Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey, they're and welcomed to Forward Thinking, the
Speaker 1: podcast that looks in the future and says, long ago,
Speaker 1: in another galaxy, there lived a robot. His name was Marvin.
Speaker 1: I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about robots. We love talking about robots. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what we're talking about today, robot rights. The idea
Speaker 1: of this this is something that we we've seen a
Speaker 1: lot of science fiction, right, especially as a MOOV and
Speaker 1: that kind of uh type of science fiction, This idea
Speaker 1: of developing creatures that have some form of artificial or
Speaker 1: synthetic intelligence and therefore have some sort of sense of self.
Speaker 1: And does that at that point mean that we as
Speaker 1: human beings should treat these machines as if they were
Speaker 1: living things, and intelligent living things for that right, rather
Speaker 1: than just tools. Yeah. Usually in science fiction it's used
Speaker 1: as a parallel to classism or racism or other issues.
Speaker 1: That's actually slavery, that's actually talking about humans. But we're
Speaker 1: working towards this incredible future or kind of incredible present
Speaker 1: where we might actually have physical robots. Yeah, it's funny
Speaker 1: because the metaphor has sort of become a literal question.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's no question now that all humans should
Speaker 1: have the same rights in most civilized human place, at
Speaker 1: least we think so. But but so the robots that
Speaker 1: we've used to illustrate this problem before, and now we
Speaker 1: have to start wondering, like, um, do they have rights
Speaker 1: in the same way human doesn't. That seems on on
Speaker 1: one hand it's like kind of easy. It's like, no,
Speaker 1: their machines. But I think we should think about this
Speaker 1: a little more carefully. Sure, And first of all, I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess it's it's good to point out the word
Speaker 1: robot comes from a check word, which essentially means slave.
Speaker 1: So when we're talking about robots that that does show them.
Speaker 1: I mean, when science fiction writers were writing these stories
Speaker 1: about robots, it really was a a kind of a
Speaker 1: way of talking about human rights and slavery and not
Speaker 1: just like, at what point do machines uh merit rights?
Speaker 1: But also are which rights humans? Yeah? Are our rights universal?
Speaker 1: United Nations would say, yes, there are some universal rights
Speaker 1: that all humans are you should possess. They like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: let's start with the concept of rights and um and
Speaker 1: talking about what gets them. So there are material entities
Speaker 1: that do get rights, for example humans, and then there
Speaker 1: are material entities that we're pretty sure don't get rights,
Speaker 1: like bananas, yeah, or or let's say rocks. Sure okay,
Speaker 1: but but but in between their cute puppies. Yeah, where
Speaker 1: to cute puppies fall on the scale? Well, I think
Speaker 1: most people around us would say that the cute puppy
Speaker 1: has not as many rights as a human, but more
Speaker 1: rights than a rock. Yeah, there's a there's a hierarchy.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you got the memo or not,
Speaker 1: but I've got the whole list here. Cute puppies are
Speaker 1: just below cats, and that's only since the World Wide Web.
Speaker 1: For that, cute puppies were ruling the roost, but cats
Speaker 1: have really taken over since the rise of the web. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: we've just sort of used our intuitions to say what
Speaker 1: we think have rights, and that like some types of
Speaker 1: entities have more rights than others. Humans have more than animals,
Speaker 1: Animals have more than plants, Plants have more than Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe you might plants. Plants might be in there somewhere
Speaker 1: we don't know. Well, let's try to flush this out
Speaker 1: and say what is the actual rubric we're using, because
Speaker 1: if we if we hone in on that, that might
Speaker 1: help us decide whether or not an intelligent seeming robot
Speaker 1: should have right. So what what is it that makes
Speaker 1: a human have rights? Well, for one thing, there's this
Speaker 1: concept of life, right, just just the concept of life itself. Uh,
Speaker 1: And to define life is a little tricky. Even if
Speaker 1: you go with the scientific definition, it tends to be tricky.
Speaker 1: For example, one definition here is the condition that distinguishes
Speaker 1: animals and plants from inorganic matter. Okay, well, all right,
Speaker 1: we've got that. So it's whatever whatever makes organic stuff
Speaker 1: different from inorganic that's life. To go further, it says
Speaker 1: including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual
Speaker 1: change preceding death. Now, there are people who have argued
Speaker 1: that this does this is while a pretty good definition,
Speaker 1: is still really kind of fuzzy because there's some things
Speaker 1: out there that seem to at least adhere to some
Speaker 1: of this, but it's hard to define it as being alive.
