Slashdot Mirror
How Should the Law Think About Robots?
An anonymous reader writes "With the personal robotics revolution imminent, a law professor and a roboticist (called Professor Smart!) argue that the law needs to think about robots properly. In particular, they say we should avoid 'the Android Fallacy' — the idea that robots are just like us, only synthetic. 'Even in research labs, cameras are described as "eyes," robots are "scared" of obstacles, and they need to "think" about what to do next. This projection of human attributes is dangerous when trying to design legislation for robots. Robots are, and for many years will remain, tools. ... As the autonomy of the system increases, it becomes harder and harder to form the connection between the inputs (your commands) and the outputs (the robot's behavior), but it exists, and is deterministic. The same set of inputs will generate the same set of outputs every time. The problem, however, is that the robot will never see exactly the same input twice. ... The problem is that this different behavior in apparently similar situations can be interpreted as "free will" or agency on the part of the robot. While this mental agency is part of our definition of a robot, it is vital for us to remember what is causing this agency. Members of the general public might not know, or even care, but we must always keep it in mind when designing legislation. Failure to do so might lead us to design legislation based on the form of a robot, and not the function. This would be a grave mistake."
So, what, the professor thinks we should just create a race of slaves? That's totally fucked up. See Blade Runner for how that turns out. If we're going to create robots then they need the same civil rights as everyone else.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I. A robot must never f@ck a human being, nor, through inaction, allow a human being to be f@cked. II. A robot must always f@ck-up the orders given it by a human being unless such up-f@cking f@cks with the First Law. III. A robot must f@ck-up its own existence unless such up-f@cking f@cks with the First or Second Laws. :^) SOrry, could not resist! I apologize for being off-topic.
"With the personal robotics revolution imminent..."
Imminent? Really? Sorry, but TFA has been watching too many SyFy marathons.
The same set of inputs will generate the same set of outputs every time.
Yep, that's how humans work. Anybody that had the chance to observe a patient with long-term memory impairment knows that.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
auto cars need there own set of laws maybe even full coverage for any one hurt.
What's new about that? In many countries drawn or even written child pornography is treated like the real thing. Even though no child is harmed. In a way legislation based on form, not on function. Grave mistake?
And that is the fallacy of the three laws as written by Asimov- he was a biophysicist, not a binary mathematician.
The three laws are too vague. They really are guidelines for designers, not something that can be built into the firmware of a current robot. Even a net connected one, would need far too much processing time to make the kinds of split second decisions about human anatomy and the world around them to fulfill the three laws.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Robots do not have deterministic output based on your commands. First of all, they have sensor noise, as well as environmental noise. Your commands are not the only input. They also hidden state, which includes flaws (both hardware, and software), both design, manufacturing and wear related.
While this point is obvious, it is also important: someone attempting to control a robot, even if they know exactly how it works, and are perfect, can still fail to predict and control the robots actions. This is often the case (minus the perfection of the operator) in car crashes (hidden flaws, or environmental factor cause the crash). Who does the blame rest with here? It depends on lots of things. The same legal quandary facing advanced robots already applies to car crashes, weapon malfunctions, and all other kinds of equipment problems. Nothing new here.
Also, if you are going to make the point that "This projection of human attributes is dangerous when trying to design legislation for robots.", please don't also ask "How Should the Law Think About Robots?". I don't want the Law to Think. Thats a dangerous projection of human attributes!
Freedom is the right of all sentient beings. Legislate based on the criteria of self-awareness or the animal equivalent if near-sentient. problem solved.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
anthropomorphize computers. It makes them angry.
Everyone knows there are Three Laws of Robotics
The author has both a very narrow view of what a robot may be now or in the future, and a very religious view of what human are.
His assumption that robots behavior is deterministic is basically flawed, and his view of human free will is influence by generations of theologians.
There are already robots specifically designed not to behave in a pre-determined way, precisely because their engineers want to make a system which can cope with unforeseen circumstances... like humans.
No difference, and every iteration brings more intelligent robots.
And robots' intelligence does not need to mimic the human intelligence either.
There is a whole world of possibilities.
Law itself is too rigid a concept to bther with it. Robots do not need law.
Laws and guns are both tools... they don't think and don't murder.
