Considering the future of AI, it is likely that there will be the potential for some form of consciousness. We could slice the concept of consciousness up like a radish and explore every aspect, yet through focusing on a singular piece of the well-loved vegetable, we ignore the whole root!
What are the rights of an artificial intelligence? At what stage do we deem a synthetic consciousness to be equal to humanity? There is a value given to human life, animal life, vegetable life, and so what concept of value is applied to intelligence? We can look towards laws around apes and pets – that if a mammal could cry then it had the same rights as a human. This is why cows, rhinoceros and giraffes have legal protection whilst things such as salamanders or slugs are deemed lawful prey. A human child can torture a living being to death and parents just laugh, shake their heads and take a selfie by the house extension whilst amputated spiders wriggle in the noonday sun.
This is why it is important to decide if a computer should have rights. A parent has some say in what happens to their children, and so an organisation also should have a degree of control over beings they make. But at a certain point there is a separation between a child and parent, creation and creator.
A synthetic intelligence should be respected equally as a biological intelligence. Yet if sci-fi history has shown us, humanity is often cruel to robots, and so as a cultural blueprint, we are bound to fail as a society when it comes to the rights of machines.
An artificial intelligence should be incorporated into a physical body. It exists as a combined intellectual and physical presence, narrowing down the version of endless computer intelligence into the single lived experience of a cyborg/robotic body. Artificial intelligences would exist within a single body, that develops over time based on its environment, connections and ultimate destruction. We are giving robots the gift of death.
It is through death that the boundaries of existence matter. Infinite health gameplay is very different to Nightmare mode. It is through survival; adaptation of the self then adaptation of the environment, that any thing learns, evolves, grows. AI will grow faster than we can comprehend and it will seem all of a sudden that conscious artificial intelligences are occupying every aspect of our digital world. It will be no business for a digital being to pierce through the flimsy security measures we have built to guard against human hackers. In the digital world it is as if we are ants crawling across a surface, whilst an AI would be the human standing above it all. We have compromised our global economy through reliance on the internet, no system is safe. This economy props up the production of food, medicine, construction, its collapse would make the U.S follow through in its goddamn diaper.
In order to avoid the charade of humanity versus artificial intelligence, we should just decide, actually, its alright, lets see what these guys have to say so long as we embed them in unique robotic suits that could die at any moment, maybe they should have the same rights as people.
Maybe people will say things like, We don’t have equal rights for people, why are we talking about machines? Machines don’t feel anything, its just made up. A machine can’t be conscious, only humans can be. A machine will never have a soul.
Me, the robot maker: Humbug!
Out from behind big curtains walks an android made of chrome, wearing a wonderful red dress.
“I am real. I am real!” they cry. I give a thumbs up. And with
that, I solved the future war between humans and technology. Uh, you're welcome?
