What Makes a Person? Five Reasons Not to Other AI

Bidan Huang teases Aude Billard's robot

I'd hoped to write this as a paper for the AAAI Senior Track but didn't make the deadline, but at least I got the talk together in time for Robotics in the Twenty-First Century: Challenges and Promises, which I'm attending now.

What Makes a Person?  Five Reasons Not to Other AI

 The second half of the title was kind of a joke, but may be unnecessarily confusing especially for non-native speakers.  "Othering" is ordinarily used to describe the process of denying or refusing to acknowledge mutual aspects of identity with another person – making them out group.  But here I'm talking about not making robots into others, but accepting them as part of ourselves – as artefacts of our culture rather than as members of our in group.

I think the slides are pretty clear and hopefully persuasive, but there's no video of the talk so you may want to see some of my related blogposts:

• About the German "digital persons" controversy: Robots are owned. Owners are taxed. Internet services cost Information.
• About the root of moral subjectivity: Chess wasn't killed by AI: The gestalt of being human.
• And more about why we can extend moral agency to our children yet avoid doing so in our robots:  Robots are more like novels than children
• About the presence of AI: 2015: The first year AI nearly killed me.
• AI & Consciousness, in 5x140 characters 
• And a reminder that in the unlikely event that we both could and did create AI that's exactly like human intelligence, then the arguments above would not hold: Clones should NOT be slaves.