Most everyone has heard about the UK gov’t report, sponsored by chief scientist Sir David King, that says the arrival of sentient robots by 2056 is a real possibility, and if it does happen, robots will deserve all the rights and responsibilities as human citizens. This is a wonderful report, which shows how forward-looking the UK can be. However, this isn’t the first time a report like this has come out, so for me, what is particularly interesting is not the report itself, but the myriad reactions to it.

There is a lot of confusion around AI, created by a complex mix of science fiction and folk psychology at their worst. The interesting thing is that many of the spacey questions you hear people ask in reaction to this report actually have definitive, yes-or-no answers. For example, “can a machine think?” The answer is an unqualified yes - humans are machines, and we can think, so machines can think. Philosophizing, references to computer science degrees or Asimov novels, etc., are all unnecessary - we know the answer to the question, and the answer is yes.

Let’s try another question, a little more complicated: “How will you ever know a robot is truly sentient or just programmed to mimic it?” The answer rests on the exact, physical definition of sentience, which we have not discovered yet, but if it does exist, then we will eventually discover it precisely, and be able to answer whether or not a given physical object is sentient by looking at its internal physical structure. If we discover that there are gradients of sentience, then we will make lists of physical qualities that correspond to those gradients, and be able to determine which gradient the agent belongs to by checking for those physical qualities. In the future, there may exist robots that are programmed to mimic sentience, or even spontaneously generate sentientlike behaviors (not explicitly programmed in!), but are, in fact, non-sentient. In this scenario, the simplistic Turing Test would surely not be enough, because it could theoretically fool the judge. Again, you’d have to check the physical structure of the AI, either by some sort of scanning or a printout of its source code. The nice thing about reality itself is that it has very low ambiguity on the macro-level: some things are a certain physical structure, and others are not. The mind is what the brain does, so there are certain types of minds that are sentient, and others that are not. If the first test we imagine can’t tell the difference, then we need to devise another test, and use it.

Another type of reaction to this issue has to do with motivation. Here is what a commenter on Digg had to say:

“I just can’t see robots ever being given that sort of autonomy. Artificial intelligence gets put in charge of things we can’t do, not things we can. Why would you want to put it in charge of a humanoid body? We already have plenty of those.”

This comment is neither malicious, nor truly ignorant, but is a standard example of status quo bias, which could happen to anyone. Why change things from the way they are? However, a few small points are being missed here: 1) AI does do things we can do, like chess and sorting tasks, but they quickly become things we used to do, because the tasks get outsourced to AIs, 2) it only takes 1 engineer out of millions to decide to put an AI in a humanoid, or otherwise autonomous body. For #2, there are numerous chances for the commenter to be proven right, but all it takes is one dissenter to be proven wrong. Especially if the bodies an AI were given had the ability to reproduce, this “aberration” could very rapidly magnify.

Many people think AI is not coming so soon:

“If any of you Asimov-wannabes actually reads the article, you’ll get the refreshing truth, for a change. “Anyone who expects robots to start protesting and paying taxes in their lifetimes have spent a little too much time living in a rich and detailed fantasy world.” That’s all there is to it. If any of you takes it for granted that computers will become sentient “one day” or “within 50 years”, you are a gullible moron. None of you understands computer science, nor reality, well enough to know WTF you are talking about, and you prove your ignorance with your lame and played-out predictions. You nerds just repeat what you hear from each other. And it’s all make-believe shit. Meanwhile, back in the real world, there are no fucking sentient robots. Just AMD and Intel computers. That’s all. There aren’t even any PLANS to on HOW to build sentient robots. Not even those. All you will ever find are plans to MAKE plans. Those are everywhere. And fictional stories. All progress in this field is fictional. The closest thing we have to an artificial being is the latest Tickle Me Elmo doll. Everything else is, and will always be, frantic, sweaty, nerd hand-waving. And anyone who takes the AI field seriously is in a deep, ongoing state of delusion. Wake up, geniuses. For your own mental health, if nothing else.”
- commenter on Digg

“Anyone who expects robots to start protesting and paying taxes in their lifetimes have spent a little too much time living in a rich and detailed fantasy world.”
- Adam Frucci, with scifi.com

Arguing that true AI is likely to be invented within the next twenty or so years is not easy, but many intelligent people do it, despite many other intelligent people disagreeing with them. Here are a few arguments, some of which have been given in recent popular books, but I won’t go into them here.

Another comment:

“Robots will no doubt one day become intelligent and sentient, but they’ll have no feelings and not suffer, so why afford them rights?”
- Digg commenter

This is another problem in predictions of robots/AI - saying that they’ll all be a certain way. In truth, if we do create intelligent robots, some will be able to have feelings and suffer, some won’t! That’s because certain physical structures correspond to qualiabearing (feeling-having) beings, and certain ones don’t. We know for a fact that humans do, but rocks don’t, for example. We’re pretty sure that lobsters and Windows XP don’t, as well. But as our software and robotic systems get increasingly complex, that boundary will get fuzzy and eventually lines will be drawn - with some robotic systems on the side with feelings, some not.

Another:

“But of course, as we haven’t even begun to fully grasp how the brain actually works.”
- Digg commenter

This is a classic one, and quite amazing. There are thousands, if not millions, of lengthy books and scientific papers on various aspects of brain function, much of which has been experimentally confirmed. This field is called cognitive science. We know a tremendous amount on the brain, so much that no one man or woman can hope to learn more than 1% of the field. However, it’s true, despite all that we know, much still remains unknown. But will we need to understand the human brain in its entirety to make artificial intelligence? The human brain is only a particular instantiation of intelligence, like an F-18 is only a particular instantiation of flight. If the F-18 were the only functioning example of flight that we had, would we need to understand it in its entirety in order to duplicate the functionality of flight? Not at all. That people think we need to fully and completely understand the human brain in order to make anything intelligent at all is pure anthropocentrism - as if our brain is the only possible physical structure in the universe that can have true intelligence.

And finally, possibly my favorite:

“this ruins the whole point of robot slaves/servants

if a robot gets rights, why dont we basically give tvs and computers rights. Robots will never be living things with real feelings and emotions, so why do they need rights. I would care if someone beat up their robot about as much as i would care if they through a brick at their tv. i.e. they’d be stupid but i wouldn’t give a shit.”
- Digg commenter

I actually do think that the majority of all AIs/robots will indeed be mindless slaves (to other robots as well as humans), and it won’t matter, because they won’t have any feelings to hurt! Transhumanists should definitely understand this point, and shake away the feeling that making any intelligence live to be a slave is fundamentally bad. Making any conscious being be a slave may be bad - but you can have intelligence without consciousness!

Anyway, it’s funny to think of a conscious AI as “ruining the point” of the robot slave paradigm, which derives from old-school science fiction.

Also: here’s Robin Hanson on why you aren’t entitled to your opinion.