Philosophy Dictionary of ArgumentsHome
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| Robot rights: Some people believe that robots should have rights, such as the right to not be harmed or the right to be treated with dignity. Others believe that robots are not capable of having rights, as they are not sentient beings. See also Laws of robotics, Artificial Consiousness, Artificial Intelligence._____________Annotation: The above characterizations of concepts are neither definitions nor exhausting presentations of problems related to them. Instead, they are intended to give a short introduction to the contributions below. – Lexicon of Arguments. | |||
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George M. Church on Robot Rights - Dictionary of Arguments
Brockman I 242 Robots/human rights/George M. Church: Probably we should be less concerned about us-versus-them and more concerned about the rights of all sentients in the face of an emerging unprecedented diversity of minds. We should be harnessing this diversity to minimize global existential risks, like supervolcanoes and asteroids. Brockman I 243 Very practically, we have to address the ethical rules that should be built in, learned, or probabilistically chosen for increasingly intelligent and diverse machines. We have a whole series of Trolley Problems. At what number of people in line for death should the computer decide to shift a moving trolley to one person? Ultimately this might be a deep-learning problem—one in which huge databases of facts and contingencies can be taken into account, some seemingly far from the ethics at hand. >Trolley Problem/Church. Brockman I 244 Questions that at first seem alien and troubling, like “Who owns the new minds, and who pays for their mistakes?” are similar to well-established laws about who owns and pays for the sins of a corporation. Brockman I 248 Robots/Weizenbaum/Church: In his 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason(1), Joseph Weizenbaum argued that machines should not replace Homo in situations requiring respect, dignity, or care, while others (author Pamela McCorduck and computer scientists like John McCarthy and Bill Hibbard) replied that machines can be more impartial, calm, and consistent and less abusive or mischievous than people in such positions. George M. ChurchVsJefferson: (…) as we change geographical location and mature, our unequal rights change dramatically. Embryos, infants, children, teens, adults, patients, felons, gender identities and gender preferences, the very rich and very poor—all of these face different Brockman I 249 rights and socioeconomic realities. One path to new mind-types obtaining and retaining rights similar to the most elite humans would be to keep a Homo component, like a human shield or figurehead monarch/CEO, signing blindly enormous technical documents, making snap financial, health, diplomatic, military, or security decisions. >Laws of Robotics/Church, George M. Brockman I 250 Mirror test/self-consciousness: The robots Qbo have passed the “mirror test» for self-recognition and the robots NAO have passed a related test of recognizing their own voice and inferring their internal state of being, mute or not. Free will/computers/Church: For free will, we have algorithms that are neither fully deterministic nor random but aimed at nearly optimal probabilistic decision making. One could argue that this is a practical Darwinian consequence of game theory. For many (not all) games/problems, if we’re totally predictable or totally random, then we tend to lose. Qualia: We could argue as to whether the robot actually experiences subjective qualia for free will or self-consciousness, but the same applies to evaluating a human. How do we know that a sociopath, a coma patient, a person with Williams syndrome, or a baby has the same free will or self-consciousness as our own? And what does it matter, practically? If humans (of any sort) convincingly claim to experience consciousness, pain, faith, happiness, ambition, and/or utility to society, should we deny them rights because their hypothetical qualia are hypothetically different from ours? Brockman I 251 Do transhumans roam the Earth already? Consider the “uncontacted peoples,” such as the Sentinelese and Andamanese of India (…). Brockman I 252 How would they or our ancestors respond? We could define “transhuman” as people and cultures not comprehensible to humans living in a modern, yet untechnological culture. The question “What was a human?” has already transmogrified into “What were the many kinds of transhumans?. . . And what were their rights?” 1. Weizenbaum, J. Computer Power and Human Reason. From Judgment to Calculation. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976 Church, George M. „The Rights of Machines” in: Brockman, John (ed.) 2019. Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI. New York: Penguin Press._____________Explanation of symbols: Roman numerals indicate the source, arabic numerals indicate the page number. The corresponding books are indicated on the right hand side. ((s)…): Comment by the sender of the contribution. Translations: Dictionary of Arguments The note [Concept/Author], [Author1]Vs[Author2] or [Author]Vs[term] resp. "problem:"/"solution:", "old:"/"new:" and "thesis:" is an addition from the Dictionary of Arguments. If a German edition is specified, the page numbers refer to this edition. |
Chur I A. Church The Calculi of Lambda Conversion. (Am-6)(Annals of Mathematics Studies) Princeton 1985 Brockman I John Brockman Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI New York 2019 |
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> Counter arguments against Church
> Counter arguments in relation to Robot Rights
Ed. Martin Schulz, access date 2024-04-20