From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Thu Jul 08 1999 - 23:01:00 MDT
> "Mark Phillips" <clay8@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> "entities," or even [sometimes] "robots"). And, indeed, these systems,
> robots, what-have-you, well be not only intelligent, but ULTRA-intelligent.
> WIll they qualify as *persons* (a la Strawson, David L. Norton, et al)?
> Tough question. My intuition is PROBABLY!!
I'm unfamiliar with the authors you mention, but there is a very good
discussion of this in Stanislaw Lem's "Golem" story in "Imaginary
Magnitude". It points out how we will not even be able to begin
to grasp (or relate to) an "ultra-intelligent" machine.
I think "person" is a poor term. The first question I would ask
is -- "is it self aware)?" (going back to my "mirror-test"
discussion of a few days ago). The second question I would ask
is "does it have a self-"agenda"? (i.e. a will to survive or
goals). Now in humans, nature has built-in the survival and
reproduction goals (required for the system of natural selection
and evolution), and presumably these play in important role
in the management of "consciousness" (which seems to determine
ones "agenda"). In Robots (at least the non-self-evolved ones),
I would envision that we program-in the goals/agenda. [So assuming
the Robot can pass the Turing test (or your personal test for
human-class intelligence), *do* we split-hairs on the difference
between an unconscious-nature-derived self-agenda and and a
human-programmed (seeded?) self-agenda. [I.e. you aren't
a real "person" unless you have a "natural" agenda.]
Now, assuming some humans rise above the natural agenda and write
their own agendas, is then that the criteria for "high-level"
persons (akin to high-level languages perhaps?). So now
you have 2 classes of both humans and robots, those that
write their own script and those that don't.
An entirely separate question is whether or not the human/robot
deserves "rights". This is an entirely legal/political concept.
Historically, slaves and women have suffered from a lack of
"personhood" (and therefore a lack of certain rights). I
think some people have a problem with the idea that "machines"
might have human-equivalent intelligence, but many more start
to voice objections when it comes to granting them human-equivalent
rights. Thats when things get really loud, "After all, they are
only machines, they aren't even *alive*"!
Lem's Golem, if I recall escaped from the whole problem by
self-evolving into a higher dimension. [The Golem explained
our shortcomings to us, then left us to stew in our own juices.]
> And don't forget that "we" shall soon-on be able to *merge* with
> entities/systems such as these. What of personal identity??
I think the current thinking is that each copy of something
with its own history, i.e. in programming terms each "instance"
would have its own identity. "Permutation City" is a great book
that examines this to some degree.
Now, at the Foresight Institute Senior Associates meeting this
year they had a *very* interesting exercise related to this.
Say one Ralph Merkle (if you know Ralph, this scenario becomes
very funny), gets himself voted into power in a country where the
leaders have a lot of power, lets say Brazil. He then passes a
law that says "uploads and copies of uploads" have the complete
rights of humans (this makes complete sense, yes?). He then
has himself uploaded and diverts some of the resources at his
disposal (after all he is the president and magtape is cheap)
to making 93 million copies of his upload. Now to avoid
having to support all of these uploads, distorting the economy,
etc, etc. these uploads are all in "suspend mode". However,
the day before the election he "activates" all of his uploads.
Well of course, these uploads think very highly of Ralph
and re-elect him president. Since their prospects for work
aren't very good, they simply decide to resuspend themselves
until the next election comes around.
This is a sticky little problem. It creates havoc with
the concept of one "person" = one vote. Now I'm sure you can
find flaws with the scenario as I've presented it. Many of
these were dealt with in the discussion to make the situation
quite plausible. The real issue is - how do you distribute,
grant, allocate, etc. "rights" when you have "entities"
that can be created cheaply and may have "programmable"
agendas (to greater or lesser degrees)... You can't
easily say that a copy of a person is not a person
(at least from my frame of reference)!
Robert
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