The line between people and machines is blurring, machines are becoming more human, and people are becoming more like machines …
Original material by George M. Church
In 1950, Norbert Wiener's book The Human Use of Human Beings was at the forefront of scientific thought, in particular, it described the following concept:
'..A genie-like machine capable of learning and making decisions based on this learning will in no way be forced to make such decisions as we would make or that would be acceptable to us. We will entrust our solutions to a machine made of metal, or those machines of flesh and blood, which are bureaus, huge libraries, armies and joint stock companies. The hour has already struck, and the choice between good and evil is at our doorstep '…
But that was the denouement of the book, which left us in limbo for 68 years, without any prescriptions, prohibitions, and even without just a well-formulated problem. Since then, such warnings about the threat of machines have repeatedly appeared to us in the form that reached large segments of the population, for example, films such as Colossus: Project Forbin (1970), The Terminator (1984), The Matrix (1999 ) and 'Out of the car' (2015). But now it is time for a big renewal to new perspectives that, in particular, focus on describing our 'human' rights and our existential needs.
The concerns are mainly about the confrontation between us versus them (robots), the gray mass (nanotechnology), or the monoculture of clones (biology). Let's try to extrapolate current trends: what if we can create or grow almost anything and achieve any desired level of safety and efficiency? Any intelligent being (composed of atoms regardless of their sequence) could have access to any technology.
Perhaps we should think less about confrontation with robots, and instead turn to a discussion of the rights of intelligent beings in the face of an unprecedented diversification of minds ahead. We must value it in order to minimize global threats to the existence of our species, such as supervolcanoes and asteroids.
Although we do not know at what level bio-, nano-, robotic and humanoid hybrids will dominate at each stage of our accelerating evolution, we can strive for a more advanced level of humanity, justice and security in relation to each other.
Equality
What 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson wanted to say in 1776 when he wrote: “We consider the following truths obvious: all people are created equal, and they are all endowed by their Creator with some inalienable rights, which include: life, freedom and the pursuit of happiness.” ? The spectrum of modern people is wide enough. In 1776, women and the non-white population were not considered 'humans'. Even today, there is an unequal (albeit often sympathetic) attitude towards people born with hereditary cognitive or behavioral problems – Down syndrome, Tay-Sachs disease, X-syndrome, cerebral palsy, and so on.
And as we shift geographically and mature, our unequal rights change dramatically. Embryos, infants, children, adolescents, adults, patients, criminals, gender identity and gender preferences, the very rich and the very poor, all face different rights and socio-economic realities. One of the ways for such 'new' types of thinking to obtain and preserve rights similar to most of the 'elite people' is to preserve a component of rationality that will become akin to a human shield or become like a ruler who signs huge documents with one stroke, makes the most important decisions in terms of finance, healthcare , diplomacy, security and military affairs. It will probably be very difficult for us to turn off, change or erase the computer and its 'memories', especially if it makes friends with people and presents extremely convincing arguments in defense of its existence (as all outstanding scientists would do in the struggle for their lives).
Radically polar rules for humans and non-human / hybrids
The division of variation in personal rights within Homo sapiens noted in the title spills over into a riot of inequality once we take into account entities that overlap (or soon overlap) the familiar spectrum of humanity. In Google Street View, people's faces and license plates are smeared. Video devices are excluded from many locations, such as courts and committee meetings. Wearable and public cameras with facial recognition software are balancing beyond taboo. Should people with hyperthymesia or photographic memory be excluded from the general conditions? Shouldn't people with prosopagnosia (facial blindness) or forgetfulness anywhere benefit from such software and OCR? And if so, why only they, and not all? If we all have these tools, why don't we all use them?
These scenarios are reflected in the short story by Kurt Vonnegut, 'Harrison Bergeron' (1961), in which outstanding ability is suppressed for the sake of mediocrity and the lower social level. Thought experiments, such as John Searl's Chinese Room and Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, appeal to the intuitions demonstrated by Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and others. The Chinese room experiment hypothesizes that a mind made up of mechanical and organic parts cannot be sentient, no matter how smart it is in communicating with a person in Chinese. The person must establish the source of consciousness and 'feel' it. The privilege applied in the first and second laws of Asimov refers to the human mind, which is placed above any other mind barely present in the third law of self-preservation.
If robots do not have exactly the same consciousness as humans, then this is used as an excuse to give them other rights, as in a situation with disputes that other tribes or races are one step below the generally accepted understanding of man. Do robots show free will? Have they finally become self-aware? The Qbo robot passed the mirror test, was able to recognize itself, and the Nao robot passed a similar test to recognize its own voice and determine the inner state of existence.