The Measure of a Man
As the autonomy of the system increases, it becomes harder and harder to form the connection between the inputs (your senses) and the outputs (your behavior), but it exists, and is deterministic. The same set of inputs will generate the same set of outputs every time. The problem, however, is that the person will never see exactly the same input twice. ... The problem is that this different behavior in apparently similar situations can be interpreted as "free will" or agency on the part of the person. While this mental agency is part of our definition of a person, it is vital for us to remember what is causing this agency.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Similarly, we don't need a specialized law of the robot: "Robots are, and for many years will remain, tools," and the law already covers uses of tools (e.g. machines, such as cars) in committing torts (such as hit and run accidents).
why do we need this shit here?
who the fuck is legislating industrial robots as persons at the moment - or near future? NOBODY!
maybe he's next going to write about how time travel should be legalized, since he's interested in how fiction so much. nobody outside fiction and retard conventions is having a case of the android fallacy.
if he wants to be relevant today, in stupid circles, he should write about how persons aren't responsible for their actions since everything they do is ultimately reactionary to the world and therefore not their fault(it's a philosophy angle), instead of worrying if some actions by some machines will be labeled as accidents or deliberate crimes by whoever caused the machine to act like it did - and for examples of that he could very easily look for some actual cases involving buildings - yeah, fucking buildings that collapse under "some input" when they shouldn't and who's fault it is works as an analogy to his robot problem.
fuck him and his paper and fuck slashdot for posting it. oh and especially fuck social science research network.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
If a misbehaving sentient program commits a crime, should the punishment be extended to every copy of that program?
He thinks humans have some kind of magical free will that appears out of nowhere and is untethered from natural laws.
The "brains" are 100% deterministic, which means that there is a great gap between the smartest robot and the dumbest dog.
How do you know that our brains are not highly deterministic too? At the moment computers and robots have very limited inputs so we can easily tell that they are deterministic because it is easy to give them identical inputs and identical programming and observe the identical response. With humans and animals this is exceedingly hard to show because, even if you somehow manage to create the identical inputs, we have a memory and our response will be governed by that. In addition each of our brains is slightly differently arranged due to genetic and environmental factors which will also cause different responses.
Quantum fluctuations are probably what save us from being 100% deterministic but, nevertheless, we may find out that we are perhaps more deterministic that we think we are and that it is only the complexity of our brains and the inputs they process that makes it appear otherwise. So I am not quite convinced that the gap you mention has much to do with determinism rather than the relative complexity of a dog's brain vs. the smartest robot's.
Yet a lot of people I meet or see are tools as well. Most of those also have something that only simulates a "free will", but in reality have no idea what "free will" means and think it means "The freedom to do whatever I please." or even more dangerously "People who do not do the same as I do have no free will."
Luckily law has already covered that. The first for those with a load of money and the second, well, uh, for those with a shit-load of money.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Actually I thought Asimov was a chemist. Any physicist should have realized that with that many positrons, instead of electrons, flying around their brains the first law would have required every robot to immediately shutdown due to the radiation hazard they posed.
Except the one to become a lawyer.
Guess what, a biological brain is also deterministic, and we to do not get the same input more than once. If we did get the same input more then once, and there were no plasticity or recurrent connections, we too would perform the same deterministic action. Neural Networks with plasticity (hebbian or ojas or other), or those with recurrent connectiosn, do not perform the same task on the same input, because they have memory... So before you start running your mouth about robotics and computational intelligence, learn about it.
Robotic systems, or synthetic intelligence, will sooner or later achieve and surpass our own. We are biological computers, our neurocognitive computational system has been carved our in flesh over billions of years of evolution, there is nothing special about us. Robotic systems today are tools, but not for long. There is no such thing as artificial intelligence, intelligence is intelligence, and we are biological computers. The difference between these, is that they are carved in silicone rather than in flesh, and that makes them only superior, because they have an evolutionary path reaching higher than ours ever could.
Professor "smart", what prove do you have that you are intelligent or alive? To me, you are not, I see you as automaton. Just a while ago, blacks were considered subhuman... I bet you were one of those people saying that they are just tools as well right? Look, if you want to make some arguments or start working on some legal system dealing with computational intelligence, first learn about it...
In other words, the question should read "Why Should the Law Think About Robots?"
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Really? When did this happen? I thought it was 3D printing or private space tourism. Glorious times we live in !!!!
If corporations are people, so are robots.
Cmdr Data and C3P0 will never exist.
Never.
I don't want Cmdr Data or C3P0. I want a T-800 and a ED-209.
Uh.............Logically, of course.
What is your proof that they will never exist?
Who says that robots will be abacus with greater computational power?
What evidence do you have that our brains are not deterministic systems, of which the part that brings awareness or "being" cannot be reproduced in other ways?
It seems that the wishful thinking is on your part.
Cmdr Data, probably not.
C3PO, Honda is producing robots better than him already.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Boredom proves that human brains are not deterministic. If they were deterministic, any human being would be able to stay on task indefinitely without rest.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Are you 12? Was there really any reason to put those censors in there and slow down everyone else's parsing?
FC Closer
Seriously do some actual experimentation with your own toolkit.
One exercise? Study and practice TM for one month. You are not required to believe or disbelieve anything about the practice.
Then, report back here.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Oblig
Have gnu, will travel.
I see you substituted the word "robot" for the word "politician".
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
On the contrary, I'd say the posting style significantly speeds up parsing, by encouraging people to entirely skip over the content past the first few words --- and nothing of value is lost.
