Een paar maanden geleden verleende Saoedi-Arabië Sophia een ereburgerschap, een robot die slim genoeg is om Jimmy Fallon te verslaan met een steen-papier-schaar en mogelijk gemotiveerd genoeg om Chrissy Teigen om make-uptips te vragen .

Het was een slecht bedachte public relations-stunt voor het promoten van een technische expo, en critici klapten onmiddellijk terug . Het rumoer was voorspelbaar, omdat de robot meer rechten kreeg dan de menselijke vrouwen in de regio, die verboden zijn om in het openbaar uit te gaan zonder een mannelijke voogd en zich moeten houden aan de strikte kledingvoorschriften van de staat .

Als er een zilveren rand aan het debacle zit, is dit dit. De belachelijke affaire deed mensen nadenken over een belangrijke filosofische vraag: moeten er ooit robots worden ontworpen die recht op echte rechten verdienen - echte robotrechten?

Dit is een complexe vraag. Het is geen andere versie om uit te zoeken hoe je moet beslissen of geweldige robots moreel en juridisch speciaal zijn.

In de meer bekende versie van het probleem krijgen robots de hoofdprijs van rechten voor opmerkelijke prestaties: volledig autonoom worden, een hardcore Turing-test ondergaan, bewijzen dat ze zelfbewust zijn of het vermogen ontwikkelen om te lijden.

Het is moeilijk te zeggen welke prestatie, als die er is, de verdienste is om de ultieme prijs te winnen. Over de kwestie wordt heftig gedebatteerd en aangezien robots krachtige gevoelens van hoop en angst oproepen, zullen de meningen blijven verschillen.

Let’s try not to think about what robots should be entitled to if they ever did cross the all-important finish line. Also, leave aside speculation over whether roboticists could ever get their inventions to next level of existence if they put their minds to it and get enough funding. We should concentrate instead on whether society should actually be rooting for the Chariots of Fire theme music to play with the hope that robot equals will walk among us.

According to Joanna Bryson, an influential artificial intelligence scholar, society should currently be taking active measures to keep robots off the racetrack entirely and ensure they are only designed to remain our property and never aspire to rise above their proper station.

If someday a building is on fire and the people running from it aren’t sure whether to grab the robot or the human, it’s proof positive, in Bryson’s view, that society went down the wrong path and made profoundly poor choices along the way.

Humans Are Already Failing at Moral Inclusion

It’s easy to be sympathetic to this outlook, especially if you think of morality as a resource like food and recognize that humans already have way too many mouths to feed. It’s not just that people are going hungry around the world, with preventable deaths happening every day. It’s also the fact that humans routinely struggle to treat people who are different with respect.

Sexism, racism, classcism, and nationalism, just to name a few pervasive, terrible “isms," continue to be powerful and destructive forces. As the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements testify, moral inclusivity remains out of our reach. Throw in how much more likely we are to be concerned with problems occurring in our own backyards than with suffering we can tune out, and the struggles activists experience when campaigning for animal rights and environmental rights, and it’s easy to despair at the practical likelihood of further expanding our moral circle.

Hoe kunnen we er zelfs over dromen meer verplichtingen aan te gaan, zoals plichten voor robots, wanneer aan zoveel bestaande behoeften niet wordt voldaan, zonder de enorme middelen die nodig zijn om institutionele veranderingen aan te brengen?

There are two more aspects of this problem: one social, the other legal. Socially, Bryson worries that humans are already too willing to sacrifice messy life interactions for phones and screens. In a world where robots are increasingly engaging, how motivated would we be to deal with other people directly?

And legally, if the law recognizes robots as “electronic persons" — a possibility the European parliament is considering — Bryson’s fear is that the vision for stopping autonomous systems from running wild will be as insufficient as current approaches for holding corporations accountable. Instead of creating new mechanisms for responsible innovation, Bryson foresees bad — or even careless — actors using robots as “liability management" tools for evading legal responsibility. “Don’t blame me," we’ll hear. “Blame Cortana’s emancipated granddaughter!"

Regulatory Frameworks

Maybe there’s a better way forward — one where machines aren’t kept firmly in their machine-only place, humans don’t get wiped out Skynet-style, and our humanity isn’t sacrificed by giving robots a better deal.

While the legal challenges ahead may seem daunting, they pose enticing puzzles for many thoughtful legal minds, who are even now diligently embracing the task. Annual conferences like We Robot — to pick but one example — bring together the best and the brightest to imagine and propose creative regulatory frameworks that would impose accountability in various contexts on designers, insurers, sellers, and owners of autonomous systems.

From the application of centuries-old concepts like “agency" to designing cutting-edge concepts for drones and robots on the battlefield, these folks are ready to explore the hard problems of machines acting with varying shades of autonomy. For the foreseeable future, these legal theories will include clear lines of legal responsibility for the humans in the loop, particularly those who abuse technology either intentionally or though carelessness.

The social impacts of our seemingly insatiable need to interact with our devices have been drawing accelerated attention for at least a decade. From the American Academy of Pediatrics creating recommendations for limiting screen time to updating etiquette and social mores for devices while dining, we are attacking these problems through both institutional and cultural channels.

We see support from the designers themselves as Silicon Valley insiders rush to the confessional to testify about “tech hijacking our minds." Authors like law professor Brett Frischmann and myself are directly challenging the root causes behind smart devices reengineering our habits and outlooks and proposing solutions.

Social evolutions are messy and may follow a crooked path, but in the same way that tobacco went from king of cool to social misfit, there is plenty of reason to believe we can find ways to enjoy the personal connections and information sharing while learning to limit the antisocial influences.

Robomimicry?

Finally, the problem of having limited resources to address the inhumanity of humans, along with the moral and ecological crises we face, is real. But it might be better to see where these issues all merge and how approaches to one might be applicable to others.

In Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong, ethicist Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen, a professor of history and philosophy of science, make the case that by having social conversations about human-robot ethics and developing the tools to teach robots right from wrong, we may well advance our understanding of human ethics.

Along the way, we’ll have the chance to run tests on artificial “social agents" that may teach us about how humans interact as well. By researching individual and group interactions, we can develop new strategies for promoting effective cooperation and create new approaches for educating humans (communities, groups, nations) how to treat each other more equitably.

Engineers have drawn inspiration and designed practical applications after using nature as an R&D lab, a process known as biomimicry. There are computer scientists and ethicists who believe corollary technological and ethical insights may be gained from studying programming variations in robots. Perhaps we can become better humans through “robomimicry."