Does conscious AI deserve rights? | Richard Dawkins, Joanna Bryson, Peter Singer & more | Big Think

RICHARD DAWKINS: When we come to artificial intelligence and the possibility of their becoming conscious, we reach a profound philosophical difficulty. I am a philosophical naturalist; I'm committed to the view that there is nothing in our brains that violates the laws of physics. There's nothing that could not, in principle, be reproduced in technology. It hasn't been done yet; we're probably quite a long way away from it, but I see no reason why in the future we shouldn't reach the point where a human-made robot is capable of consciousness and of feeling pain.

BABY X: Da. Da.

MARK SAGAR: Yes, that's right. Very good.

BABY X: Da. Da.

MARK SAGAR: Yeah.

BABY X: Da. Da.

MARK SAGAR: That's right.

JOANNA BRYSON: So, one of the things that we did last year, which was pretty cool, the headlines, because we were replicating some psychology stuff about implicit bias—actually, the best one is something like "Scientists show that AI is sexist and racist and it's our fault," which, that's pretty accurate because it really is about picking things up from our society. Anyway, the point was, so here is an AI system that is so humanlike that it's picked up our prejudices and whatever, and it's just vectors. It's not an ape, it's not going to take over the world, it's not going to do anything, it's just a representation; it's like a photograph. We can't trust our intuitions about these things.

SUSAN SCHNEIDER: So why should we care about whether artificial intelligence is conscious? Well, given the rapid-fire developments in artificial intelligence, it wouldn't be surprising if within the next 30 to 80 years we start developing very sophisticated general intelligences. They may not be precisely like humans, they may not be as smart as us, but they may be sentient beings. If they're conscious beings, we need ways of determining whether that's the case.

It would be awful if, for example, we sent them to fight our wars, forced them to clean our houses, made them essentially a slave class. We don't want to make that mistake; we want to be sensitive to those issues, so we have to develop ways to determine whether artificial intelligence is conscious or not.

ALEX GARLAND: The Turing Test was a test set by Alan Turing, the father of modern computing. He understood that at some point the machines they were working on could become thinking machines as opposed to just calculating machines and he devised a very simple test.

DOMHNALL GLEESON (IN CHARACTER): It's when a human interacts with a computer and if the human doesn't know they're interacting with a computer, the test is passed.

DOMHNALL GLEESON: And this Turing Test is a real thing and it's never, ever been passed.

ALEX GARLAND: What the film does is engage with the idea that it will, at some point, happen. The question is what that leads to.

MARK SAGAR: So, she can see me and hear me. Hey, sweetheart, smile at Dad. Now, she's not copying my smile; she's responding to my smile. We've got different sorts of neuromodulators, which you can see up here. So, for example, I'm going to abandon the baby; I'm just going to go away, and she's going to start wondering where I've gone.

And if you watch up where the mouse is, you should start seeing cortisol levels and other sorts of neuromodulators rising. She's going to get increasingly—this is a mammalian maternal separation distress response. It's okay, sweetheart. It's okay. Aw. It's okay. Hey. It's okay.

RICHARD DAWKINS: This is profoundly disturbing because it goes against the grain to think that a machine made of metal and silicon chips could feel pain, but I don't see why they would not. And so, this moral consideration of how to treat artificially intelligent robots will arise in the future and it's a problem which philosophers and moral philosophers are already talking about.

SUSAN SCHNEIDER: So, suppose we figure out ways to devise consciousness in machines. It may be the case that we want to deliberately make sure that certain machines are not conscious. So, for example, consider a machine that we would send to dismantle a nuclear reactor; we would essentially quite possibly be sending it to its death, or a machine that we'd send to a war zone. Would we really want to send conscious machines in those circumstances? Would it be ethical?

You might say, well, maybe we can tweak their minds so they enjoy what they're doing or they don't mind sacrifice, but that gets into some really deep-seated engineering issues that are actually ethical in nature that go back to Brave New World, for example, situations where humans were genetically engineered and took a drug called Soma so that they would want to live the lives that they were given. So, we have to really think about the right approach. It may be the case that we deliberately devise machines for certain tasks that are not conscious.

MAX TEGMARK: Some people might prefer that their future home helper robot is an unconscious zombie so they don't have to feel guilty about giving it boring chores or powering it down. Some people might prefer that it's conscious so that there can be a positive experience in there, and so they don't feel creeped out by this machine just faking it and pretending to be conscious even though it's a zombie.

JOANNA BRYSON: When will we know for sure that we need to worry about robots? Well, there's a lot of questions there, but consciousness is another one of those words. The word I like to use is moral patient; it's a technical term that the philosophers came up with and it means exactly something that we are obliged to take care of.

So, now we can have this conversation: If you just mean conscious means moral patient, then it's no great assumption to say well then if it's conscious, then we need to take care of it. But it's way more cool if you can say: Does consciousness necessitate moral patiency? And then we can sit down and say, well, it depends what you mean by consciousness.

People use consciousness to mean a lot of different things. A lot of people, this rubs them the wrong way; it's because they've watched Blade Runner or AI the movie or something like this. In a lot of these movies, we're not really talking about AI; we're not talking about something designed from the ground up; we're talking basically about clones.

And clones are a different situation. If you have something that's exactly like a person, however it was made, then okay, it's exactly like a person and it needs that kind of protection. But people think it's unethical to create human clones partly because they don't want to burden someone with the knowledge that they're supposed to be someone else, right, that there was some other person that chose them to be that person.

