Virtually Human 1

I forget where I first heard of this book, but, some months after it arrived through the letter box, I have now just started reading it and I thought it might be interesting to set down a few thoughts before reading, and then see how they looked after reading.

The author, who is clearly proud of her PhD, is an interesting person, inter alia, successful in business and making a great deal of money. She comes endorsed by a senior googler & futurologist Ray Kurzweil on whom I have posted before (see reference 3).

She is rich enough to have had a robot built which copies, as near as can be managed, her partner Bina. The target is a conscious robot, human enough to warrant human rights (see references 1 & 2 for background and YouTube for an interview with the robot).

I start with the mausoleum aspect of the case as, as I understand it, part of the motivation for all this is to have some (reasonably) permanent memorial of the person concerned. We have had brick-and-mortar mausoleums for some time, with the Taj Mahal being a good analogy in this context, and one which served the dual purpose of advertising the power and wealth of the builder. Then others were more concerned to hide their burial places, such as the pharaohs of Egypt or Attila the Hun. Other people again have their pets stuffed after death and install them on shelves or perhaps podia in their living rooms as souvenirs of what they meant in life. I now understand that it is becoming common for seniors to assemble a capsule of stuff which, after their demise, their juniors can open up to stir up memories of the dear departed. This robot goes to the next stage. Instead of wondering about what X would have said about Y as you turn over the contents of the capsule, you can ask him or her.

Quite a lot of otherwise respectable people now believe that such robots will succeed, that they will acquire consciousness and that for many purposes they will be indistinguishable from human persons. I am a believer too, if not perhaps respectable, having, along the way, been impressed by the Rothblatt analogy of the birds, which goes roughly as follows: we may not be able to replicate a bird, but inspired by a bird we can make impressive flying machines. I associate to a film, Short Circuit, seen years ago, in which a cuddly robot was made a citizen of the United States - and to judge by a quick peek at google, there is a lot of similar stuff out there.

So when will such robots acquire human rights? Will a first step be a petition to our Queen to extend her Charter to the RSPCA to extend their remit to include robots? Putting robots in among the animals might be a reasonable stepping stone on the way to full citizenship. Or would doing something similar for NSPCC be more appropriate? Either way one would be leveraging all the existing machinery for dealing with abuse and not going to the expense of starting over.

I might say that along the way it seems all too likely that there will be all kinds of abuse. The robots will become cheap and there will be lots of them. Lots of them will fall into the hands of the immature or unkind, rather in the way of cute young dogs at Christmas. Robots which will, unthinkingly, be turned off and on or thrown about the room, to their considerable distress.

Clearly lots to do here, but I move to the relationship I might have with a robot which I have commissioned to be like me. At one level it might just be an extension of me, a handy way to be able to get much of the fun of wandering around town without having to bother to get off the sofa. This supposes that the output from the cameras in the robot can be piped into my brain in some convenient way. Doing rather better than just having it come up on my television or telephone. Or a handy place to store information which I might want to retrieve at some point in the future but which I don't want to trust my own brain with. All of which is fairly harmless.

More confusing would be a robot which looked like a robot, rather than me, but which sounded and talked just like me. I would think that a robot could mimic my speech patterns well enough now and it is only a matter of time before it could mimic the sort of things I say, that I put into my speech. A third party might find all this rather confusing: something which sounded like me while clearly not being me. They might be rather cross that I had allowed the something out; a something to be enjoyed in private, not to let wander the streets.

But what happens when the robot starts to have a mind of its own, perhaps a mind of its own which my mind can visit. And here we start to enter dangerous territory. What will happen to my sense of self if there is another version of me knocking about, another version which I can get inside? Or looking at it from the other end, which can get inside me? What about if I am rich enough to buy lots of replicas of myself, all with minds of their own and human rights of their own?

Will my core self - whatever that might have come to mean - start to be peripatetic, sometimes living in my original head and sometimes going to stay in the mechanical one? For a holiday as it were. Or could I decide to make a permanent move to the mechanical head and discard the original? What protocols ought to govern such discarding?

Would the original head grieve if the mechanical one got run over? I think the answer to this one is yes; it seems entirely probably that one would get at least as attached to such a thing as one gets attached to one's dog or to one's train set. Or would the well head be pleased & relieved to have put the sick head out of its misery?

One could go on and on. But for the moment I desist to go back to the word of Rothblatt. Will it all seem as disturbing when I have read what she has got to say?

Reference 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BINA48.

Reference 2: https://www.lifenaut.com/.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=kurzweil.

PS 1: the book was a first in the sense that it came with two dust jackets, one inside the other. I do not recall such a thing ever happening before - so do they all come like that, or is it just mine?

PS 2: is this something like nuclear power, with its enormous potential for both good and evil, but which is not going to be put back in the bag whatever we might think of it? Too many people fascinated by the whole business. Too many people on a quest for ever more knowledge, a quest from which it is an easy jump to the tree of knowledge, the root of all evil, in the Garden of Eden. I did think about adding robotics and other IT activities of a similar sort to my end year list of dooms and glooms, but forgot and got to the magic number of seven without. See http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/doom-and-gloom.html.