Do Westworld robots of the future need legal rights?
By Art Intel
Westworld, an iconic and much-loved series, paints a dystopian scenario of a not too distant future, where robots are ubiquitous and nothing more than play-toys and slaves to humans.
Westworld, A.I. robots–and the future
In a case of life imitating art, a very real future exists where A.I. robots will roam among us, so it had us wondering if robots of the future should be given legal rights.
The purpose of Delos Inc. was to sell elaborately catered packaged vacations based on a video-game concept, in a real-life amusement park. An immersive world, designed to let you interact with and have sexual relationships with hosts, and live out your wildest fantasies.
With few rules or moral hang-ups, you can maim, hurt or even kill the hosts to your heart’s content, knowing that they can never do anything bad to you. They are expendable, just like an old computer or smartphone or bio-wear device, which can be trashed and replaced with the latest model.
On the surface there seems nothing wrong with this, after all, the robots were designed to be mistreated, used and abused.
Perhaps when A.I. robots are everywhere, and they have achieved a certain level of sentience, humans, or robots themselves will demand legal rights. These rights might be designed to protect them from being mistreated, just as humans have rights that protect them.
But does something inanimate, made by mechanical engineers, roboticists, computer scientists and built with materials such as plastic, silicon, metal, and wires even deserve legal rights? Surely in the real world, they would not be necessary.
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People would not mistreat or abuse robots and wouldn’t regard them with the same irreverence as the guests in Westworld towards the hosts…would they?
Recently, Microsoft released an AI-based Twitter chat-bot called ‘Tay’, which was designed to learn and mimic its young audience by using the dialogue of the audience to come up with its own comments.
Tay had to be shut down soon after because after interacting with humans it started spewing out negative and racist comments and even expressing a preference for marijuana!
This was not the bot at fault, but rather it was the people interacting with it that wrote abusive or questionable comments. But innocent programs like a self-learning AI can learn the unhealthy habits of humans and form the same biases as their audience. You can read some of the comments it made here.
Another example of mistreatment towards AI and robots occurred during the introduction of a new sex-robot that was presented at the ‘Arts Electronica Show’ in Austria.
When people saw the robot, they manhandled and touched it ‘inappropriately’ to a point of breaking it. Yes, it is a sex-robot, but it happened without asking permission.
The constant abuse resulted in the unit suffering major damage which had to be sent away for repairs–and this happened at more than one event.
On another occasion, a traveling robot called HitchBOT was sent on a solo journey from Canada. It was destined to travel from Nova Scotia to British Columbia ‘relying solely on the kindness of strangers to get to its final destination’.
However, after just 26 days of its journey, HitchBOT was attacked and murdered after arriving in Philadelphia, having hitched in 19 cars and traveling 10,000 kilometers. The project was later abandoned.
HitchBOT’s personal message can still be found on the official website and reads: “My love for humans will never fade”.
A Japanese robotics company conducted an experiment to see how their robot would be received if it wandered around in a public mall and everything went just fine–until the children arrived. The video captures the hilarious moments of the children reacting to the robot.
At first, they are curious when they see the robot, and have limited interaction until they figure out what it does and noticing it is unaccompanied, decide that it would be more fun to tease it.
They block the robot’s path, then start pushing it around, until finally ganging together to administer a full-blown assault with the intention of taking it down.
In another clip, the robot was only saved by moving next to a child’s mother, which instantly stopped the torture.
Looking at the previous examples, we see that humans have a tendency to attack and abuse robots at any given opportunity, just like the guests treat the hosts in Westworld.
Next: Westworld Season 2, Episode 6 preview
The difference is that in the real world, we could protect robots from these types of incidents by giving rights to robots, just as Sophie the robot got citizenship.
However, don’t think that robots are sitting ducks either! Check out these latest scenes from Atlas, Boston Dynamic’s latest Humanoid Robot and see how in future they will be able to defend themselves…
What do you think? Should robots have rights or not? Add your comments below!
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