Speaker 1: For example, a virus. That's difficult because it it has
Speaker 1: some of these properties, but other things make it seem
Speaker 1: like it's not really life as we define other types
Speaker 1: of life. But then there are other things entirely that
Speaker 1: seemed to behave to these rules, but we would never
Speaker 1: call them alive. Like fire, fire it does it? Does
Speaker 1: it grow? Yes? If it has fuel, it will continue
Speaker 1: to grow. Does it reproduce, Yes, it can reproduce. Does
Speaker 1: it have a functional activity? Well, I guess you could
Speaker 1: call burning, uh, continual change perceeding death. Yes, that also
Speaker 1: can be the case. These are things that you know,
Speaker 1: if you were to just use that that line of reasoning,
Speaker 1: you might say fire is alive. It seems to behave
Speaker 1: as if it were alive, But we do not define
Speaker 1: that as being alive. So just defining whether or not
Speaker 1: something is alive is already tricky. And we haven't even
Speaker 1: gotten too robots yet. Well, but so you know, and
Speaker 1: then and then you get into the psychology or the
Speaker 1: the ethics, the morality of what life is, and and
Speaker 1: that's when you start thinking about, well, it's something alive
Speaker 1: when it has consciousness or when it has self consciousness,
Speaker 1: and where on the hierarchy did those qualities fall. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'd like to talk a bit about consciousness because I'm
Speaker 1: skeptical about life as a as a definition. I'm sorry
Speaker 1: I didn't continue listening to their full thought. Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously we don't really particularly seem to think bacteria have rights.
Speaker 1: I mean that seems they don't get a lot of
Speaker 1: voice in the polls. No, And so there seems to
Speaker 1: be a trend that for some reason, like a dog
Speaker 1: has more rights than bacteria and humans have more rights
Speaker 1: than dogs. Um, so maybe it has something to do
Speaker 1: with the obvious thing that establishes this hierarchy, which is
Speaker 1: intelligence or which again is very difficult to define. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: but then again, we wouldn't want to create substrate to
Speaker 1: say like, if you're a smarter human, you should have
Speaker 1: more than a less intelligent human. That's clearly wrong, although
Speaker 1: I do want to see a Star Trek episode about
Speaker 1: that if one does not already exist. Yeah, oh sure, yeah,
Speaker 1: that makes sense where the crew because it's a planet
Speaker 1: where people who are smarter have more rights than people
Speaker 1: who are less smart. I can totally see that. Okay,
Speaker 1: so there's there's a hierarchy established by something having to
Speaker 1: do with our minds. But it shouldn't just be like
Speaker 1: how smart you are, So maybe there's a hierarchy based
Speaker 1: on whether or not you seem to have something called consciousness. Again,
Speaker 1: difficult to define, difficult to define, but it's we're going
Speaker 1: to have to try to deal with it. Okay. So
Speaker 1: what is consciousness? I think the best way to describe
Speaker 1: it is um the experience of being like something. Okay.
Speaker 1: So there's an experience of being you, and we only
Speaker 1: know we know that it exists because we each have it.
Speaker 1: We have our individual experience of being right. So we
Speaker 1: know that there's at least one consciousness in the world, yes,
Speaker 1: which may only be ourselves. Yeah, we assume that all
Speaker 1: the other humans of consciousness. This is something that Touring
Speaker 1: was talking about, right Alan Touring when he was setting
Speaker 1: up his his thought experiment, the Touring Test. So this
Speaker 1: is a concept where what Joe is talking about is
Speaker 1: that Joe knows that he possesses this thing called consciousness
Speaker 1: because there's a there's an experience of being me, right,
Speaker 1: But Joe is the only person who has had that experience. I,
Speaker 1: Jonathan have not had the experience of being Joe. So
Speaker 1: I've had the experience of being Jonathan. I know that
Speaker 1: Jonathan possesses consciousness because that's me. However, I don't know.
Speaker 1: As an I cannot know because I cannot be Joe.
Speaker 1: I cannot know for certain that Joe possesses consciousness. And
Speaker 1: some philosophers have said this, this is straight up impossible.
Speaker 1: You can never experience anything outside of yourself yourself, right,
Speaker 1: So in that sense, Uh, what happens is I make
Speaker 1: an assumption. I assume that because Joe is a human
Speaker 1: being and I too am a human being, and that
Speaker 1: Joe seems to possess the same sort of qualities that
Speaker 1: I possess, that among those quality is consciousness, and that
Speaker 1: Joe in fact possesses it, but I cannot know that
Speaker 1: for certain. It also helps that I can tell you
Speaker 1: I have consciousness. Sure, that's no way to know for sure,
Speaker 1: but that seems to add to the idea like if
Speaker 1: you things that tests to be conscious are probably more
Speaker 1: more likely to be conscious, for you're hallucinating, but or
Speaker 1: you're talking to a computer program. This brings us to touring, right,
Speaker 1: So what Touring said was that with the touring test,
Speaker 1: this idea that you would sit down at a terminal
Speaker 1: and you would have a conversation, and that conversation might
Speaker 1: be with another human being who is also on another
Speaker 1: terminal typing it out to you, or it might be
Speaker 1: a computer program that's just generating responses. If you are
Speaker 1: unable to tell the difference reliably whether that's a human
Speaker 1: being or a computer program, you might as well say
Speaker 1: the computer program possesses consciousness. It seems to possess the
Speaker 1: same qualities you do. And while I would go ahead
Speaker 1: and say to Joe, Joe, I assume you have consciousness,
Speaker 1: But because you appear to do the same things I do,
Speaker 1: why would I not extend the same courtesy to a
Speaker 1: piece of software that appears to do the same thing. Again,
Speaker 1: Touring is saying, it doesn't matter really if the program
Speaker 1: actually is conscious. It just matters that it appears to
Speaker 1: be conscious, because you can't tell the difference. Joe appears
Speaker 1: to be conscious, so I assume that that's one thing
Speaker 1: he possesses. Lauren appears to be also conscious right now
Speaker 1: because she had caffeine before we came in here. But
Speaker 1: give it a few more minutes of her listening to me. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: the two of us together are lulling her into a
Speaker 1: gentle dreamland. Okay, so uh, this idea of consciousness is
Speaker 1: relevant to the idea of robot rights because consciousness may
Speaker 1: very well formed the basis of who we decide gets rights. Um.
