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IN BRIEF

With artificial intelligence technology advancing rapidly, the world must consider how the law should apply to synthetic beings. Experts from the fields of AI, ethics, and government weigh in on the best path forward as we enter the age of self-aware robots.

Robot Rights

Artificially intelligent (AI) robots and automated systems are already transforming society in a host of ways. Cars are creeping closer to Level 5 autonomy, factories are cutting costs by replacing human workers with robots, and AIs are even outperforming people in a number of traditionally white-collar professions.

As these systems advance, so will the potential that they are involved in criminal activity, and right now, no regulations are in place that say how the law should treat super-intelligent synthetic entities. Who takes the blame if a robot causes an accident or is implicated in a crime? What happens if a robot is the victim of a crime? Do self-aware robots deserve rights that are comparable to those given to human beings?

Before we can begin discussing robot rights, we need to articulate exactly what (or who?) counts in this equation, said MIT Media Lab researcher and robot ethics expert Kate Darling in an email correspondence with Futurism. In other words, clearly defined terminology is a prerequisite for any productive conversation regarding robot rights.

“If we want to use legislation to regulate robotic technology, we’re going to need to establish better definitions than what we’re operating with today,” she said. “Even the word ‘robot’ doesn’t have a good universal definition right now.”

Eyes on Today

Now is the time to put these definitions in place because artificially intelligent robots are already in our midst.

Autonomous delivery robots are a common sight in the Estonian capital of Tallinn. As such, the country’s government is being proactive with regards to robot regulations and legal recourse for issues regarding ownership and culpability.

“It all started out from the self-driving car taskforce,” Marten Kaevats, the national digital advisor for the government office of Estonia, told Futurism. “We quite soon discovered that these liability, integrity, and accountability issues are not specific to self-driving cars; they’re general AI questions.”

Kaevats is aware that any discussion of robots and AI can quickly devolve into talk of the singularity and superintelligence, but that’s not the focus right now. “We are trying to work on things that are actually already here,” he explained.

Still, Estonia is looking to put legislation in place that has the flexibility to respond to advances in technology. Kaevats acknowledges that it’s not possible to create regulations that are completely future-proof, but he sees a pressing need for laws that offer certain rights alongside certain liabilities.

As Kaevats pointed out, right now, self-aware artificial intelligences are so far off that there’s no reason to rush into giving robots similar rights to humans. In addition to considering the ethical ramifications of putting machines on par with humans, we need to examine how such laws might be open to abuse before regulations are established.

Production Line Patsy

Estonia isn’t the only place where conversations on robot rights are happening.

The journal Artificial Intelligence and Law recently published an article by University of Bath reader Joanna J. Bryson and academic lawyers Mihailis E. Diamantis and Thomas D. Grant. In the paper, the authors state that proposals for synthetic personhood are already being discussed by the European Union and that the legal framework to do so is already in place. The authors stress the importance of giving artificially intelligent beings obligations as well as protections, so as to remove their potential as a “liability shield.”

But granting them full rights?

When Bryson spoke to Futurism, she warned against the establishment of robot rights, relating the situation to the way the legal personhood of corporations has been abused in the past.

“Corporations are legal persons, but it’s a legal fiction. It would be a similar legal fiction to make AI a legal person,” said Bryson. “What we need to do is roll back, if anything, the overextension of legal personhood — not roll it forward into machines. It doesn’t generate any benefits; it only encourages people to obfuscate their AI.”

Bryson offered up the example of a driverless taxi, which could potentially be made fully independent from its owner or manufacturer, serving as a legally recognized individual, fulfilling its own contracts. This situation could be manipulated to reduce the amount of taxes paid on the vehicle’s earnings by whoever receives the profits.

Kaevats said that this won’t be a problem in Estonia — the country’s digital tax system is proactive enough to track any malicious activity. However, the potential for abuse certainly exists in regions with less technologically advanced tax codes.

Corporations can already use the letter of the law to withhold as much wealth as possible. The use of a synthetic person as a “fall guy” for illicit activity isn’t outside the realm of possibility, and giving a robot rights could serve to emancipate them from conventional ownership. At that point, the entity is the ultimate independent contractor, with companies able to absolve themselves of wrongdoing even if they instructed the machine to behave in the illegal way.

Legislation could certainly be written up that avoids these pitfalls, though, so policy makers just need to be sure that any rights given to synthetic entities don’t include loopholes that can be abused.

Moral Dilemma

In the far more distant future, we’ll need to consider the issue of self-aware robots. How should we tackle synthetic personhood for those entities?

“If we discover that there are certain capacities that we want to create in artificial intelligence, and once you create those, you spontaneously get these cognitive features that warrant personhood, we’ll have to have this discussion about how similar they are to the human consciousness,” James Hughes, executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, told Futurism.

Traditionally, under the law, you’re either a person or you are property.

The creation of this level of technology won’t be happening anytime soon, if it happens at all, but its potential raises some thorny issues about our obligation to synthetic beings and the evolving nature of personhood.

“Traditionally, under the law, you’re either a person or you are property — and the problem with being property is that you have no rights,” bioethicist and attorney-at-law Linda McDonald-Glenn told Futurism. “In the past, we’ve made some pretty awful mistakes.”

According to Hughes, this situation calls for a test that determines whether or not a synthetic person is self-aware. In the meantime, Estonia has found a fairly simple way to determine the rights of their robots. Instead of using technology as the defining factor, the nation will grant rights based on registration under the mythologically inspired Kratt law.

Estonian folklore states that the Kratt is an inanimate object brought to life, just as artificial intelligence can give a machine the cognitive abilities it needs to complete a particular task. The Kratt law will determine what level of sophistication a robot needs to possess in order to be considered its own legal entity.

