What Ex Machina's Alex Garland Gets Wrong About Artificial Intelligence

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Other Writing
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April 9, 2015

Ex Machina opens this weekend. Its director, Alex Garland of 28 Days Later acclaim, appeared on Marketplace today to discuss the role of artificial intelligence in the film. Garland made a claim that is common but, in my view, flawed: “If you had a machine that said ‘I don’t want you to switch me off,’” he told Ben Johnson, “and you have reason to believe it was telling the truth, you then pretty much immediately have to give it all of the ethical rights and considerations that we give each other.”

We cannot grant AI the full set of rights that apply to humans, at least not without radical changes to our laws, norms, and institutions. Society is set up for people—people who are varied, yes, but who share a set of physical, mental, and perhaps spiritual characteristics that law and ethics more or less assume and rely upon.

Consider what I call the Copy or Vote Paradox, a thought experiment which places two fundamental rights next to one another and asks us which we would like to grant to AI, since we cannot grant both. I lay out the Paradox in my recent paper Robotics and the Lessons of Cyberlaw:

Imagine, with [Duke law professor] James Boyle, that an artificial intelligence announces it has achieved self-awareness, a claim no one seems able to discredit. Boyle examines the difficulty we might face in shutting this system down and explores some sensible arguments on either side. But why stop there? Say the intelligence has also read Skinner v. Oklahoma, a Supreme Court case that characterizes the right to procreate as “one of the basic civil rights of man.” The machine claims the right to make copies of itself (the only way it knows to replicate). These copies believe they should count for purposes of representation in Congress and, eventually, they demand a pathway to suffrage. Of course, conferring such rights to beings capable of indefinitely self-copying would overwhelm our system of governance. Which right do we take away from this sentient entity, then, the fundamental right to copy, or the deep, democratic right to participate?

Read the full piece at Forbes