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Finally, a real "Digital Liberty" story for the mechanical among us. The EU has released a report mulling topics such as "electronic personhood" status for robots, and kill switches:
The European Parliament Committee on Legal Affairs has proposed a legal framework for robots that clarifies whether they should have the legal status of people, even as it recommends the inclusion of kill switches in automated systems. "A growing number of areas of our daily lives are increasingly affected by robotics," said rapporteur Mady Delvaux in a statement. "In order to address this reality and to ensure that robots are and will remain in the service of humans, we urgently need to create a robust European legal framework."
The committee's draft report, due to be considered by the full EU Parliament in February, says that robot sales were increasing about 17 per cent annually between 2010 and 2014, then in 2014 the rate jumped to 29 per cent, driven by automotive parts suppliers and the electronics industry. It also notes that robot-oriented patent filings have tripled over the last decade.
[...] The committee is calling for an EU agency to oversee robotics and artificial intelligence and for the adoption of a voluntary ethical code governing who will be accountable for the social, health, and environmental impact of robots. It wants to ensure that robots operate according to established legal, ethical, and safety standards. The committee also hopes robot designers will take responsibility for the actions of their creations. "Robotics engineers should remain accountable for the social, environmental and human health impacts that robotics may impose on present and future generations," the report says.
The Prometheans are coming, and they don't care about anything's personhood.
Also at BBC and The Guardian.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Monday January 16 2017, @09:52AM
That was an interesting episode.
One of my main fascinations with Star Trek was their boldness to question "conventional wisdoms" using outer space aliens serving as proxy for our own sacred cows, so fundamental concepts could be discussed without stepping on someone's holy hot spot.
That series sure helped me see a lot of things handed down to me ( like racism/prejudice, blind obedience, and religion ) in another light, and question the fundamentals of what is true.
I am quite surprised the Churches did not go after Star Trek like they went after Elvis Presley. IMHO, Star Trek did more to undermine blind faith than anything else TV had to offer. It made kids like me question on what authority were we supposed to accept any given meme? "Because I said so" was no longer sufficient reason, unless backed up with violence - in which case the violence itself was taught as the way things were to be handled.
Remember the follow-up with the Exocomp mining robots? So many shades of gray.
Adaptive filtering / successive approximation / iterative optimization routines are one thing. Intelligence is another. I question why we want to even try to build an intelligent machine.
When I even look at myself, the biggest problem I have had was my dogged determination to do things the way I felt they should be done - which was not necessarily the way I was told to do it. Some people would call it "thinking outside the box" and "creativity", while others see it as "insubordination" and "not playing by the rules".
What got me thinking on this meme was the film "Command and Control" [commandandcontrolfilm.com] recently aired on PBS. Here a bunch of humans are subjected to a nuclear missile silo accident. Plenty of reason to have to think outside the box. However the military (SAC) seemed to take a really dim view of those who did not play by the book. Mirrored my experience in industry. I would pride myself on being able to think outside the box, however I was soon to discover those were "resume words" and this kinda stuff would not be tolerated on the job. Doing such things on the job would lead to termination. Now, why on God's green earth would anyone want their computers to take things into their own mind and do it differently than they way they have been told to do it? When they won't tolerate this kind of stuff from their own people?
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday January 16 2017, @10:06AM
Remember the follow-up with the Exocomp mining robots? So many shades of gray.
Actually, I thought that episode was very clear. If someone sacrifices themselves to save others voluntarily, it is noble. If we force someone to sacrifice their selves to save us, it is cowardly in the worst sense of the word. Same if we force intelligent machines. (Sensing box, must recalibrate!) Not to mention the heroic Droid in Rogue One! K-2SO rocks! May we never forget his sacrifice!
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday January 16 2017, @10:16AM
To tell stories.
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16 2017, @10:34AM
To tell stories.
This is why we need movies about robots, like that old one, "Metropolis", and the one with Johnny Five, and Millenium Man, and Speilberg's kid robot one, and "I, Robot", and some kind of "Alien" movie, and "Real Steel", and, and, and. But!! Replicants are not robots. Replicant lives matter!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16 2017, @12:17PM
But they do have a kill switch knotted inside.
Fucking is divine (if I remember the feeling well), so the results of the creation by this means need to be protected. Because, you know, the authoritarians "believe little children are special."
On the other side, replicants are engineered rather than created by fucking one out of their mind. Surely, the 'superior' neural activity involved in engineering gives the creator some additional rights over their creation, right? I mean, look, intelligence is human... clearly not divine by its nature (by this measure, God has to be a complete idiot, otherwise it would display human traits. Mmm... looking at them authoritarians as one of the god's creation, perhaps this much is true?)
(grin)
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Monday January 16 2017, @03:36PM
If you like Roy's speech you might like this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BM54jXndyvQ [youtube.com]
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday January 16 2017, @04:31PM
Thanks for it (to be sincere, I didn't resonate with it)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16 2017, @11:23AM
There are several reasons:
Also, many people confuse intelligence with sentience. Outside science fiction, intelligent machines will probably rarely if ever be sentient machines. On one hand because all those ethical questions about how to treat the machine don't arise as long as no sentience is involved. On the other hand because you want the machine to work reliably, and not one day stop doing its task because it's not in the right mood, or just out of curiosity do something it isn't supposed to do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16 2017, @02:33PM
> That series sure helped me see a lot of things handed down to me ...
We didn't have TV at home when I was a kid (in hindsight a very good choice by my parents). Only saw a few ST & THG episodes at friend's houses.
Instead, I read SF, starting with Heinlein juveniles* and kept on going for years after that. Gave me the same urge to question (at least some of) the things handed down to me.
* https://www.google.com/search?q=Heinlein+juveniles&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 [google.com] I stumbled on them in the middle school (Jr. High) library--a lucky find.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday January 16 2017, @09:26PM
I did much the same. Now that you mention it, science fiction did challenge sacred cows in a way fantasy novels, fun though they were and are, never did.
Washington DC delenda est.