Tag Archives: rights

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Won’t somebody think of the robots?

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robot horse Jamais Cascio is a sensitive soul; he doesn’t like seeing beasts of burden being abused and pushed around. Even robotic ones:

“My reaction to seeing this robot kicked paralleled what I would have had if I’d seen a video of a pack mule or a real big dog being kicked like that, and (from anecdotal conversations) I know I’m not the only one with that kind of immediate response. True, it wasn’t nearly as strong a shocked feeling for me as it would have been with a real animal, but it was definitely of the same character. It simply felt wrong.”

This throws an interesting light on the “robot rights” debates that keep surfacing. While I think we can all agree that a non-sentient machine doesn’t require the vote or union-mandated coffee breaks, this sort of psychological reaction to machines with a visual semblance of life may cause problems in early-adopter workplaces. [image by TwoBlueDay]

After all, even battle-hardened US Army colonels have been known to balk at sending machines to their doom.

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Rights for robots? Not according to Peter Watts.

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blue toy robot I think this is about the third or fourth variation of this story I’ve seen in the last few years, but nonetheless – The Guardian has a brief piece wherein philosopher Nick Bostrom suggests we should be thinking ahead about what rights we will need to grant to our sentient machines.

Which is very well-meant, I suppose. But science fiction author Peter Watts takes a rather different view of the necessity for robotic rights – basically, there isn’t any.

“I’ve got no problems with enslaving machines — even intelligent machines, even intelligent, conscious machines — because as Jeremy Bentham said, the ethical question is not “Can they think?” but “Can they suffer?”* You can’t suffer if you can’t feel pain or anxiety; you can’t be tortured if your own existence is irrelevant to you.

You cannot be thwarted if you have no dreams — and it takes more than a big synapse count to give you any of those things. It takes some process, like natural selection, to wire those synapses into a particular configuration that says not I think therefore I am, but I am and I want to stay that way. We’re the ones building the damn things, after all. Just make sure that we don’t wire them up that way, and we should be able to use and abuse with a clear conscience.”

How about you – are you looking forward to running your Roomba ragged, or planning to kennel your Aibo when you go on holiday? [Image by Plutor]

[tags]robotics, rights, ethics, technology[/tags]
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Inhumanity and the inhuman

Here’s a story that says something interesting about our ability to empathise with machines, and that shatters the myth of the heartless hard men of military brass: while watching a demonstration of an autonomous landmine-clearance robot which adapts to damage so it can continue its perilous journey, a US Army Colonel became distressed by seeing the plucky ‘bot still carrying on with only one remaining limb, and demanded that the demonstration stop, as it was ‘inhumane’. [PostHumanBlues]