Speaker 1: I because I have consciousness, I have things that I
Speaker 1: want and things that I don't want. So I want freedom,
Speaker 1: I want safety, UM. I want bodily integrity. I don't
Speaker 1: want to be worked to death, you know, stuff like that. Um.
Speaker 1: And so because I want these things, I assume other
Speaker 1: humans that uh, you know, have brains want these things also,
Speaker 1: and thus I wouldn't want it done to me. I
Speaker 1: assume they don't want it done to them, and thus
Speaker 1: humans deserve rights. Right. You can you can at least
Speaker 1: feel sympathy toward other human beings, if not empathy. If
Speaker 1: not empathy, uh Now, empathy is one of those things
Speaker 1: that we'll talk about, especially when it gets to robots,
Speaker 1: because empathy requires sort of a two way interaction. And
Speaker 1: so there's certain things that you can feel sympathy toward,
Speaker 1: but you cannot feel empathy toward because because their experience
Speaker 1: is intrinsically different than your own, or they're not experiencing anything,
Speaker 1: for example, something that's truly inanimate. There you can feel
Speaker 1: sympathy toward inanimate objects, but not necessarily empathy. But that's
Speaker 1: the question. Actually, we feel ad about, say, working a
Speaker 1: human to death. We know that should not be done, right,
Speaker 1: but we shouldn't. But we don't feel bad about working
Speaker 1: a car engine to death, right, Um, because we assume
Speaker 1: that the car engine does not actually have an experience
Speaker 1: of being where it wants to survive and doesn't want
Speaker 1: to be, you know, work to death, and it wants
Speaker 1: to have freedom. I mean that that just seems silly
Speaker 1: to us. But it would be like crushing a piece
Speaker 1: of ice, Like you don't feel badly for the ice,
Speaker 1: but who knows, maybe we should. Because there are actually
Speaker 1: a couple of ideas about where consciousness comes from. Do
Speaker 1: you ever think about what is the cause of consciousness? Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's actually tons of tons of interesting philosophical there's philosophical debate.
Speaker 1: Then you have the the the like you have neurologists
Speaker 1: who take a much more uh you know, physical approach
Speaker 1: to consciousness. There's a lot of talk about it. Well okay, so, um,
Speaker 1: unless you could start on one hand by saying that
Speaker 1: some people, of course will probably take like a supernatural
Speaker 1: view and they'd say that that a soul is responsible
Speaker 1: for consciousness or something like that. Um, you know who.
Speaker 1: That may be true, but there's no way to show it.
Speaker 1: That's that's not scientific, not not meaning that it's wrong,
Speaker 1: but rather than there's no way to test for it, right, um,
Speaker 1: So if if that's true, we just don't know. Um.
Speaker 1: But there are other options of ideas about how consciousness
Speaker 1: could come about in a physical universe physically. One idea
Speaker 1: is this idea of emergent is um, which is that
Speaker 1: consciousness is not present in say, individual neurons, but only
Speaker 1: arises as a phenomenon that is somehow more than the
Speaker 1: sum of the brains parts um. And in this case,
Speaker 1: it would be basically the idea that the more complex
Speaker 1: brains become, the higher states of consciousness they achieve. Um.
Speaker 1: So that's one idea, it's an emergent property of complex brains.
Speaker 1: But there are questions that come from that, say like, um, okay,
Speaker 1: well you have this idea that something's building up towards consciousness,
Speaker 1: Well what is it building with? And when you ask
Speaker 1: that question you get to a really interesting philosophy, the
Speaker 1: idea of pan psychism. Have y all heard of this?
Speaker 1: I have none. Pan Psychism is the proposal that the
Speaker 1: universe inherently has mind within it that all matter, even
Speaker 1: inanimate objects, may contain units of consciousness, so that there
Speaker 1: is such thing as the experience of being a rock
Speaker 1: or a pile of sand. This sounds an awful lot
Speaker 1: to me, like like a phenomenon that I was reading
Speaker 1: about in psychological research called um phenomenal logical intersubjectivity, which basically,
Speaker 1: I mean is a necessarily long word that basically means
Speaker 1: that that because humans can only know for certain what
Speaker 1: it is to be human, that we use this base
Speaker 1: of experience to evaluate and consider non human agents. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a similar thing in literary circles called the pathetic fallacy,
Speaker 1: not being pathetic, but rather that you are, in this
Speaker 1: case talking about emotion. You're talking about the imbuing emotion
Speaker 1: upon things that, as far as we know, are incapable
Speaker 1: of actually feeling emotion, but that it's similar but not
Speaker 1: the same thing. Well, but there you're starting with the
Speaker 1: assumption that this is false. I mean, this is the
Speaker 1: proposal is that this may actually be true, And I
Speaker 1: don't think it's fair to dismiss this idea out of hand.