“This is what we want our governments to do,” said Bryson, praising European efforts to put well-thought-out legislation in place. “This is what governments are for and what law is for.”

In many ways, AI technology is still very young, but there’s no better time than now to start thinking about the legal and ethical implications of its usage.

We have reached a turning point in society. According to renowned theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, the next 100 years of science will determine whether we perish or thrive. Will we remain a Type 0 civilization, or will we advance and make our way into the stars?

Experts assert that, as a civilization grows larger and becomes more advanced, its energy demands will increase rapidly due to its population growth and the energy requirements of its various machines. With this in mind, the Kardashev scale was developed as a way of measuring a civilization’s technological advancement based upon how much usable energy it has at its disposal (this was originally just tied to energy available for communications, but has since been expanded).

MEET THE KARDASHEV SCALE

Credit: Chris Cold

The scale was originally designed in 1964 by the Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev (who was looking for signs of extraterrestrial life within cosmic signals). It has 3 base classes, each with an energy disposal level: Type I (10¹⁶W), Type II (10²⁶W), and Type III (10³⁶W). Other astronomers have extended the scale to Type IV (10⁴⁶W) and Type V (the energy available to this kind of civilization would equal that of all energy available in not just our universe, but in all universes and in all time-lines). These additions consider both energy access as well as the amount of knowledge the civilizations have access to.

First, it is important to note that the human race is not even on this scale yet. Since we still sustain our energy needs from dead plants and animals, here on Earth, we are a lowly Type 0 civilization (and we have a LONG way to go before being promoted to a type I civilization). Kaku tends to believe that, all things taken into consideration, we will reach Type I in 100 – 200 years time. But what does each of these categories actually stand for in literal terms?

A Type I designation is a given to species who have been able to harness all the energy that is available from a neighboring star, gathering and storing it to meet the energy demands of a growing population. This means that we would need to boost our current energy production over 100,000 times to reach this status. However, being able to harness all Earth’s energy would also mean that we could have control over all natural forces. Human beings could control volcanoes, the weather, and even earthquakes! (At least, that is the idea.) These kinds of feats are hard to believe, but compared to the advances that may still be to come, these are just basic and primitive levels of control (it’s absolutely nothing compared to the capabilities of societies with higher rankings).

A Dyson Sphere (Credit: Slawek Wojtowicz)

The next step up – a Type II civilization – can harness the power of their entire star (not merely transforming starlight into energy, but controlling the star). Several methods for this have been proposed. The most popular of which is the hypothetical ‘Dyson Sphere.’ This device, if you want to call it that, would encompass every single inch of the star, gathering most (if not all) of its energy output and transferring it to a planet for later use. Alternatively, if fusion power (the mechanism that powers stars) had been mastered by the race, a reactor on a truly immense scale could be used to satisfy their needs. Nearby gas giants can be utilized for their hydrogen, slowly drained of life by an orbiting reactor.

What would this much energy mean for a species? Well, nothing known to science could wipe out a Type II civilization. Take, for instance, if humans survived long enough to reach this status, and a moon sized object entered our solar system on a collision course with our little blue planet–we’d have the ability to vaporize it out of existence. Or if we had time, we could move our planet out of the way, completely dodging it. But let’s say we didn’t want to move Earth… are there any other options? Well yes, because we’d have the capability to move Jupiter, or another planet of our choice, into the way – pretty cool, right?

A Cyborg (Credit: Justin Lee)

So we’ve gone from having control over a planet, to a star, which has resulted in us harboring enough “disposable” energy to essentially make our civilization immune to extinction. But now, onto Type III, where a species then becomes galactic traversers with knowledge of everything having to do with energy, resulting in them becoming a master race. In terms of humans, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution – both biological and mechanical – may result in the inhabitants of this type III civilization being incredibly different from the human race as we know it. These may be cyborgs (or cybernetic organism, beings both biological and robotic), with the descendants of regular humans being a sub-species among the now-highly advanced society. These wholly biological humans would likely be seen as being disabled, inferior, or unevolved by their cybernetic counterparts.

At this stage, we would have developed colonies of robots that are capable of ‘self replication’; their population may increase into the millions as they spread out across the galaxy, colonizing star after star. And these being might build Dyson Spheres to encapsulate each one, creating a huge network that would carry energy back to the home planet. But stretching over the galaxy in such a manner would face several problems; namely, the species would be constrained by the laws of physics. Particularly, light-speed travel. That is, unless they develop a working warp drive, or use that immaculate energy cache to master wormhole teleportation (two things that remain theoretical for the time being), they can only get so far.

An artist rendering of such a civilization (Credit: Sid Meier’s Civilization IV)

Kardashev believed a Type IV civilization was ‘too’ advanced and didn’t go beyond Type III on his scale. He thought that, surely, this would be the extent of any species’ ability. Many think so, but a few believe there is a further level that could be achieved. (I mean, surely there is a limit?) Type IV civilizations would almost be able to harness the energy content of the entire universe and with that, they could traverse the accelerating expansion of space (furthermore, advance races of these species may live inside supermassive black holes). To previous methods of generating energy, these kinds of feats are considered impossible. A Type IV civilization would need to tap into energy sources unknown to us using strange, or currently unknown, laws of physics.

Type V. Yes, Type V might just be the next possible advancement to such a civilization. Here beings would be like gods, having the knowledge to manipulate the universe as they please. Now, as I said, humans are a very, very long way from ever reaching anything like this. But it’s not to say that it cannot be achieved as long as we take care of Earth and each other. To do so, the first step is to preserve our tiny home, extinguish war, and continue to support scientific advances and discoveries.