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domingo, 5 de mayo de 2019

BioEdge: Let’s think about robot rights now

BioEdge: Let’s think about robot rights now

Bioedge

Let’s think about robot rights now

by Michael Cook | 5 May 2019 |

Two of the most common pieces of bioethical advice are: The ethics always lags behind the science and Draft guidelines before it’s too late. The latest invocation of these nuggets of wisdom comes in an article about low-level artificial intelligence.

Writing in Aeon, philosophers John Basl, of Northeastern University, and Eric Schwitzgebel, of University of California, Riverside, warn that we are in danger of following in the footsteps of Nazi doctors if we ignore the ethical dangers of mistreating robots.

Most discussions of AI rights (or robot rights) concern humanoid robots. But the authors point out that most robots will have a much lower level of consciousness.

You might think that AIs don’t deserve that sort of ethical protection unless they are conscious – that is, unless they have a genuine stream of experience, with real joy and suffering. We agree. But now we face a tricky philosophical question: how will we know when we have created something capable of joy and suffering? If the AI is like Data or Dolores, it can complain and defend itself, initiating a discussion of its rights. But if the AI is inarticulate, like a mouse or a dog, or if it is for some other reason unable to communicate its inner life to us, it might have no way to report that it is suffering.

It is possible that “we might soon be creating many subhuman AIs who will deserve ethical protection”.

The way forward? Write a report.

On most mainstream theories of consciousness, we are not yet creating AI with conscious experiences meriting ethical consideration. But we might – possibly soon – cross that crucial ethical line. We should be prepared for this.

Michael Cook is editor of BioEdge

The government's statistics for euthanasia in the Netherlands were released recently. They show that the number of people who took advantage of legal assisted suicide and euthanasia declined slightly -- about 7% -- for the first time since 2006.

To be completely candid, I regard a decline in the number of euthanasia cases as good news. That is, if it is true. It is possible that more cases were simply not reported to the authorities. Fewer euthanasia cases means fewer people in desperate pain and fewer people who feel that their lives are meaningless.

However, this is not the way that euthanasia supporters see it. For them it was bad news because fewer people had taken advantage of the blessing of a peaceful death. From their point of view, good news is an ever-increasing, upward-sloping line on a graph.

Euthanasia already accounts for at least 4% of all deaths in the Netherlands. What proportion are its supporters aiming at? 5%? 10%? 40%? I have never read any projections of this figure. It would be interesting to know what the future holds for the Dutch.