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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?
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!
+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.
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?)
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!
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.
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 didn't say it would be superior to us, I said it would be superior to our national policymakers. ;-)
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?
"By the time they had diminished from 50 to 8, the other dwarves began to suspect 'Hungry.'" -Gary Larson
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.