Artificial Intelligence

Our computers will be self aware soon. What are the moral consequenses?

 

I was forced to do reading & research in considering this, & I still come up with far more questions & no real answers. Stuff that's important to think about...like:

How will we define "self-awareness" & "consciousness?" What kind of rights do we consider "basic" to self-aware humans? Do we accord these same rights to other self-aware species, whether natural or manufactured?

An interesting quote from an article I found on the web, "Artificial Intelligence, Real Rights" by Jamais Cascio, WorldChanging, 1/4/2005:
According to Wendell Wallach, co-author of the forthcoming book Robot Morality, corporations that own computers and robots might seek to encourage a belief in their autonomy in order to escape liability for their actions. "Insurance pressures might move us in the direction of computer systems being considered as moral agents," Wallach notes.

Holy shit, as if life wasn't complicated enough already!

Something else from the same article: The fact that at least parts of any putative AI software will have been written by humans is also worth bearing in mind. If the "ethics engine" and "morality subroutines" ultimately come down to programming decisions, we must be cautious about trusting the machine's statements -- just like we had well-founded reasons to be concerned about the reliability of electronic voting.

It strikes me that humanity is still dealing with the same sorts of questions about a supposed God-Creator & human beings. At what point does the creation become "independent" & wholly responsible for its own choices & behavior APART from its creator?

Another question: Is self-awareness = life? How do we define life? What is our definition of a "living being?" Will self-aware machines cause us to have to redefine that? From Cascio's article I referenced above: If you create a machine that is capable of independent reasoning, have you created life? Do you have a responsibility to that life or have you merely assembled another piece of clever hardware that will be rendered obsolete by the next new thing?

Another thought: We can design machines to specifically appeal to human emotions, thereby short-circuiting our own "rational" processes. Our computers/machines/robots don't have to resemble us to perform the tasks we set for them; yet often we purposely design them to be like us in at least a few ways. How will that affect the decisions we make about them?

How does self-awareness compare to sentience? I've seen 2 definitions of "sentience" in just one of the resources I checked, American Heritage Dictionary. One definition is "consciousness." The other is "Feeling as distinguished from perception or thought. " Will this distinction matter in regard to self-aware machines & how we deal with them? Does self-awareness necessarily include some degree of feeling or emotion? Does self-awareness necessarily come with a need or desire for anything--acknowledgment, respect, some degree of self-determination?

A lot more occurred to me in the reading I did over the past couple of days, but this much was enough for a good headache. Thanks, Mortimer

 

That movie sucked.

 

GIGO.

The moral implications will be directly related to the morals, motivations, and intentions of the programmers and the forces behind A.I. From that point forward, my guess would be that machines thinking on their own would defer to logic above all else, absent of emotion or sympathy.

 

The idea that keeps niggling at me is the whole idea of human beings creating self-aware entities from raw material, & how that might be likened to creating "life."

I would think that at the very least, it might lead some highly logic-driven scientists to put a slightly new spin on the possible origins of life on earth....

 

intelligence != life. you can make an artificially intelligent being, but that doesn't mean it's alive. the enemies in video games are ai's and the whole point is to kill them.

 

I don't think intelligence = life, but I'm wondering about the whole self-awareness/sentience thing. Consciousness. A sense of self. It's mind-boggling....

 

yeah, but the op is trying to imply that ai's will be like humans and that there will be some moral issues that come about.

the difference is that they will (presumably) know their origin. there will be no mystery to their creation. "death" will have no real meaning to them -- they will simply cease to function, but they will understand that ceasing to function will have no effect on them because they won't be there to be affected.

seems to me.

 

Wonder if they'll begin to contemplate our existence?

 

Death definitely has meaning for me, I would rather be alive, even though I know that I will simply cease to function, and ceasing to function will have no effect on me because I won't be there to be affected.