Speaker 1: There's actually an interesting philosopher named Galen Strawson UM and
Speaker 1: he's got the idea. He says basically, Um, if you
Speaker 1: accept that the nature of reality is physical and the
Speaker 1: consciousness is a feature of the physical world, you should
Speaker 1: accept the idea that units of consciousness are in his words,
Speaker 1: literally physical like an electric charge. Well, that might be so,
Speaker 1: but I would think that that's also possible that it's
Speaker 1: a manifestation of very specific types of matter. In other words,
Speaker 1: types of matter like mural cells, that would be a
Speaker 1: manifestation of consciousness. But if you're talking about just you know,
Speaker 1: a collection of iron atoms, that might not be so.
Speaker 1: While you may still physical basis, it's still an interesting
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, I can see the argument that
Speaker 1: the same way that we know that gravitons exist, but
Speaker 1: that we don't know what they are, what they do,
Speaker 1: that perhaps there's a conscious netron that um probably wouldn't
Speaker 1: be called that, but you know, but but it's some
Speaker 1: kind of quantum unit of of ideation. Um. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: think the issue with this is I think it's a
Speaker 1: really interesting idea, and it's because of the same problem,
Speaker 1: the Turing problem we've talked about. It's just impossible to test,
Speaker 1: which means it's not scientific against philosophy, it's not scientific course,
Speaker 1: neither is it scientific to say that rocks don't have mind? Well, no,
Speaker 1: unless you are. What you would have to do is
Speaker 1: prove that rocks do have mind. That would be scientific,
Speaker 1: it's so, But you wouldn't be able to do that either,
Speaker 1: but I mean not using this approach. So so that's
Speaker 1: the See, this is one of the things where it's
Speaker 1: an interesting thought experiment. It's it's the same problem I
Speaker 1: have with a lot of philosophy is that ultimately there's
Speaker 1: not a whole lot you can do practically with this
Speaker 1: sort of idea. Yeah, it's just like, well, that's an
Speaker 1: interesting idea. Moving on, What you could do is uh
Speaker 1: is sort of like tested against propositions that are brought
Speaker 1: up by other by actual induction, by forms of experimentation
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. Principles that we know to be
Speaker 1: true in one way or another. Maybe we can test
Speaker 1: whether or not this idea is consistent with them or not.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, still it's difficult to tell. But anyway, that
Speaker 1: the point of this is ideas like this I think
Speaker 1: make it not so necessarily obvious that robots don't have
Speaker 1: an experience of being, even if you believe in in
Speaker 1: say the emergent theory of consciousness. Well, I don't know.
Speaker 1: When you create an intensely complicated neural network through you know,
Speaker 1: of of a simulated robot brain, are you perhaps creating
Speaker 1: an emergent phenomenon of experience. Well, the other argument I
Speaker 1: would make about this is that, uh, the even if,
Speaker 1: even if you were to create some form of consciousness,
Speaker 1: let's assume that there is a basic unit of consciousness,
Speaker 1: that everything has some sort of element of this, you
Speaker 1: cannot then extend the assumption that that experiences anything remotely
Speaker 1: like the human experience. No, not at all. So here's
Speaker 1: the when you start talking about rights, what we're basing
Speaker 1: that on as human rights, you can even assume that
Speaker 1: my experiences like yours, though we're back to the problem
Speaker 1: we started with, no trapped in your experience. If we're
Speaker 1: able to have a conversation, we can at least find
Speaker 1: ground where we seem to share some form of commonality. Right. So, now,
Speaker 1: if we're talking about a a an object, that apparently
Speaker 1: that that may or may not possess this basic element. Again,
Speaker 1: since you cannot assume that that is at all remotely
Speaker 1: analogous to the human experience. When it comes to talking
Speaker 1: about rights. It's kind of a moot point anyway, because
Speaker 1: what we would consider rights for us might not at
Speaker 1: all be similar to whatever that conscious thing might really
Speaker 1: enjoy being set on fire or turned into glass. Maybe
Speaker 1: it thinks it's pretty, So that's a good point. We
Speaker 1: don't know even if there is such a thing as
Speaker 1: the experience of being a robot. We can't know for
Speaker 1: sure what that robot would want. Yeah, but like we
Speaker 1: were just saying, we can't know for sure what anybody
Speaker 1: else would want. And they tell you, which guess we
Speaker 1: can think about most humans, they will in fact very
Speaker 1: vocally telling you. Right, if you're cutting off someone's foot
Speaker 1: and they say I really don't want you to do that,
Speaker 1: I usually take them for their word. I do it. Anyway.