I don't know if we'll be able to stick to that, but I would say that AI clones fall into the same category. If you were really going to make something and then say, hey, congratulations, you're me and you have to do what I say, I wouldn't want myself to tell me what to do, if that makes sense, if there were two of me. Right?

I think we'd like to both be equals, and so you don't want to have an artifact of something that you've deliberately built and that you're going to own. If you have something that's sort of a humanoid servant that you own, then the word for that is slave. And so, I was trying to establish that, look, we are going to own anything we build, and so, therefore, it would be wrong to make it a person because we've already established that slavery of people is wrong and bad and illegal.

And so, it never occurred to me that people would take that to mean that oh, the robots will be people that we just treat really badly. It's like no, that's exactly the opposite. We give things rights because that's the best way we can find to handle very complicated situations. And the things that we give rights are basically people.

I mean, some people argue about animals, but technically—again, this depends on whose technical definition you use—but technically rights are usually things that come with responsibilities and that you can defend in a court of law. So, normally we talk about animal welfare and we talk about human rights. But with artificial intelligence, you can even imagine itself knowing its rights and defending itself in the court of law, but the question is why would we need to protect the artificial intelligence with rights? Why is that the best way to protect it?

So, with humans, it's because we're fragile; it's because there's only one of us. And, I actually think this is horribly reductionist, but I actually think it's just the best way that we've found to be able to cooperate. It's sort of an acknowledgment of the fact that we're all basically the same thing, the same stuff, and we had to come up with some kind of—the technical term, again, is equilibrium—we had to come up with some way to share the planet, and we haven't managed to do it completely fairly, like everybody gets the same amount of space. But actually, we all want to be recognized for our achievements, so even completely fair isn't completely fair, if that makes sense.

And I don't mean to be facetious there; it really is true that you can't make all the things you would like out of fairness be true at once. That's just a fact about the world; it's a fact about the way we define fairness. So, given how hard it is to be fair, why should we build AI that needs us to be fair to it?

So, what I'm trying to do is just make the problem simpler and focus us on the thing that we can't help, which is the human condition. And I'm recommending that if you specify something, if you say, okay this is when you really need rights in this context, okay, once we've established that, don't build that.

PETER SINGER: Exactly where we would place robots would depend on what capacities we believe they have. I can imagine that we might create robots that are limited to the intelligence level of nonhuman animals, perhaps not the smartest nonhuman animals either; they could still perform routine tasks for us, they could fetch things for us on voice command. That's not very hard to imagine.

But I don't think that that would be a sentient being necessarily. And so, if it was just a robot that we understood how exactly that worked, it's not very far from what we have now; I don't think it would be entitled to any rights or moral status. But if it was at a higher level than that, if we were convinced that it was a conscious being, then the kind of moral status it would have would depend on exactly what level of consciousness and what level of awareness.

Is it more like a pig, for example? Well, then it should have the same rights as a pig—which, by the way, I think we are violating every day on a massive scale by the way we treat pigs in factory farms. So, I'm not saying such a robot should be treated like pigs are being treated in our society today; on the contrary, it should be treated with respect for their desires and awareness and their capacities to feel pain and their social nature—all of those things that we ought to take into account when we are responsible for the lives of pigs also we would have to take into account when we are responsible for the lives of robots at a similar level.

But if we created robots who are at our level, then I think we would have to give them really the same rights that we have. There would be no justification for saying, oh, yes, but we're a biological creature and you're a robot; I don't think that has anything to do with the moral status of a being.

GLENN COHEN: One possibility is you say: A necessary condition for being a person is being a human being. So many people are attracted to that argument and say: Only humans can be persons. All persons are humans. Now, it may be that not all humans are persons, but all persons are humans. Well, there's a problem with that and this is put most forcefully by the philosopher Peter Singer, the bioethicist Peter Singer, who says to reject a species, the possibility that a species has rights and ought to be a patient for moral consideration—the kinds of things that have moral consideration on the basis of the mere fact that they're not a member of your species, he says, is equivalent morally to rejecting giving rights or moral consideration to someone on the basis of their race.

So, he says speciesism equals racism. And the argument is: Imagine that you encountered someone who is just like you in every possible respect but it turned out they actually were not a member of the human species; they were a Martian, let's say, or they were a robot and truly exactly like you. Why would you be justified in giving them less moral regard?

So, people who believe in capacity X views have to at least be open to the possibility that artificial intelligence could have the relevant capacities, albeit even though they're not human, and therefore qualify for personhood. On the other side of the continuum, one of the implications is that you might have members of the human species that aren't persons, and so anencephalic children—children born with very little above the brain stem in terms of their brain structure—are often given as an example. They're clearly members of the human species but their abilities to have the kinds of capacities most people think matter are relatively few and far between.

So, you get into this uncomfortable position where you might be forced to recognize that some humans are non-persons and some non-humans are persons. Now again, if you bite the bullet and say, "I'm willing to be a speciesist; being a member of the human species is either necessary or sufficient for being a person," you avoid this problem entirely.

But if not, you at least have to be open to the possibility that artificial intelligence, in particular, may at one point become person-like and have the rights of persons. And I think that that scares a lot of people, but in reality, to me, when you look at the course of human history and look how willy-nilly we were in declaring some people non-persons from the law—slaves in this country, for example—it seems, to me, a little humility and a little openness to this idea may not be the worst thing in the world.