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monkey news from Africa (via India)

August 28, 2007

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Why (or rather, when) suffering in AI is incoherent.

I've been arguing for some months now in public talks that AI cannot be a legal person because suffering in well-designed AI is incoherent. This is not actually my own argument, but rather is due to S. M. Solaiman from their brilliant recent article Legal personality of robots, corporations, idols and chimpanzees: a quest for legitimacy.

The great thing about Solaiman's article is that they make it clear why corporations are legal persons but AI and chimpanzees aren't. Basically, the notion of legal person has been developed to synchronise with our system of justice. Justice among other things requires means of redress and coercion. A legal person most know and be able to claim their rights–they must be able to assert themselves as members of a society. This is why non-human animals (and some incapacitated humans) are not legal persons. I'm happy with definitions of "know" and "assert" that would mean that intelligent artefacts could do this, …

We Didn't Prove Prejudice Is True (A Role for Consciousness)

The good news: We know where word meanings come from We have a paper in Science,Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human biases (a green open access version is hosted at Bath). What this paper shows is that you can find the implicit biases humans have just by learning semantics from our language. We showed this by using machine learning of semantics from the language on the Web, and comparing that to implicit biases psychologists have documented using the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT uses reaction times to show that people find it easier to associate some things than others. For example, it's easier to associate flowers with pleasant terms and bugs with unpleasant terms than the other way around. Notice that the actual statistics underlying the IAT is always about these slightly complicated, dual relative measures. It's easier to: group {flowers and pleasant terms} together, AND {unpleasant terms and insect names} (both those groupin…

Robots are owned. Owners are taxed. Internet services cost Information.

As I often recount, I got involved in AI ethics because I was dumbfounded that people attributed moral patiency to (thought I shouldn't unplug) Cog, the humanoid robot, when in fact it wasn't plugged in, and didn't work (this was 1993-1994). The processors of its brain couldn't talk to each other, they weren't properly grounded [earthed]. Just because it was shaped like a human and they'd watched Star Wars, passers by thought it deserved more ethical consideration than they gave homeless people, who were actually people.

I started writing AI ethics papers way more frequently when I thought the administration of George W. Bush was trying to use Ron Arkin to do what Bush had done in Abu Ghraib – blame pawns for despicable policy. Not that robots could ever be as culpable as privates in the military, but neither are responsible for creating the context of such vast abuse by power.

Now there's a new moral hazard caused by faulty moral reasoning and transhuma…

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