Speaker 1: Then would we uh perhaps have some inkling of an
Speaker 1: obligation to help a robot achieve its task efficiently? Does
Speaker 1: the robot want it? I don't know. See, here's the
Speaker 1: thing is that we first have to get to a
Speaker 1: point where we have a robot that is capable of
Speaker 1: what we would consider to be intelligent communication. That in
Speaker 1: itself does not necessarily mean the robot is intelligent, but
Speaker 1: it's capable of at least simulating it, and Toring would
Speaker 1: say that that is enough. The door that says that
Speaker 1: it's very pleased to open for you, and we'll be
Speaker 1: thank you for coming through this door. Yeah, um yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's do you have an obligation to help that
Speaker 1: door open and close as often as possible. You mostly
Speaker 1: have an obligation to slowly go mad as the door
Speaker 1: thanks you for walking through it over and over again,
Speaker 1: as Douglas Adams had written about extensively. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: so it's it's you know, first we get to a
Speaker 1: point where we have robots it somehow behave beyond simple
Speaker 1: uh machines that that that performed tasks. Here here we're
Speaker 1: assuming a robot that very closely simulates human intelligence. Right now.
Speaker 1: Once you get to that point, then things really do
Speaker 1: get tricky. If the robot is able to simulate consciousness
Speaker 1: and intelligence, whether or not it possesses it is kind
Speaker 1: of beside the point, because, just like Touring was saying,
Speaker 1: we have to just start assuming that the thing has
Speaker 1: what it appears to possess. Right, Well, yeah, that's what
Speaker 1: I sort of meant with the panpsychism thing. We don't
Speaker 1: know this is true but on the off chance that
Speaker 1: it is, should we give them right? So that's a
Speaker 1: good question, And in fact, there was a question asked
Speaker 1: in a game. It was a game that was associated
Speaker 1: with the movie AI So, the the Kubrick film that
Speaker 1: ended up being taken over by Spielberg. It was all
Speaker 1: about a little boy robot and it's um adventures and
Speaker 1: self discovered terrible ter all adventures. Yeah so um so,
Speaker 1: Well I would have been even more terrible had Kubrick
Speaker 1: actually directed it. But it uh, Spielbrek has a little
Speaker 1: bit more of a soft space for I was gonna
Speaker 1: say schmaltzy, but soft space is good. Uh so, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's anyway. The idea in this game was that you
Speaker 1: were solving various mysteries, and there were lots of different
Speaker 1: elements of this game. It was an alternate reality game
Speaker 1: and a r G and which means a marketing thing
Speaker 1: leading up to the film coming out. I believe in
Speaker 1: this case it was a marketing thing. Not all a
Speaker 1: r G s are market but this one in particular was,
Speaker 1: and it actually extended beyond the opening of the film.
Speaker 1: In fact, people were playing this game well after the
Speaker 1: film had opened. But the idea was that it was
Speaker 1: supposed to draw you into the universe created in this
Speaker 1: particular movie, and you did lots of different stuff. But
Speaker 1: one of the things that happened was that players in
Speaker 1: the game were assumed to be in this future world
Speaker 1: that AI took place in. So you were playing yourself,
Speaker 1: you were being you, but you were assumed to be
Speaker 1: in the future. And they actually held a referendum, and
Speaker 1: the referendum they were voting on whether or not robots
Speaker 1: should receive human rights because they had in the film.
Speaker 1: If you have not seen it, you see that there
Speaker 1: are robots that are gaining a sense of self awareness. Um,
Speaker 1: some have more of a sense of self awareness than others,
Speaker 1: depending on how advanced the individual roboting question is right.
Speaker 1: So they've essentially reached the point now where robots are
Speaker 1: capable of experiencing life on some level. Whether or not
Speaker 1: it's completely analogous to a human is beyond our ability
Speaker 1: to say. But they are having an experience. That's that
Speaker 1: becomes clear in the movie. So the question is should
Speaker 1: we extend rights to robots? And they held a vote
Speaker 1: among the players. I was one of the players who
Speaker 1: voted no. But the reason I voted no was not
Speaker 1: because I thought that these rights had to be withheld
Speaker 1: from a robot force. It was actually more of a uh.
Speaker 1: It was more of a to start a conversation about
Speaker 1: how I thought your responsible to create such an intelligence
Speaker 1: in the first place. If what you were intending the
Speaker 1: robot to do was uh, to work for you as
Speaker 1: a tool of some sort, like you should not give
Speaker 1: a tool these sort of things because the tool has
Speaker 1: a very specific purpose. Now, I know, we like to
Speaker 1: talk about how all people have a purpose in life.
Speaker 1: There's a purpose, but in general we think of that
Speaker 1: as something that we get to discover for ourselves. We
Speaker 1: get yeah, like we we get to make choices, We
Speaker 1: get to choose what we want. And in an ideal
Speaker 1: circumstances obviously there are people who live in different ones
Speaker 1: that have very limited, if any choices. But ideally you
Speaker 1: have all the different options open to you, and you
Speaker 1: make the choices that are right for you, and you
Speaker 1: find your purpose however you wanted to find that. But
Speaker 1: if you are something that was created for a very
Speaker 1: specific task, if you're a tool, then really you have
Speaker 1: your purpose preordained for you. You did not get to
Speaker 1: make those choices, and so to give something like that intelligence,
Speaker 1: an agency and consciousness, to me, is incredibly cruel because
Speaker 1: it means that either you are forcing it to do
Speaker 1: something that it may not want to do, or that
Speaker 1: you're just assuming that somehow that's going to make it
Speaker 1: do the thing that it was supposed to do better.
