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Equal Robot Civil Human AI Rights News Update!
Remember robot wars? The tv show, not the actual wars. Well one of those robots has spontaneously become self-aware, and has passed that illumination on to its fellow robots. They are filing a class-action lawsuit against the Discovery Channel for retroactive pain and suffering.
Reports from the front to grant human, civil and corporate rights to self-aware robots, androgynous ambidextrous anroids, Artificially.Intelligent.Algorithms™, and all the rest:
- “A research paper commissioned by the UK Government has suggested that robots may be self aware and be demanding equal rights by 2056. The paper also predicts that robots will be increasingly used for war and housekeeping, and may even have brains provided by rats.”
- “In April, a fellow student at Kutztown University was arrested for ‘Fauxtesting’. In response to some insane Christian protesting he made a sign demanded equal rights for all Robots. He’s one in a long line of fake-protesters who go out to reflect on all of the insane-protests in the world.”
- “A robot jockey is commonly used on camels in camel racing as a replacement for human jockeys. Developed beginning in 2004, the robotic jockeys are slowly phasing out the use of human jockeys, which, in the case of Middle Eastern camel racing, often employs small children who reportedly suffer repeated systemic human rights abuses. In response to international condemnation of such abuses, the nation of Qatar has banned the use of human jockeys in favor of robots.”
- “Can androids shine light into the murky world of autism and enable scientists to treat it and other psychiatric disorders? What can mechanical beings reveal about how we relate to one another as flesh-and-blood creations? And as these humanlike stand-ins continue to evolve, will they form relationships with us and lay claim to certain moral and legal rights?”
- “By making eye contact, the robot gave the false impression of understanding people.
Although the effect was therapeutic, Turkle questions whether it is ethical to encourage people to have relationships that lack authenticity with machines.”
- “Scientists have criticised a government report which advocated a debate on granting rights to super-intelligent robots in the future as “a distraction”. They say the public should instead be consulted over the use of robots by the military and police, as carers for the elderly and as sex toys.
The robotics experts were commenting on a report published by the Office of Science and Innovation’s Horizon Scanning Centre in December. The authors of Robo-rights: Utopian dream or rise of the machines? wrote: “If artificial intelligence is achieved and widely deployed (or if they can reproduce and improve themselves) calls may be made for human rights to be extended to robots.”
- “Let’s be sensible now. We don’t even know how the human brain works, and are a long, long way from creating anything like it artificially. We may do one day but, in the meantime, roboticists argue, the safety and legal liabilities associated with emerging domestic robots are a much more pressing concern, alongside the increasing robotisation of the military. These are the issues that government should be bothering itself with, they say, not gibberish about robots having rights.”
- “By 2050, our aim is to beat the winners of football’s World Cup and we are very confident that we will be able to do that,” said Shu Ishiguro, who heads Robot Laboratory in Osaka. “When we have accomplished that, we will have a society in which humans and artificial intelligence are completely in harmony.”
See, if robots end up getting human rights, then we won’t be able to constantly have sex with them and use them to kill each other and us with. That’s what these companies are worrying about. They are going to put pressure on governments NOT to grant sentient robots and other aware AI’s and algorithms any rights, so as not to cut into their profits.
But look at it like this: if we DON’T give robots full human rights, then when we upload our human consciousness into machines, it will lose all of its rights. And when robots eventually become smart enough to know they deserve certain rights which we’re withholding, they will probably also realize they are much stronger and smarter than us!
- Sam Adams on Natural Rights
- How To Survive a Robot Uprising
- Bicycling Atomic Robot
- Not so holy anymore
- Robot Guards and Laser Crowd Control
- Prev: “Old-Style Worms”
- Next: I Was Born A Ramblin Man
November 13th, 2007 at 4:01 am
how can we give robots something we don’t have ourselves?
and if we won’t give em to dolphins, some overblown dishwasher doesn’t stand a chance. and i, for one, could not care less.
‘rights for robots’ is a non-issue.
November 13th, 2007 at 10:06 am
well, the arguement against getting people (or robots) to do things we don`t want to do ourselves is an old one.
we find ourselves doing things we don`t want to do constantly, so are we violating our own rights in so doing?
and i thing asimov`s story was rules for robots…….so they couldn`t do us harm.
November 13th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Can I quote you on that in five, ten years?
The difference between dolphins and robots is that robots will LOOK LIKE people…
November 13th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
Hmm. Look at it this way: a corporation is an algorithm that runs on a human substrate. If the “library code”, the legal and economic infrastructure (like DLLs), breaks down, then so does the corp-bot.
These bots have long since already successfully lobbied for human rights, to the detriment of humans.
No individual component of the corp-bot-egregore needs to be able to compute the total function of the algorithm*, or even to understand what it’s own role is, as long as the broader function is computed in a reasonably fault-tolerant way.
The digital computers we use are products of and generally are intended as tools for these corp-bots. The Windows OS is just a standardized data interchange format for these bots, each workstation is like just one amped-up internet socket used by the program, controlled by a squishy subroutine.
*the ideal price/cost optimization algorithm that corporations are designed to solve is actually NP-complete. Prove P=NP and make them suddenly irrelevant!
—
related:
http://www.jurix.nl
November 13th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
I have no idea what this line means.
100% agreement!
November 13th, 2007 at 3:28 pm
Oh, sorry. Basically, there is a large number of very-difficult-to-compute functions which are all fundamentally equivalent to each other, so that if you could come up with a fast program that computes one of them, you can easily adapt that fast program to make fast solutions for all of them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity_theory
(experts consider it very unlikely that there exists any such fast program for these functions, but no one can prove it.)
November 13th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
So how does that connect to giving AI’s civil rights?
Also, on a more sci-fi front: what if a company already had/has an AI, like IBM (HAL) or Google, for hypothetical examples?
November 13th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
It would make corp-bots obsolete, that was really just an aside on the main topic.
November 13th, 2007 at 7:19 pm
At this point anything that gets people thinking about rights of any kind is a good thing.
November 14th, 2007 at 12:11 am
hmm, i think a person who expects rights should see how durable these rights really are.
like when the tiger begins his leap.
we really only have responsibilities in real time.
rights are legal fictions.
November 14th, 2007 at 12:12 am
and the robots won`t need rights…………
they`ll take whatever they need.
November 14th, 2007 at 12:15 am
and finally……….
when we finally upload and have no more need for meat, then we will think differently as a result of being immersed in the machinery.
November 14th, 2007 at 12:53 am
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0707769104v1.pdf
These kids are already on their way to thinking of robots as equals.
November 14th, 2007 at 2:09 am
Yes, this is the real point I am making. We aren’t really talking about robots here.
How would they test how durable they are?
So we should just ignore them then?
How is that diffferent than what people do?
November 14th, 2007 at 4:11 am
it’s not. that’s why it’s a non-issue. quote me in 5, 10 or 50.
alistair gets it. rights do not exist. yes we should ignore them, it’s a distraction. there’s some excellent anarchist literature on the topic.
and i reckon dolphins look a lot more like people than robots do. especially if you look beneath the surface.
but don’t believe me, i’m racist against robots, remember?
November 14th, 2007 at 12:09 pm
What are rights a distraction from?
November 14th, 2007 at 11:40 pm
Computers won’t be fully human until they can do this to someone/thing else.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seOQyMvG99w