Robots Could Some Day Demand Legal Rights 473
Karrde712 writes "According to a study by the British government, as reported by the BBC, robots may some day improve to a level of intelligence where they might be able to demand rights, even 'robo-healthcare'." From the article: "The research was commissioned by the UK Office of Science and Innovation's Horizon Scanning Centre. The 246 summary papers, called the Sigma and Delta scans, were complied by futures researchers, Outsights-Ipsos Mori partnership and the US-based Institute for the Future (IFTF) ... The paper which addresses Robo-rights, titled Utopian dream or rise of the machines? examines the developments in artificial intelligence and how this may impact on law and politics." I'd better get started on my RoboAmerican studies degree.
movie version (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This sounds like a 9th grade essay (Score:3, Informative)
Never's a dangerous word. 100 years ago, there were pundits who were saying that we had reached the limits of technology, that basically every discovery that could be made had been made. Instead, the pace of technological development has only continued to increase.
Right now it's impossible to know whether strong AI will ever be developed. However, the future is a very long time, and, while there are still a lot of holes in our knowledge, everything that we do know about that squishy thing inside our heads currently suggests that consicousness is not so special that it can't be implemented on a machine of human device.
Re:A moot point, but I hope they do (Score:3, Informative)
Um... what? "Robot" is exactly what the Asimo is. Dictionary.com defines "robot" as:
Wikipedia defines it as:
There is no term yet for intelligent robots. (Probably because we don't have any.) The closest word to what you're thinking is "android". Specificially, "android" refers to a human-like robot. So the Asimo is technically an android. However, the connotations on that term often imply human-like intelligence which is why no one is calling it an android.
Re:Another terribly naive assumption.... (Score:4, Informative)
Why does everyone just assume an AI will be superior to us in reasoning ability? We have zero idea how an AI will be implemented.
...uh... because that's how we're going to implement it?
Your comment sounds a little like a 17th century guy that says "how do we know that flying machines will fly better than humans?". The answer is that this is how we're going to build them or otherwise there's no point in building them in the first place. A flying machine that doesn't fly wouldn't be worth producing.
We may not know up front whether what we're trying to do is possible, but if it is, then it'll be what we're setting out to do.
If the first attempts are basically emulating a human brain it might be slow and dumb.
Is that how we built flying machines? There may have been prehistoric attempts at emulating birds, but flying really "took off" (sorry for the pun) when folks stopped trying to make "something like a bird" and started making "something that flies". Airplanes are very, very, different from birds in every conceivable respect -- and they are useful exactly because they're different from birds. If all we wanted was another bird, we could get a mommy bird and a daddy bird and let them build a nest and do the whoopy...
In the same sense, if all we wanted was another human, there's a fine, time-tested method for doing that. The whole point of making an artificial intelligence is that we'd like to do something that is NOT already abundant in nature. Something that can do things humans can not. Why else would we want to do it in the first place?
Re:A moot point, but I hope they do (Score:3, Informative)
Looks like the programmer was having a little fun. (Apparently at your expense.) Jabberwacky is quoting a silly reincarnation of the oldie song, "Goin' to the chapel, and we're... gonna get maaaaarried. [...] Goin', to the Chapel, of Love."