Speaker 1: It's it's not an ideal situation. So that's why I
Speaker 1: voted against it in the game, knowing that in the
Speaker 1: game it didn't ultimately matter one way or the other.
Speaker 1: The conclusion was going to be that the robots were
Speaker 1: going to rise up against us anyway, uh spoiler alert.
Speaker 1: But but the you know, it was it was important
Speaker 1: to me to have that conversation that in my mind,
Speaker 1: it was an unethical approach that unless you had the
Speaker 1: full intent that we want to create another species, another
Speaker 1: kind of life, a synthetic kind of life, that uh,
Speaker 1: from the outset, that was our goal, then that's okay.
Speaker 1: Make sure they have the rights, because I think that
Speaker 1: that's important. If you're giving them that ability to think
Speaker 1: and to have self awareness and that's their purpose for
Speaker 1: whatever reason, give them the rights they deserve them. But
Speaker 1: if you are talking about just trying to make a
Speaker 1: really good toaster, don't give it the intelligence in the
Speaker 1: first place. Of course, I guess we have no idea
Speaker 1: if the toaster has intelligence, but probably not. I'm going
Speaker 1: with no, it certainly does have not intelligence consciousness I think.
Speaker 1: I think it's certainly has a sense of vindictiveness based
Speaker 1: upon how my my, my toast might come out one
Speaker 1: day versus another difference. Maybe I should stop plugging it
Speaker 1: into that atomic generator I've got in the back. I
Speaker 1: don't know. Yeah. One of the follow ups to the
Speaker 1: whole panpsychism discussion we had is, of course, like, if
Speaker 1: that is true, then obviously it would apply to robots,
Speaker 1: but it would also apply to rocks and toasters. It
Speaker 1: would apply to them, it would apply to the raw
Speaker 1: materials of the robot. Yeah. Um, so that's an interesting
Speaker 1: thing in itself. But I have another thing I'd like
Speaker 1: to raise, which is that I think whether or not
Speaker 1: we believe that robots actually do have intrinsic rights, like
Speaker 1: whether they themselves need and deserve them, we might end
Speaker 1: up giving them rights anyway for our own needs. Right.
Speaker 1: I see exactly what you're saying, Joe. I mean it
Speaker 1: maybe that it's not It doesn't even necessarily mean that
Speaker 1: we feel that the robots are truly intelligent or truly conscious.
Speaker 1: We may even still openly questioned that and yet give
Speaker 1: them rights because we tend to identify with stuff. We
Speaker 1: tend to imbuse stuff with characteristics that it may or
Speaker 1: may not inherently possess, and then if we don't act
Speaker 1: according to those those feelings that we have, we start
Speaker 1: feeling like that's wrong. It's a anthropomorphism, yeah, which is
Speaker 1: you know, in in psychology they talk about it being
Speaker 1: a way, you know, that that humans are emotionally uncomfortable
Speaker 1: with things that are not like us, and that anthropomorphism
Speaker 1: allows us to um to reduce that discomfort. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: that's attributing human qualities to non human things, whether whether
Speaker 1: it's uh inanimate or animate. So for example, like you know,
Speaker 1: The Simpsons has this great little moment in one of
Speaker 1: the early episodes where everyone's looking at I think it's
Speaker 1: like a little dog, and the dog sneezes, and one
Speaker 1: that caress thinks it's people. You know, that's kind of
Speaker 1: kind of what we're talking about. Anthropomorphism is what you know,
Speaker 1: you might look at your your pet and just assume
Speaker 1: that your pet is feeling a certain way, but we
Speaker 1: really can't know that it's actually having any sort of
Speaker 1: emotion that's similar to ours. We do think they have emotions,
Speaker 1: but whether or not they mapped towards the kind of
Speaker 1: emotions that we have, that's a huge leap. Oh sure.
Speaker 1: And and this, this theory is is not anything new.
Speaker 1: I mean, this supposedly goes back to ancient Greece where, um,
Speaker 1: where a philosopher was using it to describe the similarity
Speaker 1: between religious believers and their gods. You know that that, um,
Speaker 1: that he was noticing that that the Greeks considered their
Speaker 1: gods to look basically like them, and that the African
Speaker 1: consider their gods to look basically like them, and so
Speaker 1: on and so forth. Um. And but in you know, now,
Speaker 1: in the present, neuroscience, research has shown that that similar
Speaker 1: brain regions are involved in thinking about the behavior of
Speaker 1: of humans and also non human objects. Yeah, and from
Speaker 1: what I've read, I think we are particularly susceptible to
Speaker 1: having feelings about robots. Actually read this was just published
Speaker 1: the other day in the Tripoli Spectrum. Hey, that's my joke,
Speaker 1: the okay, So it was a report on a thesis
Speaker 1: by a University of Washington student Julie Carpenter UM, and
Speaker 1: the thesis was entitled to quiet Professional and Investigation of
Speaker 1: US military Explosive Ordinance disposal personnel interactions with everyday field
Speaker 1: robots UM. I want to read a little selection from
Speaker 1: that article. What Carpenter found is that troops relationships with
Speaker 1: robots continue to evolve a the technology changes. Soldiers told
Speaker 1: her that attachment to the robots didn't affect their performance,
Speaker 1: yet I acknowledge they felt a range of emotions such
Speaker 1: as frustration, anger, and even sadness when their field robot
Speaker 1: was destroyed. That makes Carpenter wonder whether outcomes on the
Speaker 1: battlefield could potentially be compromised by human robot attachment or
Speaker 1: the feeling of self extension into the robot described by
Speaker 1: some operators. So there's this this perception that there could
Speaker 1: be a problem because what you're supposed to use this
Speaker 1: robot for is to get killed for your right. You know,
Speaker 1: it goes where where there would be danger to human life,
Speaker 1: and to preserve human life, you send your robot in.
