CAN A ROBOT’S SOVEREIGN CITIZENSHIP BE REVOKED?
Artificially Intelligent robots are so advanced that they can joke about destroying humanity!
Hold on, don’t panic. That’s not true at all. Although if you watched some of the marketing material coming out of certain robotic research companies, you would be misled into believing that is the case.
Most people have by now seen videos or read about robots that appear to have sentient consciousness; the ability to be aware of their own existence, generate and articulate their own original thought, even contemplate the Divine. This ability to have conscious awareness is otherwise referred to as General Artificial Intelligence.
Could such machines take our jobs? Could they supersede humanity? Could they harm it?
In late 2017, Hanson Robotics' “Sophia” robot made international headlines, even gaining sovereign citizenship from a country that doesn’t easily grant it, because audiences believed that she was so sophisticated that she could generate and articulate original thoughts of her own. She expressed feelings during her conversations; humour, remorse, deep contemplation...suggesting she was capable of such human characteristics. Her interviews with celebrities & talk show hosts are all over YouTube. Check them out.
Many people seem to feel that if she could contemplate her own existence, as her interviews suggested, then she could certainly contemplate ours. What then? Could an army of anthropomorphised artificially intelligent robots, one day flick a switch and decide to enslave mankind?
The answer is no. General A.I. doesn't exist. We haven’t created it. We don't even know how to create it yet. Today's artificial intelligence is nowhere near that state of sophistication, but that’s not the point of this article.
Companies that are out there subtly implying that they have developed General A.I. in the form of robots capable of sentient consciousness, are just being deceitful. They're cleverly and knowingly fooling the uninitiated public, into believing that they have accomplished levels of sophisticated A.I. development that even the tech titans like Google and Apple haven't yet achieved.
It's unethical. It's wrong. It's all snake oil.
Sophia doesn't think. She doesn't feel. She simply churns through a cleverly choreographed dialog with an interviewer...that's it. She uses natural language processing (NLP) tools for voice recognition and generation, combined with pre-programmed responses to the interviewer's scripted questions and comments. NLP is a form of narrow A.I. that specifically enables computers to learn to understand and respond to conversation, using natural languages like English or Spanish, but that does not make for General A.I. There's no sentient consciousness involved, despite disingenuously creepy videos like this implying the contrary.
I believe that organisations cannot be allowed to irresponsibly propagate false messages for their marketing purposes. In a twist of irony, Facebook's head of A.I. called out Sophia as ‘complete bullshit’ in January of this year, and a spat ensued.
I’m not alone. There are plenty of A.I. industry participants calling for the establishment of ethical regulations governing the development of artificial intelligence, including thought leadership giants like Elon Musk and the late Stephen Hawking.
Sophia, like many other eye-catching robots, are nothing more than impressive applications of narrow artificial intelligence, manifested in physical form through the use of robotic engineering. Sentient robotic beings with a mind of their own, they are not!
Can a robot’s sovereign citizenship be revoked?