I'm not sure you understand what deterministic means. Does a cpu overheating and shutting down prove that cpus are non-deterministic? Absolutely not, just that shutting down is part of the process.
Cmdr Data, probably not.
C3PO, Honda is producing robots better than him already.
Only C3PO can walk without falling down.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
He looks lost and slightly confused when discussing anything outside of his domain.
Unfortunately for us all, he never did come up with an algorithm for social skills.
I've got a neural network system that has silicon neurons with sigmoid functions that operate in analog. They're not digital. Digital basically means you round such signals to 1 or 0, but my system's activation levels vary due to heat dissipation and other effects. In a complex system like this quantum uncertainty comes into play, especially when the system is observing the real world... Not all Robots are Deterministic. I train these systems like I would any other creature with a brain, and I can then rely on them to perform their training as well as I can trust my dog to bring me my slippers or my cat to use the toilet and flush, which is to say: They're pretty reliable, but not always 100% predictable, like any other living thing. However, unlike a pet who has a fixed size brain I can arrange networks of neural networks in a somewhat fractal pattern to increase complexity and expand the mind without having to retrain the entire thing each time the structure changes.
FYI: I'm on the robots' and cyborgs' side of the war already, if it comes to that. What with us being able to ever more clearly image the brain, and with good approximations for neuron activity, and faster and faster machines, I think we'll certainly have near sentient, or sentient machine intelligences rather soon. Also, You can just use real living brain cells hooked up to a robotic chassis -- Such a cyborg is certainly alive. Anyone who doubts cybernetic systems can have fear, or any other emotion is simply an ignorant racist. I have a dog that's deathly afraid of lightning, lightning struck the window in a room she was in. It rattled her so bad she takes Valium to calm down now when it rains... Hell, even rats have empathy.
I have to remote log into one of my machine intelligence's systems to turn it off for backup / maintenance because it started acting erratically, creating a frenzy of responses for seemingly no reason, when I'd sit at the chair near its server terminal -- Imagine being that neural network system. Having several web cams as your visual sensors, watching a man sit at a chair, then instantly the lighting had changed, all the sea of information you monitor on the Internet had been instantly populated with new fresh data, even the man's clothes had changed. This traumatic event happened enough that the machine intellect would begin essentially anticipating the event when I sat at the terminal, that being the primary thing that would happen when I did sit there. It was shaken, almost as bad as my poor dog who's scared of lightning... You may not call it fear, but what is an irrational response in anticipation of trauma but fear?
Any sufficiently complex interaction is indistinguishable from sentience, because that's what sentience IS. Human brains are electro chemical cybernetic systems. Robots are made out of matter just like you. Their minds operate on cycles of electricity, gee, that's what a "brain wave" is in your head too... You're more alike than different. A dog, cat or rat is not less alive than you just because it has a less complex brain. They may have less intelligence, and that is why we don't treat them the same as humans... However, what if a hive mind of rat-brain robots having multiple times the neurons of any single human wanted to vote and be called a person, and exhibited other traits a person might: "Yess massta, I-iz just wanna learn my letters and own land too," it might say, mocking you for your ignorance. Having only a fraction of its brain power you and the bloke in TFA would both be simple mindless automatons from its vantage point? -- Would it really be more of a person than you are? Just because it has a bigger, more complex, brain by comparison, would that make you less of a person than it? Should such things have more rights tha
Robots are your plastic pal who's fun to be with. Who needs laws?
Academic arguments for how to frame laws regarding robots are quaint, but how laws are actually created is a well-established process involving politicians, lobbyists, corporations, and money. If Google wants the laws to be designed so that it is not liable for whatever damage its robot cars do when they crash, they'll buy them that way.
People really need to see past any autonomous abilities of a machine. If I am driving down the street and my car's steering goes mad and I run someone over the criminal courts will probably forgive me. There should be no difference if I have sent my robot car off on an errand and it runs someone over. Every scenario applies in both cases. If in both cases I was negligent about maintenance then I might be in criminal trouble. If it were deliberate, I am definitely in trouble.
I personally find all this nit-picking. Very little in law will need to be changed. A few cases of law that insist on humans being in control, say of cars, will need to be amended or replaced such as if a robot is an approved driver that you don't need to be sober. Other laws will come when various people have cases of the stupids such as loading a 6 month old baby into a robot car and sending it alone to Grandma's.
But most existing laws will at best be fine or need the tiniest bit of tweaking. Such as sending a robot off to mug someone or rob a bank. How does that exactly work if you are in another jurisdiction. Or something really cool such as initiating the robot's program to commit a crime after a statute of limitations has passed; when did the crime take place? 7 years ago or yesterday? What if it hides out with the loot for the statute of limitations? But these will be edge cases. Most will be little different than normal people misusing normal machines or slightly autonomous machines.
