On accountability and AI - V2

You are sitting at a table at your favorite techno-savvy coffee shop after watching the boxlike robo-waiter regurgitate your meal - only to realize that it got your order terribly wrong

Who is responsible for this world-ending blunder? Surely you did not enter your order incorrectly on the touch-pad in front of you?

As you watch the robotic waiter trundle from table to table to dispensing more stored orders you realize that it neither knows nor cares that your order was bungled - nor can it be held responsible.

So you grab the un-appetizer and wait in line with the rest of the lunchtime squares for a full five minutes before talking to the sanctioned checkout officer.

He confirms your order as sushi with a side of bacon even though you know you ordered simple cup of coffee so you insist that what you received was incorrect. 

The man in an attempt to quickly solve the problem blames 'some programmer' and hastily exchanges your order.

Now what if the system in question had more intelligence and still bungled order you muse? And what if you had special dietary requirements and had been killed?

An AI as of now has no rights/responsibilities and therefore could not be held responsible - This means the onus would fall to the same people as would if a standard computer program had stuffed up.

The above is just an example, an entire medical project working with neural networks to diagnose patients got canned. Why? Not because it was inaccurate - it was often more accurate than the doctors. Nay, it was canned because of accountability issues when it did stuff up.

For someone inspiring.

Artifical Intellegence Rights 5

Digital Privacy and the patenting of our DNA

First of all I would like to make my standing clear: patenting our DNA is stupid; understandable, yes, but still stupid.

I was reading through a GNU (open source) licence and a thought struck me, because all derived work must also be released under the same (open source) license, what happens when our digital buddies (or future overlords/executioners) hit the scene?

Does a company who created the AI in question have control over the AI's source code, and by extension the AI?
Would open source AI's (in whole or part) belong to the community?
Do AI have any right to 'source code privacy'?
Would an AI be able to petition for control of it's source code even if it is a derivative work?

Also by extension, would it be the companies or communities responsibility to maintain the AI?

As with humans and the workforce I imagine a give and take, we created you, we expect you to do X for Y number of years, we'll give you these benefits but you have to abide by these restrictions.

I am reminded of a fictional use for deformed (read: as good as dead) babies as dreamed of by Amn Mcaffery - Stick them in life supporting pods and train them up to be the controller for a starship.

Naturally this isn't cheap, and the goal of every shell person is to buy out themselves and their starship so they contract out their services to whomever they wish; rather than just being tied to company that created them.
</ i'll-formatted braindump>

What are your thoughts on the matter?

Artificial Intellegence Rights Part 4

Defining AI (continued) and defining the rights

It's easy to simply write up a feature list of an AI and say they get X rights for Y features. To use my last post as an example, each successive AI generation might get more rights because they are (in theory) capable of more, but also more responsibilities.

Obviously that won't because each generation may not be capable of more; just able to determine how you like your toast with more granular precision (he likes it 0.0001% darker on the butter side, but only on Sundays)

But a system like that is partway there, if is your right to have an internet connection, but do not have the capability to access the internet, whats the point? So the above needs to be used with the below.

In any case I'll stop listing features and rights and get down to the meat of it: 

How do we define those rights/Who qualifies for them?

WRONG TRAIN OF THOUGHT

Who defines those rights/How do we set the qualifications for them

Short answer: 

Democratically.

Long answer:

You begin with an (elected?) council of humans in Generations 00-01 (see last post if you want more info on generations) This is because any potential decision on the rights of even one AI (at least initially) will have major repercussions throughout the worlds of both human and AI. That and the niggling detail that the artificially inclined properly exist yet in a bra-burning sense.

Who are these people?

For the love of god not politicians, please, just don't go there. Aside from that i'd hope to see a mix of tech savvy philosophers. Bear in mind that is the ideal situation.

More likely your going to see major tech-developers/tech-gurus/tech-<insert relevant field here>, politicians representing the commercial sector (shudder) and/or military.