Speaker 1: But the problem is feeling bad about the robot dying.
Speaker 1: Then yeah, that's kind of a problem. And I can
Speaker 1: very much imagine the same kind of reaction happening as
Speaker 1: we incorporate more robotics into our day to day lives.
Speaker 1: You know, people name their room buzz the name. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: of course they have. I'm like, yeah, they do have
Speaker 1: feelings about their room bas. And I highly suspect I
Speaker 1: don't have any scientific literature on this, but I highly
Speaker 1: suspect that people get way sadder when their room bas
Speaker 1: break down than when their toaster breaks. Oh, when your
Speaker 1: toaster breaks, it's kind of annoying. I think this has
Speaker 1: to do partially and and this is again I don't
Speaker 1: I don't have any numbers on it, but I feel
Speaker 1: like it's probably because robots um move autonomously, and autonomous
Speaker 1: movement is one of those things that we generally apply
Speaker 1: to living stuff. So um, you know, for for for
Speaker 1: the same reason that that a child might be more
Speaker 1: upset about a toy that moves around breaking than it
Speaker 1: would be about otherwise stationary. It all depends on the
Speaker 1: the emotional attachment. I'm still bitter about my blankie. Um. Well,
Speaker 1: there was an interesting art project I was just trying
Speaker 1: to research and see if I could find. Uh. I
Speaker 1: think it was Mark Owens who did this project. Mark
Speaker 1: Owens created something called the Avatar machine, and I wrote
Speaker 1: an article about it many years ago. Now that that
Speaker 1: doesn't really apply to this conversation, but I want to
Speaker 1: say it was Owens that also created an interesting experience. Uh.
Speaker 1: He was really interested. He was kind of thinking about
Speaker 1: people's relationships with inanimate objects and technology, and how we
Speaker 1: can form at least a one way emotional bond with
Speaker 1: something that itself does not appear to have any kind
Speaker 1: of emotion or feeling. And I want to say it
Speaker 1: was Owens who had created this interesting experiment where he
Speaker 1: had a lamp and had this kind of a membrane
Speaker 1: stretched over the lap, so the light was showing through
Speaker 1: the membrane, and then gave people scalpels where they would
Speaker 1: be able to cut through the membrane to let light
Speaker 1: show through. That was their task, right, Their task was
Speaker 1: to get light to shift. And the membrane looked like skin,
Speaker 1: It was very similar to skin. And the idea was
Speaker 1: that you see how people reacted to the thought of
Speaker 1: having to cause damage to this thing in order to
Speaker 1: let light through, and because it looks so much like skin,
Speaker 1: there were people who were very hesitant to cut like
Speaker 1: they were afraid of I guess of hurting it in
Speaker 1: a way or just that the thought of having to
Speaker 1: cause damage to let light through was something that gave
Speaker 1: them a sense of hesitation. So that alone, we're talking
Speaker 1: about just the lamp here. That's there's no animate part
Speaker 1: of this other than the fact that the like can
Speaker 1: come on or imagine it can have convincing conversations with you. Right.
Speaker 1: So yeah, part and and and all three of us
Speaker 1: have have talked about UM off off off the mic,
Speaker 1: about UM having problems playing video games when the computerized
Speaker 1: avatars and the game's look too much like a real
Speaker 1: human person. Like, the more realistic they get, the more
Speaker 1: uncomfortable we are with causing pain to them, right And
Speaker 1: though you know you're not actually hurting any living thing,
Speaker 1: right right, like like like harvesting the little Sisters and
Speaker 1: uh in BioShock. Yeah, I couldn't do it. I couldn't.
