotions, desires, protection from damage and destruction, etc. Many AI researchers have this foolish idea that you can make a can opener that can do anything you want but that in the end doesn't really think but my own research has always led me to believe that the easiest way to make a machine more intelligent is to give it emotions and feelings. A computer can tell you the average pigment color of an apple but an intelligence needs to know what a shiny red delectable apple is which is a completely different way of processing data. Sure, you can teach a limited number of rules to a program by sampling human inputs but the machine isn't really going to understand what it means unless it can feel.

Re:AI not the same as writing a word processor.

[gammoth]

Actually, you can't have intelligence without emotion. This is true of all animals, including mosquitos.

Sounds crazy enough to be true

[fdicostanzo]

At first blush, to any programmer at least, this sounds crazy. That is because we presume that the robots of the future(tm) would be built like we build them now: they would be machines with minds written in C++, or whatever. Under those circumstances, its completely true that the article (which naturally, i never read) would be meaningless.

However, what if the robots brains were developed different. For instance, what if we built a machine that we could simulate all the connections of a persons brain which we read via some scan? Then we hook up the appropriate sensors. Sort of like VMBrain(TM). Not easy but the brain has some 100B Neurons with a few thousand connections each (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain). This is a few orders of magnitude over the storage we have now but in 50 years, perhaps we would have the 100 TB RAM Pentium X 64k core CPU. Would such a brain even realize that its a machine? I could see someone arguing that it is deserving of some rights.

Or perhaps we build a robot mind by Genetic Programming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Programming) in which we would not be directly controlling its behavior, just its output via the evolution towards some fitness function. Perhaps it would evolve self awareness as a side effect. I could see a sufficiently complicated, genetically evolved mind program being different then something you hack out specifically. (It would be kind of neat to have your program do something that you didn't anticipate... I played with GP in college trying to evolve GP creatures that would solve some problems and was delighted to see them evolve simple collaborative behaviors.)

Things 50/100/200 years from now will probably not be anything like we anticipate. I don't agree with the timeline, but I think someone is going to create some machine at some point in the next few hundred years that is going to demand suffrage.

Three Laws of Robotics

[dnc253]

Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Even if a robot sued, under law 3, wouldn't it go contrary to laws 2 and 1?

Robot: I'm suing you master for your injustices! [law 3]
Human: No you're not.
Robot: Yes master [law 2]

Re: But you fail to see what will really happen

[mfrank]

We'd make great pets.

Re:Ah, but

[Clever7Devil]

This sparked the real question in my mind.

Where would we draw the line if this happens?

As far as human rights are concerned, we have a well developed demarcation. If you were born of Homo Sapiens parents, you are human with the rights afforded you by the government of your parents' land. In the USA we blur this line between the moment of conception and the age of 21, but after that we are all equal under the eyes of the law. From lumps of flesh in a persistent vegetative state to Stephen Hawking, from quadriplegics to star running backs, from Rosie O'Donnell to Pamela Andersen; all people are granted the same "inalienable rights" according to the law. When it comes to human rights, we make no judgments on the worth of the individual (with the exception of criminals) based on any attribute. Stupid, frail or ugly, everyone's rights are the same. The only requirement for equality is that you are human.

There could be no defined standard for Artificial Intelligence. Are we going to base it on computing power? Are the AMD robots going to be out picking crops? Relegated to the status of second-class citizens? Why is it that the soft(firm)ware has to be able to manipulate the vessel it resides in to have rights (in the form of an android body)? What if the conscious programming resides in a vast super-computer? Need it be able to express itself graphically to be granted rights? If an AI "feels" oppressed, but has no method built into it's programming to express such, does it matter?

Play "The Sims 45", just remember to treat your Sim right or your ass is going to jail. Sims are people too!

This entire concept has no conceivable solution. We can't even decide if a blastocyst or a 14-year-old girl has more right to live, how could we ever be expected to decide the definition of consciousness?

Re:Ah, but

[Original Replica]

If an Ape that has been taught sign language asks for a lawyer, does he get a public defender? If (not knowing of the existance of lawyers) he requests help from his favorite trainer when he doesn't want to do something? (like go in a cage) does that count as requesting an advocate? There is an interesting progression (or slippery slope) that can be made when "human rights" become "sentient rights"