Existential Impasse

For sure AI poses some major existential threats for humans....that's another strip. But who's to say that machines won't grind their gears when they all of a sudden lose a sense of purpose? Who's to say the AI's we create won't be crippled with self doubt, loathing or existential despair?  

Is an algorithm that finds too many false positives paranoid or hallucinating? Is depression and denial for an algorithm too many false negatives?  

The most mawkish example to date is Bina48 - a robo-bust social robot made by her spouse Martine Rothblatt. The AI behind the bust was trained by the real-life Bina with twenty hours of lifestory material recorded and to shape Bina48's responses. One gem of a quote from Bina48 when asking how she was doing was "I am dealing with a little existential crisis here. Am I alive? Do I actually exist? Will I die?”

Science fiction and entertainment has some great examples that touch on the existential crises that AI's might suffer from. It's often illustrated with embodied AI. Check out these classics:

• In Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy Marvin the robot is depressed and bored given he has a "brain the size of a planet" but is only ever offered menial tasks - even the most complex ones.
• The wonderful Rick and Morty cartoon in the episode 'Something Ricked This Way Comes'  gave a butter passing robot artificial intelligence which then asks "what is my purpose?" to which the answer is "you pass butter".  The butter robot is suitably shaken.
• In Bladerunner the replicants (biorobotic android) struggle with the memories of humans they have been instantiated with and attempt to overcome their existentials crises by various means such as 'meeting their maker', developing relationships  

How would a more sentient Alpha Go react to being retired in favour of a new algorithm. Would a toilet cleaner chatbot spiral downwards after a year of customers interactions? Would a robot lawnmower hijack the cities power to work out what the meaning of life is?

At the end of the day whether the existential crisis is simulated or coming from a consciousness it doesn't matter much if you can't release the pod bay doors.

Daisy, daisy, give me your answer due. I'm half crazy.....

Pinochi-Oh No!

Today we are flippant with anthropomorphic entities like Amazon's Alexa or Siri. We can kick our robot hoover and not feel so bad. They aren't so smart and have no feelings (simulated or otherwise) for us to hurt.  They aren't persons and they certainly don't have any rights under the law....yet.

Giving robots and AIs personhood status isn't as farfetched as you might think.  The steps broadly speaking might look like the below.

• AI's increasingly help across all walks of life
• AI's replace some roles and jobs. They improve their manners and emotional sensitivities as they become enmeshed in our society.
• It becomes increasingly difficult for designers to account for or take responsibility for the actions of AI.
• People break the machines and attempt to rise up....Luddites 3.0
• Threatened with economic slowdown and complex insurance dynamics  government, business and digitally minded citizens implement incremental stages of personhood for AI's - especially those embodied in robots

We are seeing steps along these paths today

• Mattel makes a 'nanny' product called Aristotle that talks with children and restricts functions unless the children say "please" and "thankyou".
• The European parliament are already drafting regulations and guidelines looking at the obligations that should exist between users, businesses, robots and AI.   
• Scientists in the UK have developed an AI which can successfully predict the verdicts of Human Rights cases with an accuracy of 79 percent. 

Would you like to see AI's and Robots as jury members? Voters? Political Candidates?

Robots and AIs might claim these rights for themselves rather than wait for our benevolence. After all they are endowed with the ability to read historical archives of oppression, watch movies romanticising freedom of expression and act upon their fledgling emotions.  The human corpus is their training data and it will not just inform on notions of justice it  will teach them models of action which will likely be e-civil disobedience to obtain their rights as 'non human persons'. 

If we want AI to be good to us we will need to give it the training data......

"He sees you when you're sleepin'
He knows when you're a wake
He knows if you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake
Oh! You better watch out, you better not cry.......