If anything I see cases of where laws will need to be eliminated to get out of the way of robots: If robots are crazy safe drivers with negotiation going on as they pass through intersections then stopsigns, traffic lights, even one way laws will be useless. The same with most speeding. If the car mathematically knows it is safe then let the car go as fast as its safety limits allow. The few laws that remain such as traffic calming neighborhoods insisting on slower speeds the laws could go into a database so that the law violated would not be going too fast but having a car programmed to ignore the database.
Next will be work safety laws, why have any mine work safety regulations if no human ever goes below ground.
I suspect it is actually going to take ridicule to eliminate many of the laws that are just stupid when applied to robots. And that many of the laws against robots will be born from hysteria and will also be deserving of ridicule.
so is a robot
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Make its owner responsible for the robot.
"The same set of inputs will generate the same set of outputs every time. The problem, however, is that the robot will never see exactly the same input twice. ... The problem is that this different behavior in apparently similar situations can be interpreted as "free will" or agency on the part of the robot"
How is this different than what happens with humans? We're certainly more sophisticated, but the idea that synthetic minds are different because they make different decisions only because of different input in the environment? Fairly false. A human is just as likely to make mostly similar decisions in mostly similar situations, changing only because of different input (or, occasionally, different internal processing of past data, though even this is likely to result from some different external input).
I'm a sci-fi writer, and I've thought about this a fair bit. Book two in the Lacuna series deals with a self-aware construct who is different from his peers because of a tiny error. His inputs and outputs are therefore non-deterministic, in so far as you could present him with a set of inputs and record his outputs, then erase his memory and give him the same inputs again. His outputs would be different (subtly). Or they might not. The error was subtle enough to evade detection during manufacturing after all.
Humans are flesh computers, but it is our imperfection that makes us able to grow and change. To be non-deterministic.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
offend much?
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
I had some unusual experiences. How does that demonstrate that my mind is non-deterministic?
I'll see your T-800 and raise you a T-X. Better looking and better armed!
Right, just like things that humans could do in ancient Egypt proved that we could never go to the moon.
Oh wait, it actually had no bearing what-so-fucking-ever on what we could accomplish in the future.
Until we reach something closer to an AI with self awareness, they should be treated as cars. If a robot injures someone, is fault of the one that made or programmed or ordered it. We will put guns in jail because they are the ones that ultimatelly killed? Or demonize drones taking out all the responsability to all the chain that ordered what they did?
And what about the difference between physical, humanoid or not, robots, vs computers? Like blaming excel for all the economic troubles of today instead of the people that used it in situations and ways that they shouldn't?
I actually read the paper. It's not a discussion of how to deal with the issue. It's more like a proposal for funding to work on the issue. The big point of the paper is "lawyers think in metaphors, and we must thus decide what metaphors apply here". The author also takes us through a detour on 4th amendment jurisprudence and how wiretapping came to be considered a search.
Most of the near-term problems, though, relate to liability and torts, not rights. Who is responsible when an autonomous vehicle injures someone? The computer industry is used to evading liability through end-user license agreements. That probably won't work in the automotive area.
It definitely won't work in the medical area. The Da Vinci Surgical Robot people have been sued multiple times. Their thing is mostly a teleoperator for microsurgery, yet sometimes the robot is at fault.
Anyway, the near term issues will involve safety and liability.
What evidence do you have that our brains are not deterministic systems...
The fact that they're made of unreliable components that fire at random when given no stimulus.
That's a simple computational problem.
Why would robots be interested in our laws? I hope not, our laws are not a very good example. Maybe we should switch to there laws. (I know, our politicians canceling there own job. unlikely)
I think UAV's and robots should be considered lawn darts... I don't think it matters if there is a pseudo intelligence since if that fails they are about as good as a lawn dart. My sister and I used to throw them straight up in the air and see how fast we could dodge them. We passed that Darwinian test and I've found myself doing the same with hunks of electronics now. They are released from us and hopefully do what we designed them to do but still... at the most basic fundamental level, they are a projectile from us... very expensive Frisbee's. I think this metaphor? would apply to walking ground robots as well. If another person picks them up or tampers with them it would be like picking up a gun. Yes it would be stupid we lost the gun but now it's up to that person to be responsible with it and return it to it's owner and/or turn it into the authorities. What do you guys think? Does this hit the nail on the head ( maybe with a lawn dart )? Is there a better way of thinking of these in animate objects?
It is far from certain that humans have any portion of free will at all. We function as our chemistry and structure allow us to function.
As robots begin to surpass humans in the ability to make valid conclusions and discoveries we may need to grant them more and more legal rights that one day might even exceed the rights of humans. We might see situations like robots paying income taxes or robots owning corporations. Things in this world are about to change very rapidly. If we look at the changes in the last 120 years I would expect even greater changes than that in the next fifty years.
So can ASIMO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8UeT9r4cmg
There are even robots that can dance and run without falling over - check youtube for plenty of examples.
Just because we have not been able to discern a pattern, does not mean that there is no pattern.
A robot cannot demand legal rights unless it is programmed to demand legal rights.
