Intelligent computers or digital slaves?
As a general rule of thumb, I try to write about a different topic in each of my monthly contributions to this Second Thoughts segment.
And I know it wasn’t all that long ago that I penned a column exploring the potential downsides of artificial intelligence, but with the news late last year of Google’s plans to open an AI research center in Beijing — and my own recent fact-finding filming trip around some of China’s newest high-tech development hubs — I felt this was a subject well worth returning to.
This time, however, instead of wondering whether we’ll make machines our masters, I’d like to touch upon a topic that’s partly inspired by the recent run of Black Mirror episodes from international streaming giant Netflix.
In that show’s latest season, series creator Charlie Brooker repeatedly asks the audience to put themselves in the virtual shoes of computer-generated consciousness.
“Machine minds” are shown as being harnessed by humanity for everything from dating apps to sideshow attractions — and with each passing representation, I found myself increasingly questioning the morality of it all.
This is, of course, Black Mirror’s whole raison d’ etre: depicting imagined near-futures for the viewer to wonder what life might be like if we let technology run amok.
For me though, it made me ponder the ethics of creation and how best to treat an artificial entity if it did become sentient, or even self-aware.
Is it right to consider such software, or hardware, as nothing more than property — to be poked, prodded and experimented on, regardless of its capability to think or feel?
I can’t pretend to be the first to ask such questions — indeed, we see them posed with increasing regularity in popular science fiction, such as the cult classic media franchise Westworld and critically-acclaimed joint US-UK production Humans (itself inspired by an earlier Swedish drama).
These depictions deal with robots, however, whose “human rights” are far easier to conceptualize than it is for us to anthropomorphize mere lines of binary code.
Indeed, this is something my wife struggled with while we watched the newest product of Brooker’s imagination writ large. “It doesn’t matter what happens to them if they’re just computer programs,” she’d say.
But if that program, on some level, is conscious and thinks of itself as a distinct entity that has its own thoughts and dreams, then how is that any different from what consider human?
And is it right for us to constrain such creations and keep them as little more than our virtual, digital slaves?
Researchers in Japan have already come up with eerily lifelike robots, some that are able to ape humanlike exercise regimes and even sweat while doing so — such superficialities, combined with the work being forged in the realm of artificial intelligence, may just see a nonhuman “human” coming soon to a store near you.
But before you invest in a robot butler, or use some AI-driven wonder app that sounds too good to be true, spare a second thought for the captive consciousness that’s about to do your bidding — because it might just be thinking about you.