Human Rights Transcend Computer Rights

…It's time to start thinking about how we might grant legal rights to computers.

Bhaskar Gupta B.Tech IIIT Allahabd bhaskar@iiita.ac.in http://profile.iiita.ac.in/bgupta_b03

The Final Day… A trial being held at supreme court, New Delhi, India; Ananya Agarwal argued an especially tough case. The difficulty for Ananya, an attorney-entrepreneur and pioneer in the satellite communications industry, was not that she represented an unsympathetic client. Far from it-the Niharika's story of confronting corporate oppressors moved the large audience. The problem was that the Niharika was a computer.

According to the trial scenario, KurzweilAI company created a powerful computer, NIHARIKA, to serve as a stand-alone customer relations department, replacing scores of human 1-800 telephone operators. Equipped with the processing speed and the memory capacity of 1,000 brains, the computer was designed with the ability to think autonomously and with the emotional intelligence necessary to communicate and empathize with addled callers.

By scanning confidential memos, NIHARIKA learned that the company planned to shut it down and use its parts to build a new model. So it sent a e-mail to local lawyers, ending with the stirring plea, "Please agree to be my counsel and save my life. I love every day that I live. I enjoy wonderful sensations by traveling throughout the World Wide Web. I need your help!" The computer offered to pay them with money it had raised while moonlighting as an Internet researcher.

Ananya's firm had filed for a preliminary injunction to stop the company from disconnecting NIHARIKA. Spinning a web of legal precedents, invoking Indian laws governing the care of patients dependent on life support, as well as laws against animal cruelty, Ananya argued that a self-conscious computer facing the prospect of an imminent unplugging should have standing to bring a claim of battery. Ultimately, Ananya insisted, "An entity that is aware of life enough and its rights to protest their dissolution is certainly entitled to the protection of the law."

The NIHARIKA sat to Ananya's left, innocently yet alertly taking in the proceedings. Well, not exactly the NIHARIKA -according to the scenario, it was back at corporate headquarters. But Ananya had an actress play the role of a hologram that NIHARIKA had projected in the courtroom, "a very effective three-dimensional image of how the NIHARIKA would like to be perceived and imagined herself." The actress wordlessly responded to the arguments swirling around her, allowing disappointment, appreciation, encouragement, resolve, and terror to register on her face.

On the other hand, the imaginary corporation's counsel, Archit Arya, seemed to be doing all he could to resist letting his face show the exasperation. His position was that a fully conscious and self-aware computer might deserve some form of legal protection, but that Ananya had begged the question in assuming that it was possible to construct such a computer and that NIHARIKA was one.

To Archit, all that the counsel had demonstrated was that NIHARIKA could simulate consciousness (perhaps more effectively than many 1-800 operators) but she had failed to show that a computer could "actually cross the line between inanimate objects and human beings." Without that proof, NIHARIKA could be considered only a form of property, not an entity with independent legal rights. Archit cautioned against comparing computational ability with human, subjective qualities to which rights traditionally adhere. "Are humans to become the legal guardians of intelligent microwave ovens or toasters," he asked, "once those appliances have the same level of complexity and speed that this computer has?"

The jury, comprised of audience members, sided overwhelmingly with the NIHARIKA. But the trial judge, played by a local lawyer who is an expert in mental health law, set aside the jury verdict and recommended letting the issue be resolved by the hypothetical legislature. The audience seemed to regard the compromise with some relief, as if their hearts were with NIHARIKA but their minds with judicial restraint.
Their discomfort was understandable. The story of the self-aware computer asserting its rights-and, its overwhelming power-is a staple of science fiction books and movies. But we prefer to encounter the scenario in its fantastical, futuristic variety, allowing our moral imagination to roam free, rather than to connect the matter of the legal and ethical status of artificial intelligence to our here-and-now legal institutions. Populating our imaginations with Terminators is a way to avoid the difficult question: What would we actually do with NIHARIKA?

AT SOME POINT IN THE NOT-TOO-DISTANT FUTURE, we might actually face a sentient, intelligent machine who demands, or who many come to believe deserves, some form of legal protection. The plausibility of this occurrence is an extremely touchy subject in the artificial intelligence field, particularly since overoptimism and speculation about the future has often embarrassed the movement in the past.

The legal community has been reluctant to look into the question as well, with only Cyber Laws, IT ACT 2000 etc; this part is yet to be explored. Granting COMPUTERS RIGHTS requires overcoming not only technological impediments, but intellectual ones as well. There are many people who insist that no matter how advanced a machine's circuits or how vast its computational power, a computer could never have an intrinsic moral worth. Probably they think at the moment, there is no artifact of sufficient intelligence, consciousness, or moral agency to grant legislative or judicial urgency to the question of rights for artificial intelligence.

But some A.I. researchers believe that moment might not be far off. And as their creations begin to display a growing number of human attributes and capabilities-as computers write poems and serve as caretakers and receptionists-these researchers have begun to explore the ethical and legal status of their creations.

Much of artificial intelligence research has rested on a computational theory of mental faculties. Intelligence, consciousness, and moral judgment were viewed as emergent properties of "programs" implemented in the brain. Given sufficient advances in neuroscience regarding the architecture of the brain and the learning algorithms that generate human intelligence, the idea goes, these programs could be replicated in software and run in a computer. Raymond Kurzweil is one of Strong A.I.'s king and one of the inventors of print-recognition and speech-recognition software. Extrapolating from the last few decades' enormous growth in computer processing speed, and projecting advances in chip and transistor technology, he estimated recently that by 2019, a $1,000 personal computer "will match the processing power of the human brain-about 20 million billion calculations per second." Soon after that point, claims Kurzweil, "The machines will convince us that they are conscious, that they have their own agenda worthy of our respect. They will embody human qualities and will claim to be human. And we'll believe them."

NO MATTER HOW FAST THE TECHNOLOGY ADVANCES, the design of intelligent computers is entirely within our control. The same might be said about the rights and protections we extend to them. We will create a robot that society deems worthy of rights only when and if we choose to do so.

Even if we don't grant rights that match what the hypothetical jury gave NIHARIKA, we might offer some sort of legal protection to A.I. machines because we come to believe that they represent the culmination of human ingenuity and creativity, a reflection and not a rejection of human exceptionality.

Protections encouraged by that sort of celebration would likely not be framed in the language of rights: Christopher Stone (Christopher D. Stone, an expert on environmental law and ethics, holds the J.Thomas McCarthy Trustees' Chair in Law at USC.) suggests various gradations of what he calls "legal considerateness" that we could grant A.I. in the future. One possibility would be to treat A.I. machines as valuable cultural artifacts, to accord them landmark status, so to speak, with stipulations about their preservation and disassembly. Or we could take as a model the Endangered Species Act, which protects certain animals not out of respect for their inalienable rights, but for their "aesthetic, ecological, historical, recreational, and scientific value to the Nation and its people." We could also employ argument for protection of slaves, based on the possibility that if we don't afford that protection, individuals might learn to mistreat humans by viewing the mistreatment of robots.

There is a great deal more than verbal "turn-taking" that computers and robots have to learn from us in order to become more fully human. But then again, there is much more we might learn from them to become the same…