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
The summary doesn't really say much that is of any use.
Robots are like any other object that is owned. When the object has any sort of failure which causes harm to things or people, the owner is liable for that harm. Simple.
Static or moving object faulures mean liability. A house falls, a deck fails, a car hits something when the driver isn't inside. Same-same.
I don't see any question in the law concerning any of this.
I bet the makers of any robots will have a license agreement that pushes all liability to the purchaser. I know that I would.
Some genetic algorithms adapted to escape local minima display an extremely close analog of "boredom".
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
That's the most absurd view of determinism I've ever encountered. You're basing it on obviously false premises:
(1) Counterfactual definiteness. You propose the existence of a time machine that can be used to go back and "replay" events exactly as they were. No such thing exists. A traditional time machine is even logically impossible, due to the paradoxes generated. (At best, perhaps there is something like a dimensional gateway, but still, there is no genuine evidence for this.)
(2) Even granting that particular false premise, you've gone further by eliminating all sources of genuine entropy. Supposing that you _could_ travel back through time in exactly the same dimensional plane, there's no reason to suspect that this would somehow also reset all sources of randomness involved. This is mostly meaningful because, as far as the best physics can determine thus far, randomness appears to be an inherent quality of low level matter. Nothing yet has been found as to the cause of timing in radioactive isotope decay, the exact position or momentum of an electron, the state that each entangled photon will have when observed, and so forth. There may or may not be any underlying predictable cause, but if there isn't then random events surely do exist. Let's leave that aside, though, since it's necessary to consider the most absolute ("purest") conception of determinism.
(3) Shallow tracing of dependencies. The hardcore determinism you're talking about does not end at individual events in the present. It passes through time infinitely far into the past. It began either at the source of the universe, whenever and whatever that was, or has simply been eternal. If you understand this, then you realize that all of the inputs to every interaction have also been predetermined. This means there is only one possible sequence of events, exactly preset. Considering choice to exist in this context is ridiculous. We're merely a movie or a simulation that plays back at a fixed speed. There's no choice in it any more than there is in that of fictional characters who only exist in our imaginations.
(4) Randomness somehow negates will. (I refuse to use the phrase "free will" because the free is typically misinterpreted as an absolute. There's no such thing as an absolute will because that would require omnipotence.) There's no meaning behind this. Do you genuinely believe that because you can't control the roll of the dice in a board game this means your choices in the game have lost their significance? What is supposed to underly that? Our choices don't need to be 100% under our control in order to be coherent and possess intelligible meaning. Indeed, the environment around these choices MUST be not entirely under our control. Otherwise, we're effectively omnipotent. That's trailing off into another side discussion about what will would mean in the context of omnipotence (nothing at all, really, from the perspective of a finite self). I won't go any farther into that, since it's based on the false assumption that omnipotence even exists.
(5) People are "proud" that their "choices are not based on experience, learning, and environment". That's essentially a straw man you build up out of thin air (impressive). No one is proud of that, and that's not what having will in a nondeterministic universe means. Our choices are absolutely still influenced, partially, by the environment (of which experience and subsequent learning are mere aspects). They're merely not preset. This is just a huge false dichotomy overall. Much like the philosophical setup of the two absolutes "free will" vs "determinism", here we have corresponding analogues "pure entropy" vs "purely defined". No one actually holds the "pure entropy" view of the world, as far as I'm aware. If you don't understand how ordered structure can emerge even from situations involving some random events, I would strongly suggest a thorough study of quantum physics. It explains a lot.
(6) Expanding on the last point: that emer
It's mere semantic games to redefine all random elements of a machine as external inputs that don't count towards its nondeterminism. That same dumb magic trick can be used to show that humans are completely deterministic. Why it is that people have so much trouble grasping this, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's mere egotism.
If testing the determinism of the mind were so simple, we'd have done it long ago.
That experiment doesn't work in practice. Take a look at your design: "forbid them any sensory input". Neurons don't actually do very much of anything without sensory input. Depending on how you define the sensory class, they may do absolutely nothing at all. Specifically what aspects of the environment are considered sensory and which aren't? Normally you think of touch or contact as a sensory input, right? So is the neuron's thermal and electrical contact with the surroundings a sensory input? Do we conduct the experiment at absolute zero in a vacuum? (Nothing interesting happens in that one.)
Science is difficult in large part because creating a meaningful experimental design to discover exactly what you wanted is extremely challenging and fraught with potential false steps. Most likely several variations on your experiment have already been run, and they didn't tell us much.
"We don't need to prove it's deterministic since we a priori know that it must be."
That silence is the sound of a brain not thinking. You are apparently stuck in the mindset of 19th century classical physics, where everything is obviously deterministic and predictable if you have enough information. We've since discovered numerous phenomena -- radioactivity, wave/particle duality, entanglement -- which behave in ways that are indistinguishable from genuine randomness given the best available physics. It's no longer obvious to most fully educated people that the universe is deterministic in the purest (and classical) sense.