For free will, we have algorithms that are neither random nor completely definite, but they aim at a near-optimal process for the probability of making a decision. It can be argued that this is a practical Darwinian consequence of game theory. For many (not all) games or problems, it is true that we are more likely to lose if we behave in a completely predictable or completely unpredictable manner.
However, why is free will so attractive? Historically, it has provided us with a way to attribute guilt in the context of reward or punishment in this life or in the afterlife. Punishment goals may include changing the priority of an individual to help the species survive. In extreme cases, this includes imprisonment or other restrictions if Skinner's positive / negative reinforcement cannot help protect society. It is clear that such tools can apply to free will, and more broadly, to any machine whose behavior we want to fix.
We can argue whether robots actually experience subjective primary feelings of free will or self-awareness, but the same applies to human judgment. How can we know if a sociopath, a coma patient, a patient with Williams syndrome, or an infant has the same free will or self-awareness as we do? And does this really mean anything? If people (of any type) are convinced that they feel consciousness, pain, faith, happiness, ambition and / or belonging to society, then should we deny them their rights because of the hypothetical difference between their hypothetical primary feelings and ours?
The thin red lines of the prohibition, which, in theory, we should never cross, increasingly seem short-lived and unreasonable. The line between humans and machines is blurring, machines are becoming more human, and people are becoming more like machines. Not only is this happening not only as we increasingly blindly follow GPS cues, replay tweets and quote samples of elaborate marketing, but also as we increasingly saturate our brains and our genetic programming mechanisms with information.
The various forbidden lines depend on genetic exclusivity, in which genetics are traditionally considered hereditary (although proven to be reversible), while free (and lethal) technologies, such as machines for any purpose and need, are irreversible due to social and economic processes. Within genetics, the prohibition line forces us to prohibit or avoid genetically modified food, but accept the existence of genetically modified bacteria to make insulin.
When we talk about 'human research', we draw on the Declaration of Helsinki (19640) and keep in mind the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (1932-1972), the most notorious biomedical study in US history. In 2015, the Nonhuman Rights Project sued the New York High Court on behalf of two chimpanzees being held for testing at Stony Brook University. The Court of Appeal ruled that chimpanzees cannot be classified as subjects of the law, because they “have no duties and responsibilities in society.” And all this happened despite numerous public assurances to the contrary and controversy that such a solution could be applied to children and people with disabilities.
What prevents you from transferring this experience to other animals, organelles, cars and hybrids? As we (in the person of Hawking, Mask, Tallinn, Wilczek and Tegmark) have banned autonomous weapons, we have also demonized one kind of silent machine in relation to others, while other machines can be more deadly and more stupid.
Or maybe transhumans are already walking on Earth? Think of the 'non-contact peoples': the Sentinelese and Andamans from India, the Korowai from Indonesia, the Mashko-piro from Peru, the Pintupi from Australia, the Surma from Ethiopia, the hands from Vietnam, the Himba from Namibia, as well as dozens of tribes from Papua and New Guinea. How would they or our ancestors answer? We can define 'transhumans' as a nation or culture that is incomprehensible to people living in a modern but not yet fully technological culture.
It will be extremely difficult for modern Stone Age people to understand why we are so excited about the recent proof of the existence of gravitational waves, which proves the century-old theory of general relativity. They will scratch their heads in bewilderment, thinking about the reasons for the existence of atomic clocks or GPS satellites that help us find our way home, or why we decided to expand the range of the spectrum we see from a small range to the full spectrum with radio and gamma rays. We can move faster than any living species, we can pick up speed enough to leave Earth's orbit, and survive in the cold vacuum of space.
If these characteristics (and hundreds of others) do not denote transhumanism, then what do they mean? If we feel that it is the modern human (and not the paleocultural) who should judge transhumanism, then how do we achieve the status of 'transhuman'?
We, the 'newest people', will always be able to understand each other's technological growth, but we will not be surprised at the moment when we 'arrive' at the point at which the transition to the next stage of development will be available. William Gibson, a science fiction prophet, said, 'The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.' While this may underestimate the next phase of the 'future', millions of us are already 'transhumans' and many are demanding more. The question 'who were the people?' already turned into 'what were the transhumans and what rights did they have?'
Original material by George M. Church
The topic of artificial intelligence has fascinated me since my acquaintance with the work of Bradbury and Bulychev in elementary school. Of course, over time, interests expanded and robots fell out of sight for a while. But now all the books read, one by one, pop up in memories when looking at how modern AI evolves over time.
A separate issue will be the distribution of rights, and this is where you have to work hard in order to substantiate the basic concepts and understand the boundaries of reason and the criteria for an intelligent being. A successful test with a mirror is more than serious, as for me. What is a man? Will he completely control this evolution or will inevitably fall a victim, as we are portrayed in films and described in science fiction novels?