Rights for Robots?
Peter Singer and Agata Sagan
PRINCETON and WARSAW – Last month, Gecko Systems announced that it had been running trials of its “fully autonomous personal companion home care robot,” also known as a “carebot,” designed to help elderly or disabled people to live independently. A woman with short-term memory loss broke into a big smile, the company reported, when the robot asked her, “Would you like a bowl of ice cream?” The woman answered “yes,” and presumably the robot did the rest.
Robots already perform many functions, from making cars to defusing bombs – or, more menacingly, firing missiles. Children and adults play with toy robots, while vacuum-cleaning robots are sucking up dirt in a growing number of homes and – as evidenced by YouTube videos – entertaining cats. There is even a Robot World Cup, though, judging by the standard of the event held in Graz, Austria, last summer, footballers have no need to feel threatened just yet. (Chess, of course, is a different matter.)
Most of the robots being developed for home use are functional in design – Gecko System’s home-care robot looks rather like the Star Wars robot R2-D2. Honda and Sony are designing robots that look more like the same movie’s “android” C-3PO. There are already some robots, though, with soft, flexible bodies, human-like faces and expressions, and a large repertoire of movement. Hanson Robotics has a demonstration model called Albert, whose face bears a striking resemblance to that of Albert Einstein.
Will we soon get used to having humanoid robots around the home? Noel Sharkey, professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield, has predicted that busy parents will start employing robots as babysitters. What will it do to a child, he asks, to spend a lot of time with a machine that cannot express genuine empathy, understanding, or compassion? One might also ask why we should develop energy-intensive robots to work in one of the few areas – care for children or elderly people – in which people with little education can find employment.
In his book Love and Sex with Robots , David Levy goes further, suggesting that we will fall in love with warm, cuddly robots, and even have sex with them. (If the robot has multiple sexual partners, just remove the relevant parts, drop them in disinfectant, and, voilà, no risk of sexually transmitted diseases!) But what will the presence of a “sexbot” do to the marital home? How will we feel if our spouse starts spending too much time with an inexhaustible robotic lover?
A more ominous question is familiar from novels and movies: Will we have to defend our civilization against intelligent machines of our own creation? Some consider the development of superhuman artificial intelligence inevitable, and expect it to happen no later than 2070. They refer to this moment as “the singularity,” and see it as a world-changing event.
Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the founders of The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, believes that singularity will lead to an “intelligence explosion” as super-intelligent machines design even more intelligent machines, with each generation repeating this process. The more cautious Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence has set up a special panel to study what it calls “the potential for loss of human control of computer-based intelligences.”
If that happens, the crucial question for the future of civilization is: Will the super-intelligent computers be friendly? Is it time to start thinking about what steps to take to prevent our own creations from becoming hostile to us?
For the moment, a more realistic concern is not that robots will harm us, but that we will harm them. At present, robots are mere items of property. But what if they become sufficiently complex to have feelings? After all, isn’t the human brain just a very complex machine?
If machines can and do become conscious, will we take their feelings into account? The history of our relations with the only nonhuman sentient beings we have encountered so far – animals – gives no ground for confidence that we would recognize sentient robots not just as items of property, but as beings with moral standing and interests that deserve consideration.
The cognitive scientist Steve Torrance has pointed out that powerful new technologies, like cars, computers, and phones, tend to spread rapidly, in an uncontrolled way. The development of a conscious robot that (who?) was not widely perceived as a member of our moral community could therefore lead to mistreatment on a large scale.
The hard question, of course, is how we could tell that a robot really was conscious, and not just designed to mimic consciousness. Understanding how the robot had been programmed would provide a clue – did the designers write the code to provide only the appearance of consciousness? If so, we would have no reason to believe that the robot was conscious.
But if the robot was designed to have human-like capacities that might incidentally give rise to consciousness, we would have a good reason to think that it really was conscious. At that point, the movement for robot rights would begin.
Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and the author of, among other books, Practical Ethics, Rethinking Life and Death and The Life You Can Save. Agata Sagan is an independent researcher living in Warsaw.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009.
www.project-syndicate.org
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joshuafox 09:23 16 Dec 09
> The more cautious Association for the Advancement of
> Artificial Intelligence
It is far LESS cautious. Yudkowsky's Singularity Institute is focused almost completely on averting what they see as a potential risk. Compare this to others, including the AAAI group, who dismiss the risk.
I guess you mean "cautious about believing that there is a risk." I know some people who are cautious about believing that driving without a seatbelt is a risk, but that's not quite how I would use the word "cautious."
pwsinger 05:22 16 Dec 09
For those confused, this was NOT written by the Peter W. Singer, who wrote the recent book Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century. If you want an extensively researched, and thus less speculative, discussion of robots and issues of law, ethics, and rights, by someone named Peter Singer, it may prove a better resource.
Dr. Singer, if you are now going write on the exact topic that I cover in my research, at least aid the readers in letting them know the difference. If I ever write about zoophilia or infant euthanisia, I promise to be kind enough to do the same.
--P.W. Singer
www.pwsinger.com
APierce 10:09 24 Dec 09
In An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation Jeremy Bentham refused to draw a rigid line between human interests and those of other creatures:
What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason or perhaps the faculty of discourse? …. The question is not Can they reason, nor Can they talk? But, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being?
There is little reason to believe that any robot made with existing electronic design principles will ever have the capacity to suffer, enjoy or otherwise become a sensitive being. Mere computing power, or clever programming doesn't seem to equate to consciousness. We don’t even have a credible theory as to how we would build a device with consciousness as yet. The creation of artificial life may be just around the corner, because biochemistry is relatively well understood, but not understanding the origin of consciousness, it seems unlikely we can recreate it anytime soon.
Science fiction writers have often addressed the question raised in this piece about whether advanced robots would try to dominate or destroy us. Such worries may reflect our misunderstanding of the strangeness of machine intelligence, if it ever comes into being. If machines become truly independent thinkers perhaps we would not be all that important to them. Our drive to impress or control our fellow human beings may be as irrelevant to them as a salamander's sex drive is to us. A robot that is no more than an extension of its human creators may act as a friend or enemy, based on the way it was programmed. But a truly intelligent robot may have more important things to do than bother with the world of men.
Andrew Pierce
singularityman 04:57 15 Dec 09
The great breakthrough in human like robots, and A.I. in general, will come through either the necessities of military technology or man's desire for sex. Which will be first? Perhaps it is humanities' last chance to truly 'make love, not war'?
Incidentally, feminists at the University of Ottawa have already started proposing legislation to outlaw sex with robots.