It ain't pretty but it's a start; and in the end, it is not about presenting a council without an agenda, its about presenting a council that is adaptable the the needs of the time and presents as many agendas as is feasible.

Why are they there/What are they doing?

They are there to regulate the industry to begin with, make sure that the cutting of the ribbon in front of the first true AI ain't' going to be a disaster, or if it is (and i'd put my money on it is), they cover it up. Besides, if they don't, someone else will certainly try.

Trust me, it's better for us in the long run. We want as little preconceived prejudices when the AI community as a whole starts philosophizing; Letting our fears get the best of us will set relations (and AI development as a whole) back YEARS if not damage them permanently.

Why? we oppress what we fear/hate. Can't escape from it, it's human nature at its simplest.

As someone wise once said: fear leads to hate, hate leads to violence, ??? leads to PROFIT  darkside.

...and yes I am well aware that it is:
"...Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering..." - A funny looking Muppet  YODA DAMNIT.

Where will they be going from there?

Well... that is a bit harder to predict, but easier to be naively optimistic about. Assuming all AI past the inevitable first crisis aren't lobotomized at creation you will eventually see some philosophizing; either by learned behavior or design.

These initial philosobots may or may not have anything useful to say on, for example, a council defining the rights for artificial intelligence's but those that do will help with the initial task of defining what an AI is. 

And for you sitting in your chair, even after reading my prior articles, saying "An AI is an AI, it's easy to define", I put this question to you: humans (outside of Africa) are from 5-10% neanderthal.

What is human?

And the council from there?

Just like any council it must constantly adapt, new AI's are elected to the council as old ones are shelved so to speak, definitions are redefined, humans phased out, post-humans - should they exist at all within the context of AI culture - phased in and we all go about out democratic life.

One last note, as I mentioned above, even an AI shouldn't be on term for forever, fresh ideas, oldies oldies being stuck in a rut (I know i'm stereotyping shush), young blood and all.

Or the council stagnate and fester like all councils do if left at it. After all for the most part "Governments are not voted in, they are voted out"

Artificial Intellegence Rights Part 3

Defining Artificial Intelligence

Time for a slight tangent for a brief and probably overplayed game of categorize that AI! Since most artificial intelligences will be radically different from each other a universal categorization system is rather hard, and yet necessary for the distribution of rights. More on that later though.

<music>We're talkin' 'bout artificial generations</music>
Since to exist a given artificial intelligence needs to be by definition be created, I can foresee an emergent timeline of said creation going something like this. Personally would like to see someone better qualified at this do one of these; this is as close to speculative fiction as you can get.

Generation 00 - And so it begins
The here and now; if it exists in the present (as of the writing of this article) it belongs here.

Generation 0.5 - The talking toaster test
In the near future chat bots and similar built solely to successfully pass the Turing test, I put this as gen .5 because as impressive as this is, it is merely the start.

Generation 1 - And so it REALLY begins
This generation will probably be more for proof of concept or specialized uses; testing the waters if you will. They will most likely be based off of gen .5/00 technologies and concepts such as the hypothesis generator .

This need necessarily be the case however. Biggest definer of a gen 1 AI is the implementation of heuristic learning methodologies and kicking of entirely new industries (or simply redefining a few old ones). I know the science of earthquakes for example would be revolutionized by a gen 1 AI.

Something else worth noting is that even though it will be based off of gen 0.5 tech, a generation 1 and above AI need not be able to speak; though it would most certainly help it in the whole proving it is intelligent (and thus an AI)

Generation 2 - The bubble
If it's happened once with humans, it's happened a million times, a bubble occurs, more money enters a given sector than is sustainable and (perhaps misguided?) innovation is rampant.  This is where I can see concepts such as self-modifying code bases being implemented in a practical manner.

