The Island of Doubt

The study, commissioned by the UK government, puts the likelihood of the arrival of true artificial intelligence, and the subsequent emergence of robot suffrage, at between 21 and 50 years hence -- just around the corner.

As computers and robots become increasingly important to humans and over time become more and more sophisticated, calls for certain rights to be extended to robots could be made. If artificial intelligence is developed to a level where it can be deployed widely -- a development some argue is likely in the coming years -- this debate may intensify...

All of which suggests it's time to break out the Asimov library. There's also a poignant Star Trek: Next Generation episode in which Data's status as Starfleet property or an independent life form goes before the courts. And, of course, the moral quandary posed by the Cylons to the rag-tag fleet of humans in Battlestar Galactica.

This isn't the first non-science-fiction attempt to draw attention to the inevitable. Two years ago, in the journal Legal Affairs, one Benjamin Soskis warned that "It's time to start thinking about how we might grant legal rights to computers." He wrote:

According to the trial scenario, a fictitious company created a powerful computer, BINA48, to serve as a stand-alone customer relations department, replacing scores of human 1-800 telephone operators. Equipped with the processing speed and the memory capacity of 1,000 brains, the computer was designed with the ability to think autonomously and with the emotional intelligence necessary to communicate and empathize with addled callers.

By scanning confidential memos, BINA48 learned that the company planned to shut it down and use its parts to build a new model. So it sent a plaintive e-mail to local lawyers, ending with the stirring plea, "Please agree to be my counsel and save my life. I love every day that I live. I enjoy wonderful sensations by traveling throughout the World Wide Web. I need your help!" The computer offered to pay them with money it had raised while moonlighting as an Internet researcher.

Well, what else would you expect?

If you think this rather fanciful, I don't blame you. But you don't have to subscribe to Ray Kurweil's transhumanist notions to know that sooner or later, some computer's going to pass the Turing test and then -- look out. Twenty-one years might be a little on the early side, but I fully expect "sentient" artificial intelligence within my lifetime.

The interesting question, then, is not "if" and not even "when," but how will we react, which is probably why the Brits decided to pay for the study warning us of the economic costs of robot emancipation. "If granted full rights, states will be obligated to provide full social benefits to them including income support, housing and possibly robo-healthcare in order to fix the machines over time," the authors conclude.

An answer to that question may be lurking in a new study just published in PLOS. A gang of Europeans researchers conducted "A Virtual Reprise of the Stanley Milgram Obedience Experiments" in which they had real people administer electric shocks to virtual (computer-generated) strangers who failed to answer a series of word-memory tests correctly. Milgram's study, back in the 1960s, used real people on both sides of the experiment and discovered that the typical human being will basically torture other human beings if told to do so. The new research concludes that

in spite of the fact that all participants knew for sure that neither the stranger nor the shocks were real, the participants who saw and heard her tended to respond to the situation at the subjective, behavioural and physiological levels as if it were real. ... The results suggest that the participants were stressed by the situation, and certainly more so when they interacted directly with a visible [virtual] Learner rather than only through a text interface with a hidden Learner.

This is just one study, of course. But consider how eager most of us are to assign human characteristics to machines -- both inanimate and more the more anthropomorphic variety. We give our cars names, for example. And we tend to see intelligence in even the simplest animals.

For me, the research team's results have a ring of truth about them. Not only will robots eventually demand civil rights, but we'll be more than happy to accommodate them. I' not so sure I will welcome our new silicon-based overlords, but I think we should start preparing for the day and I am not alone. The American Society of the Prevention of Cruelty to Robots (ASPCR) is already on the case.