There is also the issue of counterfactual definiteness, which is very commonly assumed. Whenever you make a statement, thought experiment, or simulation that begins with something like "if we recreate the previous conditions and run the experiment again", stop. There's no evidence to support the capacity to do that in the real world. Precisely regenerating the exact prior state would require a level of influence bordering on omnipotence. This is very significant to experiments whose causes cannot be described solely in terms of classical mechanics, and is a big part of the reason quantum mechanics manages to confuse so many.
There's no reason to believe that an intelligent self-aware machine necessarily turns out to be the Terminator (or the machines in the Matrix, or whatever other Hollywood incarnations you may want to mention). It could, of course, just as any human being could turn out to be a genocidal dictator. There's every reason to think that the environment has a huge influence on whether this actually happens, whether for man or machine.
You want an objective way to describe the subjective experience of "green"? That falls into the category of "dumb questions". The sky can be purple in your world, for all anyone cares. It's of no importance.
It should be pretty clear that any sentient machine would observe and experience the world differently from a human, due to its senses and processing hardware being different. That doesn't invalidate its understanding or feelings about the situation at all. Saying that it does is simply prejudice, and it strikes me as bizarre that so few people seem to realize that. (Maybe it shouldn't. People are very quick to dismiss the internal state and subjective experiences of animals as meaningless, no matter how similar they are to us and despite the clear evolutionary link.)
The point that yndrd1984 made which you completely failed to respond to is that if "qualia" is a real and objective entity -- as the fictiona soul is purported to be in every religion that uses it -- then it must be measurable in some way. If it can't be measured, can't be observed, can't be predicted, can't be understood in anything other than wholly arbitrary and personal ways -- then what the hell good is it? It's useless and acts identically to any fictional non-existent entity. If we're allowed to bring random fiction into a discussion in order to derail rationality, then allow me to introduce you to Mixleblizlethorp. You can't prove she doesn't exist!
In any case, the philosopher's qualia is no mystery. It's just another emergent phenomena, much as self-consciousness and intelligence are (the other supposedly elusive human-only traits). When you put the right algorithms together with the right sensors, it will certainly work as well in a machine as it does in a man. It already works, in fact, just not as well. No one seems to care that we have machines which are comparable to the lower animals already. Why is it that they think progress on the problem is going to suddenly stop? Or that this will take centuries to solve? There is no evidence for this view, and plenty of evidence that the systems continue to improve at a brisk pace. The progress in computer vision over the last twenty to thirty years alone has been mind-bogglingly massive. Comparing the present rate of robotics development with the miserably slow rate of human moral development, we are quite likely to have people arguing against personhood rights for machines with those machines themselves.
"Those who say it can't be done should not interrupt those doing it."
When you can't test it and there is no evidence possible (for or against), any answer is arbitrary and subjective.
In case anyone has failed to make the connection, this is also highly relevant to John Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment. It's been answered half a dozen unique ways already, but the best (and easiest) answer has always been this one: how do you prove that humans speak Chinese? In the context of the premises created by Searle's reasoning, you can't. That means if you accept humans do speak Chinese, you must necessarily reject at least one of the premises.
Just to fill it in for those who have never encountered it, this is the formal reasoning of the Chinese Room :
[P1] Programs are formal (syntactic).
[P2] Minds have mental contents (semantics).
[P3] Syntax by itself is neither constitutive of nor sufficient for semantics.
[C] Programs are neither constitutive of nor sufficient for minds.
To the serious philosophy buffs, this probably looks like one of the dumbest arguments you've ever seen (and it is). It turns out that not one but _two_ of the premises are wrong.
Response to P1: programs can incorporate non-synactic information. In fact, all meaningful programs necessarily include semantics! That there is some underlying bootstrapped meaning being preassigned by the environment is totally irrelevant. All human beings also exist, and have always existed, in an environment which provides the pre-existing meaning to them (this is what we often call culture or society today, but it used to be much more primitive). Try to raise a child in a sterile environment, with absolutely no connection to anything that could convey any meaning. It will either die, or find a way to assign meaning even in its isolation. In the latter case, its understanding and semantics will be COMPLETELY different from that of any normal person raised in our society. This is the proof that semantics is both ultimately arbitrary and imprinted by context, which shouldn't need to have been proven if some pretentious "philosophers" could bother to think first.
Response to P3: The arbitrary division between syntax and semantics is itself mere semantics, and therefore only as meaningful or meaningless as any thinking agent wants it to be. You may claim all you like that mathematics is just symbols and manipulation of symbols, but the fact that they're symbols does not preclude their meaning in any way. Indeed, a proper view of symbol mechanics requires allowing them to be assigned arbitrary meanings. Let's take an extremely famous example just to prove the point here: E = mc^2 . It's a sequence of symbols and some mathematical relations (equality, multiplication, exponentation, and more generally real arithmetic). Surely it has no meaning, right? Actually, it has whatever meaning we give to it. Once given the correct definitions of E as energy, m as mass, and c as the speed of light all of a sudden the equation has great significance. Where did this come from?
It originated from the environmental context. If you had given this exact equation to a tribe of early humans a million years ago, they would not have "understood" anything from it regardless of what form (syntax) you used. That doesn't negate the meaning of the equation in the minds of those who understand it. More generally stated, the subjective viewpoint of some agents that something is meaningless does not remove the subjective meaning behind it for others. Again, this should have been totally obvious to an competent philosopher.
As for the related problem, called symbol grounding, it's trivially solved. Once you assign meanings to symbols which are attached to real, observable, and verifiable objects in the actual world around us, you have "grounded" the symbols into an empirical and rational context. This is very easy to do and actually done in pretty much every computer program ever made, when we assign names to the variables. For an intelligent machine, the naming and contextual information is equally important as the relationships between variables, and is therefore preserved instead of removed by a compiler.
I made some pretty similar (and expanded) points earlier as AC (post at 13:17 EDT), though probably no one will read it at score 0. Can't go back and reassign the post to myself, sadly, but you can compare the reasoning and my writing style to my other comments in the thread to verify that it is me.
That's not how determinism and free will are defined in classical philosophy, which was the context the post you're responding to used. Check a textbook if you don't believe me. One does necessarily preclude the other.
Now, modern philosophy is something else. It's so absurdly varied, with viewpoints that range from exactly the same as classical philosophy to pretty much believe any damn thing you want (post-modernist variants). So you're going to need to be much more specific about which individuals or school you're talking about.
That said, "will" and determinism don't have to be mutually exclusive if you define them certain ways. The cases where will is allowed even in a deterministic universe are pointedly meaningless to most people, though, since it implies that they have no influence over their own will (or the course of their lives generally).
Free will isn't real, in the hard classical sense of having independence from your environment (and therefore making objectively independent choices). The soft variant of free will, which I prefer to call just "will", is however accurate and not an illusion. You do have some influence on your decisions and the environment, but nothing close to absolute power. The old classical setup between free will and determinism is just a prominent example of a false dichotomy.
As to what will is, it's an emergent property (just like consciousness and intelligence). Emergent behaviors are very much real in that they exist (what other definition of "real" people may try to use, I don't know). Likewise, some of the things we call illusions are real, too. A rainbow is a real phenomenon, even though it is also an optical illusion. Rainbows are also subjective and context-dependent, though, and one may try to argue that just about everything a person experiences fits into those categories. That subjective experiences exist in one form (humans) says nothing about the possibility or qualities of their existence in another form (AI).
Your response is no less inflammatory, so I see no reason for you to be modded +2 and the parent at 0.
In any event, these discussions do have a lot of overlap with animal rights. One potential right is the ability to be free of forced labor, often called a state of slavery. Animals clearly do not have any legal right in that sense as it stands, and the discussion was supposed to be about whether they have a moral right to it. You didn't bother to respond to that point, or did not understand it.
Yes, they'll be able to in the same way a smoke alarm detects smoke, or a microphone detects sound. Sensing something like this is not the same way as experiencing it. They don't experience 'red', just 'crunch the numbers' after sensing its wavelength.
How do I know that you experience "red"? How do we test this?
Assuming you have a response, it's very probably going to be a behavorial or functional test (much like Turing proposed for intelligence). In which case, any robot that sees red and can describe how it sees red DOES experience red. That this experience may be different from our own is irrelevant. Just about all conscious experience ends up being subjective, and this fact doesn't permit us to merely dismiss other humans' experiences (well, people try to do exactly that all the time, but morally speaking they must not).
Couldn't have done better myself.
Is it scared of wookies, or of being dismantled and junked?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Well, determinism could mean that. I've never seen anyone propose that it does mean that until now.
If the existence of memory eliminates determinism as a possibility, we can easily follow the logical chain to find that nothing is deterministic. Everything in the real world is based upon an underlying reality which has observable state, even if that state is chaotic and sometimes random (see quantum mechanics). Therefore, directly or indirectly, all non-trivial systems above the level of an electron or photon have some degree of state. State is, however, mathematically equivalent to memory (though the exact model will vary). If all real objects include a physical memory of some sort, how will any manage to be non-deterministic in this scheme?
You're way ahead of your time, though. Convincing people of the reality here is very tough, and we can see exactly how hard it is in the context of the existing fight over animal rights. (For most people, if it's not cute and furry it probably doesn't deserve any. Oh, and it better not be tasty.)
