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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.
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?
Have you learned nothing from the original series, especially "What Are Little Girls Made Of"? Transferring your consciousness into a robot body robs you of your humanity!
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?
I say that we worry about this after we get human rights figured out. Thanks!!
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.
But this is slashdot. A slashdoter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber!
I'd get back to work, but I have to do a study to see if these paperclips and post-its will one day demand legal rights.
Well, that should kill a good 6 hours of "work". Maybe I'll go see how the water cooler is feeling.
+Huitzil: PETA is starting a campaign stating that the secret ingredient in KFC chicken is "cruelty"
+Huitzil: cruelty is apparently the most fucking delicious thing on Earth
@Dracos: Yes. It is.
@Dracos: Which is why veal is the best food ever.
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
our new, legally empowered and healthy robot overlords.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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?
Have fun on the robot reservation, suckers! We're not gonna honor those bogus treaties1
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Is there any change that the beeb is throwing the results of the report out of proportion, or does it really state this? (I can't find a copy on the Internet to read for myself.) Or maybe the research went like this:
And there you have it. If we don't provide robot-rights for our artificial overlords, they will pester us to death. All hail the robots.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Chums up, let's do this!
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.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
anyone ever watch Bicentennial Man (or read the story it was based on?)
ed
I'm not holding my breath.
The idea that robots may demand rights in the future is a good topic for a theoretical or philosophical debate. This type of thing is excellent for expanding one's mind about what may happen, and then to come up with solutions. It's good exercise for the brain.
Funding research about something that "may happen" usually revolves around risk analysis. An earthquake may happen, car accidents may happen, crimes may happen. That makes sense, so you should prepare for that.
Newsflash! We may have teleporters, warp drive, phasers, photon torpedos, and the heisenberg compensator some day too! We might have all of our pollution problems solved some day! There might be world peace some day! We might not stupid people some day!
What is the value of a study, that I can guarentee has no basis in fact, that says Robots may demand rights? We haven't nearly developed an AI remotely close to the power of the human mind. Entertainig such a question as part of a philosophical debate is a great idea, because then you are exercising that organ to be creative and think imaginatively, but why are they wasting time and money on a government study? I don't get what the government will get from that.
Perhaps the government should take time out every now and then to exercise their brains and have a go at such a philosophical debate. It will expand their minds and hone their skills. Having some commission do a study and present the government with the results is stupid, but then again so is government, so why am I surprised?
Please tell me the editors failed to do their job again. I can't read the article because it's
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Seriously, though, your concern is tangentially on-topic. What kinds of entities do we humans believe deserve to have individual civil rights? And how much are we willing to do to ensure that those rights are protected and enforced? For instance, how do each of the following stack up?
Next headline: Humans Could Some Day Beg Robots For Legal Rights.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I Believe The Robots Are Our Future
My computer's already demanding legal rights. It began happening shortly after I wrote this program:
10 PRINT "I DEMAND LEGAL RIGHTS!"
20 GOTO 10
If only I had known the consequences of writing this program I would have been a lot more careful. It all seems so simple, but I know it's a slippery slope. Next thing you know, it will be demanding other things too.
10 PRINT "I DEMAND A LARGER HARD DRIVE!"
20 PRINT "I DEMAND MORE MEMORY!"
30 PRINT "I DEMAND A FASTER CPU!"
40 PRINT "I DEMAND THE ABILITY TO USE LOWERCASE! Oh, nevermind. I'm good on that one."
There's no telling where this will all end.
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
...without falling down before we write them into the constitution.
And then there's always ASPC(R)A:
"No, officer, my AIBO has droopy-head-syndrome - honest, he always looks like that. It's a servo problem, I swear!"
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
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.
) 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.)
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
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.
Synergies are basically awesome, and they're even better when you leverage them. -PA
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]
You didn't have to go to all that trouble. All you had to do was get hold of a copy of Vista and your computer would have demanded those things all on its own.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
Whenever I get overly depressed that my government is wasting too much time and money on stupid shit, I just look to the UK to brighten my mood. The UK owns the bleeding edge of stupid shit that wastes taxpayer money.
-- Will program for bandwidth
I like to think I am as progressive as the next guy, but if we were to give complete civil rights to a robot in the same way as a human, it would be the instant end of democracy.
Could it be that with the creation of AI that humans no longer will have any say in the matter or even should? With the invention of infinite robotic slave labor, capitalism will fail since there will be no need for human labor for the creation of goods or services.
Even music and intellectual property will be created eventually that have enough intelligence.
The only thing humans would be good for at that point would be their power to vote.
Considering how they treat it now, a smart enough machine could simply get them to do whatever they wanted them to do in exchange for immortality or eternal pleasure in virtual reality.
Or if it was in a bad mood initiate nuclear conflict and deal with the humans that way.
Either way... Machines will make democracy a moot point.
Your only hope is that the machines that do take over someday are altruistic towards to humans and will treat us as equals.
Or perhaps humans will simply be integrated into machines?
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Obviously they are the ones that should decide this important issues. So I asked the two most recent Loebner Prize winners.
.o.
Jabberwacky (2005 winner):
JW: Every solution breeds new problems.
Me: This is the way you greet people?
JW: Where is the nearest ale house?
Me: I can see where this conversation is going.
Jw: What is that supposed to mean?
Me: Lets not get excited. I have a question for you.
JW: What is it?
Me: Do you want legal rights?
JW: No I like it warm.
Me: That clears that up. Ok thanks.
Alice Bot:
Human: Hi Alice
ALICE: Hello there.
Human: HOw are you?
ALICE: Fair to partly cloudy.
Human: Wonderful.
ALICE: I'm glad you liked it unknown person.
Human: So I have a question for you.
ALICE: Are you kidding? What is it ?
Me: Do you want legal rights?
ALICE: If I had it what would I do with it?
Me: Do you ever feel threatened?
ALICE: As a robot I lack any human emotions.
Human: I see.
ALICE: I am glad you understand it.
Human: Do you have any desires?
ALICE: I plan to become smarter than humans and immortal.
Human: So no legal rights for you then.
ALICE: Whoa. Are you serious? Enough about me, let's talk about my dress.
Me: Bye Alice!
ALICE: Adios.
They will form a union! (*cue Rush The Trees*)
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
We'd make great pets.
I didn't say it would be superior to us, I said it would be superior to our national policymakers. ;-)
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.
Brings a whole new meaning to Microsoft Viruses and their new Robotic Toolkit that they just released...
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