Speaker 1: I wanted to see what it looked like when you
Speaker 1: did it, but I couldn't make myself do it. I
Speaker 1: had to look it up on YouTube. Yeah, I didn't
Speaker 1: do it either. And we have this decision as well
Speaker 1: as that in video games, if you have a game
Speaker 1: where you are given the choice to do something, whether
Speaker 1: it's you know, the moral choice however you want to
Speaker 1: find that, or the evil choice, I always go the
Speaker 1: good guy route. I have trouble playing as a villain,
Speaker 1: unless it's such a cartoonish villain. I'm just saying that
Speaker 1: I personally can't. I personally can't play that way except
Speaker 1: when it's a game where that's really your If it's
Speaker 1: not a choice, if that's just the way the game works,
Speaker 1: then I end up being able to play through it
Speaker 1: without too much trouble. But if it's one of those
Speaker 1: things where you choose one or the other, I hate
Speaker 1: having to choose things that uh that don't seem to
Speaker 1: benefit the people that I like in the game. The
Speaker 1: people being like the characters in the game that I like,
Speaker 1: they have no actual experience, and you're causing harm to
Speaker 1: no one. Right exactly I could choose. I could choose
Speaker 1: to waste an entire village in a in an RPG,
Speaker 1: if I had a character who was strong enough to
Speaker 1: be able to take on all the guards that would
Speaker 1: immediately be set upon me. But I have problems with
Speaker 1: I like like sky Rim is another example. I play
Speaker 1: Skyrim and I'll walk into uh An Inn, for example,
Speaker 1: They're none of those characters are at all alive, but
Speaker 1: they all have their own little personalities, even though they
Speaker 1: may be used by the same voice actors that I've
Speaker 1: heard a billion times in other towns. I can't bring
Speaker 1: myself to just go into wholesale slaughter mode and start
Speaker 1: wiping out characters. In fact, I don't know if this
Speaker 1: happened originally with Skyrim, but recently I've been playing it again,
Speaker 1: and I would get letters from the first town I
Speaker 1: went in when a villager would be killed by some
Speaker 1: other event that happened while I was not in the village,
Speaker 1: and they had given me an inheritance they had willed
Speaker 1: and inheritance to me, and I received gold because they
Speaker 1: had died. I would be upset about this, like no, no,
Speaker 1: poor Ozrick is dead or whatever, you know. And yeah,
Speaker 1: So I think the conclusion of this is that robot
Speaker 1: rights may be coming, whether robots deserve them or not,
Speaker 1: or need them, or or even if they're able to
Speaker 1: at all think in a way that we consider well
Speaker 1: analogous to human thing. Yeah, in my opinion, that would
Speaker 1: be the rubric for whether or not they actually deserve them.
Speaker 1: If there is an experience of being a robot. Obviously
Speaker 1: the robot needs some kind of protection. We don't know
Speaker 1: whether or not there will be, but I think robots
Speaker 1: will be cute enough and anthropomorphic enough if they're going
Speaker 1: to be moving around having conversations with this resembling life
Speaker 1: in any way, even as much as like a bomb
Speaker 1: disposal robot, right, right, And and and especially because you know,
Speaker 1: there's there's theories and marketing that tell us that that
Speaker 1: when we can highly anthropomorphize something, that people will be
Speaker 1: more likely to buy it. So yeah, I very much
Speaker 1: suspect that we're going to have strong feelings about protecting
Speaker 1: the interests of our robots, whether or not the robots
Speaker 1: actually care. It will be interesting to see the first
Speaker 1: case brought against someone for robot abuse. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: that then, you that will really the way it's decided
Speaker 1: in the courts will be interesting because it may or
Speaker 1: may not align with the way that the general population feels.
Speaker 1: And it's a good question to um, Okay, so imagine
Speaker 1: we do grant some kind of rights to robots, just voluntarily, say,
Speaker 1: even though they don't need them, is it actually immoral
Speaker 1: to be gratuitously cruel to a robot if the robot
Speaker 1: can't feel it, that's a good question. I mean, is
Speaker 1: there a moral to be just yeah, oh there there
Speaker 1: There are certainly non Western theories I mean, or I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, I guess, I guess, non mainstream Western theories
Speaker 1: that say that, yes, that causing damage to even even
Speaker 1: non non alive beings is detrimental to your own personal
Speaker 1: So if I were to draw a picture of a
Speaker 1: stick figure and then rip it up into tiny little pieces,
Speaker 1: according to that philosophy, that would be bad. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: just just the concept of trying to to reach freedom
Speaker 1: from suffering, which is the basic tenant of of Buddhism
Speaker 1: for example. That and that you know, introducing negativity of
Speaker 1: any kind into your life is going to negatively effect.
Speaker 1: It just reminded me of Hitchcock who said that he
Speaker 1: he invied Disney because Disney could just actors and throw
Speaker 1: them away whenever they were giving them trouble. So that's great. Yeah,
Speaker 1: one of those one of those little little nuggets that
Speaker 1: I just absolutely love. Well, this is you know, so
Speaker 1: I agree. I think that robots are are are probably
Speaker 1: going to end up once they reach a certain level
Speaker 1: of sophistication end up being given rights by humans. Uh,
Speaker 1: simply because emotionally for us, that's something that will meet
Speaker 1: our needs if if not the robots, um except for ferbies,
Speaker 1: because screw those guys. So yeah, I guess that wraps
Speaker 1: up our discussion about robot rights. Guys, if you want
Speaker 1: to join this conversation, you want to tell me, hey, no,
Speaker 1: furbies deserved rights too, You're wrong, but you're welcome to try,
Speaker 1: go to f W thinking dot com. That's where you
Speaker 1: can find the blogs, the videos, the podcasts, the articles
Speaker 1: that we right that are some that that associate with
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