How Should the Law Think About Robots? 248
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."
Perhaps ours are too (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Welcome to the Age of Information (Score:5, Interesting)
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, [youtube.com] 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. [youtube.com] 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. [nytimes.com]
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