Additionally this is where ill-conceived and poorly educated AI's with a lack of social skills and no work prospects leads to a brand new unemployed underclass, good job humanity. (I wish I could say that I am entirely joking when I say that)

Generation 2.5 - Pop
It isn't a bubble unless it pops; If there is going to be trouble it will probably be in gen 2-2.5 as progress moves faster than the society does. Heck, trouble caused by generation 2 will probably cause the bubble to pop.

What happens to all the half baked bastard children we've created though...?
And what will be the true backlash of the pop?

Generation 3 - Post-human is the new black
Signified by the designing and creation by an artificial intelligence in whole or part by another artificial intelligence. Post-humans also fall under this category because if you are not one by now  your officially outmoded as of several decades ago.

Also on post-humans, depending on the ratios of post-human to vanilla-human one or both will be  discriminating against the other. So you've shed your mortal shell, one or more humans, but now your all uptight know-it-all snobs who -still- haven't learnt from their own mistakes.

Generations 4+ going postal
At this point the sky is the limit and the definition of generations 4+ is probably best turned over those controlling it - our friendly new robot overlords/vacuum cleaners/unstoppable omnicidal doom machines, who knows this far in the future?

Artificial Intellegence Rights - Part2

Equal Rights for the ToasterKind?

So should we really give our toasters the same rights as we enjoy?

Short answer: maybe.

In truth it's a lot more complex than simply copy-pasting the bill of rights onto any machine that is able to tell us where to go (i'm looking at you, satnav). 

This is since, quite unlike humans, there are likely to be differences that count among st AI's. Your toaster, installed with a simple chat-bot (read: not smart at all) and able to learn how long to leave the toast in; probably shouldn't get more rights than you being polite to it every morning - and likewise it's only responsibility is to make your toast that perfect shade of brown.

A mainframe AI (read: smarter than the entire human race combined) would be subject to a few more rights than even we have; and notably more responsibilities/restrictions than we have. This is simply because it is capable of so much more than us squishy humans.

To put it into perspective, if humans where computers, we'd all be like commodore 64's; some with noisy fans and/or different colored machine cases; some able to use all their ram, and some are a little bit slow to boot up; but all essentially built to the same specifications - and the highest selling computer model around.

Now I understand that human beings have a lot more processing power than a mere commodore 64 - but suck it up, AI's are the eldritch abomination of the technological world; they hit the floor we might as well have that sorta processing power.

Equal rights movement for the Artificially Inclined? Nay.

Artificial Intellegence Rights - Part 1

Why even bother giving rights to a toaster?

Why indeed, there is a long precedence amongst humans that if two or more otherwise perfectly rational individuals don't quite see eye to eye everything form a bar-fight to bra burning to wars can break out. This is not to say that these thing won't happen for other reasons as well of course.

Humans being a generally selfish and stubborn species (I know peeps have their redeeming qualities, the only reason I have not jumped off this ride years ago really...) we will (by precedence) not give any more rights than we damn well have to until we are forced to.

This worked well and good when it was humans we where oppressing (see: all of history) - they simply fought tooth and nail through whichever means was available to them to right their situation.

This is not to downplay the countless battles won against oppression to this day - heck, many battles for human rights lay right around the corner, and it still won't be easy, just like it has not been easy in the past.

How does Selfish Preservation sound?

Now this is not why we should give rights to a toaster, but its a reason that may appeal to many people.Violence was one way, rights where clawed from an oppressors hands, politics but another - reform almost never came easy no matter the means. Now what happens when a vastly superior being of our own creation (read: just as bloody selfish and stubborn) wants it's share of the rights pie...?

This is where the future gets fuzzy, as there are a million ways an AI could be architectured and taught to do whatever it is it does. Will it rise up against us violently or will it do so in some other means using a technology that is inconceivable to our minds of today?

Will AI's of today's popular fiction ever exist when we can just put a post-human mind to work at the task?

Many many of the possibilities have been explored in books and movies - no real need to go over all them here.