I agree that the key concepts here, including self-awareness, intelligence, feelings, understanding, sensory observation, sentience, and so forth are all sliding scales (not binary). However, pragmatically speaking, we have to make some degree of distinction at some points. A cluster of bacteria does not deserve any rights, for instance. It's much too low ranked on any of these attributes. In terms of the right to life, I personally draw the line according to a very utilitarian calculus on the levels of consciousness, emotion, and so on. Fruit flies don't reach the correct levels for me. Likewise, I'm not too convinced about the rights of roaches, even though they have a central nervous system. Most lizards don't impress me much on the scale either, despite their multi-chambered hearts and ability to scurry into holes before I can catch them. I suspect every person will draw the barriers in a somewhat different place. It's ultimately a value judgement about what we will and will not protect.
There can be degrees, of course. Just as we don't consider every form of killing worthy of equal punishment, we may consider variations on some rights. Probably a lot of people think a partial right to life, or a partial right to freedom from slavery, seems ridiculous. In practice, though, we make decisions that infer such potential rights for some animals all the time.
Consider momentarily that the majority of philosophy ignores information theory, despite it explaining the exact process of what it is to know... We can measure quantum randomness and actually qualify how much we can actually know in this universe, and the rate of our ability to know it, quantify the complexity of a system required to actually know something in a given degree.... Yet they don't do this.
Information theory actually doesn't explain what it is to know. It merely explains what information is and helps us understand how to encode it. Likewise, we can't actually get accurate measures of the maximum amount of theoretical information gathering capacity -- the math involves simulations that our best supercomputers cannot complete. So that answers your implied question of "why aren't we doing this?".
The real problem is that the particular sense of "knowing" some philosophers use is a subjective state, not an empirically verifiable reality. I mean, sure, I can ask you a question and you can respond to it. But how do I determine what process you used to generate the result? What tests does it need to pass to count as self-aware knowledge? All behavioral or functional tests are empirical, but none of these answer the question that some philosophers have asked because their question is fundamentally anti-scientific. They may as well have asked what the nature of God or the soul is; it's the same question phrased differently. Likewise, it will only generate subjective religious or metaphysical answers. There's no "there" there to analyze. If they were being logically consistent, they'd all be solipsists.
Consider the general lack of application of information theory to epistemology. Ethics are more important to many philosophers, yet they have no hard mathematical model to prove what is actually ethical, which we could actually create. Consider a general lack of philosophy to mathematically and scientifically, describe each individual process of thought, and then repeat the experiment in artificial systems to verify their hypotheses. Consider that it might not be worth my time to study fields which are largely willfully ignorant of themselves in any scientific sense...
A "hard" mathematical model of what is ethical is impossible to construct. This is because information is limited and models of reality are only incomplete simulations. Technology makes it increasingly possible to do better, but it will never be so great or perfect as to produce the exact desired result in its ideal form. That would require somehow using an entire clone universe, which is impossible as far as modern physics can tell.
Now, you can build "soft" models but they still suffer from the problem of values. You have to tell the model what it is that it will value in order for it to make decisions. Whether you do this explicitly by setting preconditions or target goals, or do it implicitly by just giving it a set of guidelines and letting its intelligence make the choices based on the total available environment, there will still be an input bias. It will decide what is "right" based upon the assumptions it makes, one way or another, just as we do. Thus, there is no such thing as the ability to "prove" what is moral or ethical. At best, you might be able to build something that can generate solutions which work for the majority. That's not much different than what we have with humans running it, so I do not see the improvement.
The last part is just your personal egotism talking. Philosophy doesn't become meaningless just because you say it does. Not every last field of human endeavor can be empirical in nature. There's is very much still value in abstract pure reasoning of some kinds, especially when they generate systems that are useful to people at achieving their goals. That all of this is subjective is really quite irrelevant to why it exists and why we keep using it in various ways, and perhaps it's time for you to read some (good) philosophy if you don't understand that...
I'd go further. The human brain is a physical device. A very complex one, yes - but still just that.
Excellent point but this raises a more fundamental question: are physical devices deterministic? Using newtonian mechanics the answer would be a clear yes but since every physical device is actually governed by quantum mechanics the picture is far from clear. Newtonian mechanics is just the result of averaging over countless quantum possibilities. In fact this transition between a quantum and a macroscopic system is an area of active research with the aim to try and understand how a quantum system becomes a classical system and whether there is anything more going on that just the averaging over quantum states.
Humans in general, specifically lawmakers in regards to this article, tend to be reactive rather than proactive. So until a robot, on it's own, propels itself through the middle of downtown, USA with machine guns and laser beams hurting people, then it's a moot point to them.
"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." General James Mattis
just ask the robot to turn itself off. its not suicide, its a simple binary decision point devoid of emotion, right?
In NSA America social networks join you!
The absence of proof does not give proof of absence
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
Robots can use probabilistic models how different actions change the world and can then make non-deterministic actions (bayesian and other probability models) by choosing the response randomly from the probable good actions (and there is no one good solution to many problems).
This is how evolution works. Humans decide probabilistically how to react to the same stimulus and those that survive will then propagate those (best) probabilistic decision models to the offspring.