鈥淗ELLO, I鈥檓 Scout. Want to play?鈥� My daughter has a toy dog that yaps and comes out with a few stock phrases. When it gets too annoying, I don鈥檛 hesitate to turn it off. I sometimes think about 鈥渓osing鈥� Scout, or even 鈥渁ccidentally鈥� breaking it, acts that would be cruel to my daughter but not to the dog. But for how much longer will this be true? Technology is getting better all the time. What will it mean if we can create a robot that is considered alive? If I find myself annoyed by such a robot, would it be wrong to turn it off? Would that be the same as killing it?
The answer isn鈥檛 obvious. Many people already regard robots more sensitively than I do. At Kofukuji temple near Tokyo, Japan, Buddhist priests conduct services for . In Japan, inanimate objects are considered to have a spirit or soul, so it makes sense for Aibos to be commemorated in this way.
Such sentiments aren鈥檛 confined to Japan, however. Julie Carpenter, a roboticist in San Francisco has written about bomb disposal soldiers who form strong attachments to their robots, naming them and even sleeping curled up next to them in their Humvees. 鈥淚 know soldiers have written to military robot manufacturers requesting they fix and return the same robot because it鈥檚 part of their team,鈥� she says.
Advertisement
This is attachment. You might feel the same about an old coat, yet no one will argue that a coat is sentient. Even machines that seem very human-like, such as Alexa, Siri and those capable of face or voice recognition, have internal states that are completely different from those of humans or animals. 鈥淭hey have no consciousness, no awareness, no emotions, no attachments,鈥� says Bernd Stahl of De Montfort University, UK. 鈥淪peaking of the 鈥榙eath鈥� of a robot is thus a metaphor similar to the 鈥榙eath鈥� of your car or phone when they stop functioning.鈥�
Yes, at the moment it is a metaphor. But it is feasible that we will one day make a sentient machine that has empathy and moral agency. Then what?
Even if artificial intelligence gets good enough to pass as sentient, it is likely to 鈥渓ive鈥� in a dispersed state, not situated in a single device. 鈥淚t will probably live in the cloud or some other place where its memory could be retrieved and used in a different format or body,鈥� says Carpenter. In that case, a sentient robot could never die. It could just download itself somewhere else 鈥� like Alexa and Siri, it could be in many places at once.
Would we feel differently if that sentient robot contained an actual human brain? This year, neuroscientists mapped all the connections between all the neurons in an animal鈥檚 brain for the first time. It was a simple nematode worm. But transhumanists believe that if we could create such a 鈥渃onnectome鈥� for a human, we could replicate it on a computer and transfer our consciousness to silicon, creating an entity that was 鈥渁live鈥�. However, Daniel Dennett at Tufts University in Massachusetts is sceptical. 鈥淗aving the complete connectome would be a bit like having a complete map of a city鈥檚 telephone system and thinking that was all you needed to know to make sense of all the events going on in London or New York,鈥� he says. In short, there is little chance that an uploaded brain will be 鈥渁live鈥� any time soon.
Nevertheless, a growing feeling that robots are becoming more sentient will change how we behave towards them, says David Gunkel at Northern Illinois University. 鈥淲e keep moving the line in the sand to protect ourselves from the incursion of the robot. We are now making machines that challenge those boundaries,鈥� he says. That is a good thing, because exposure to them will teach us new ways to think about other entities.
Because our world is changing so rapidly, Gunkel believes we should now start to think from the robot鈥檚 point of view, considering their rights and the question of robot death and even suffering. 鈥淲e have to answer these questions before we get these things in our world, so we are prepared.鈥�
