Robot Rules

Regulating Artificial Intelligence

Jacob Turner

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319962351
• Topic: Technologie et ingénierie
• Subtopic: Ingénierie

This book explains why AI is unique, what legal and ethical problems it could cause, and how we can address them. It argues that AI is unlike any other previous technology, owing to its ability to take decisions independently and unpredictably. This gives rise to three issues: responsibility --who is liable if AI causes harm; rights --the disputed moral and pragmatic grounds for granting AI legal personality; and the ethics surrounding the decision-making of AI. The book suggests that in order to address these questions we need to develop new institutions and regulations on a cross-industry and international level. Incorporating clear explanations of complex topics, Robot Rules will appeal to a multi-disciplinary audience, from those with an interest in law, politics and philosophy, to computer programming, engineering and neuroscience.

© The Author(s) 2019

Jacob TurnerRobot Rules https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96235-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Jacob Turner¹

(1)

Fountain Court Chambers, London, UK

Jacob Turner

End Abstract

He had not a minute more to lose. He pulled the axe quite out, swung it with both arms, scarcely conscious of himself, and almost without effort, almost mechanically, brought the blunt side down on her head. He seemed not to use his own strength in this. But as soon as he had once brought the axe down, his strength returned to him…. Then he dealt her another and another blow with the blunt side and on the same spot. The blood gushed as from an overturned glass, the body fell back. He stepped back, let it fall, and at once bent over her face; she was dead.¹

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

Our immediate reaction is emotional: anger, horror, disgust. And then reason sets in. A crime has been committed. A punishment must follow.

Now imagine the perpetrator is not a human, but a robot. Does your response change? What if the victim is another robot? How should society, and the legal system, react?

For millennia, laws have ordered society, kept people safe and promoted commerce and prosperity. But until now, laws have only had one subject: humans. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) presents novel issues for which current legal systems are only partially equipped. Who or what should be liable if an intelligent machine harms a person or property? Is it ever wrong to damage or destroy a robot? Can AI be made to follow any moral rules?

The best-known answers to any of these questions are Isaac Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, from 1942:

First: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second: A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Fourth: A robot may not harm humanity or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.²

But Asimov’s rules were never meant to serve as a blueprint for humanity’s actual interaction with AI. Far from it, they were written as science fiction and were always intended to lead to problems. Asimov himself said: “These laws are sufficiently ambiguous so that I can write story after story in which something strange happens, in which the robots don’t behave properly, in which the robots become positively dangerous”.³ Although they are simple and superficially attractive, it is easy to conceive of situations in which Asimov’s Laws are inadequate. They do not say what a robot should do if it is given contradictory orders by different humans. Nor do they account for orders which are iniquitous but fall short of requiring a robot to harm humans, such as commanding a robot to steal. They are hardly a complete code for managing our relationship with AI.

This book provides a roadmap for a new set of regulations, asking not just what the rules should be but—more importantly—who should shape them and how can they be upheld.

There is much fear and confusion surrounding AI and other developments in computing. A lot has already been written on near-term problems including data privacy and technological unemployment.⁴ Many writers have also speculated about events in the distant future, such as an AI apocalypse at one extreme,⁵ or a time when AI will bring a new age of peace and prosperity, at the other.⁶ All these matters are important, but they are not the focus of this book. The discussion here is not about robots taking our jobs, or taking over the world. Our aim is to set out how humanity and AI can coexist.

1 Origins of AI

Modern AI research began on a summer programme at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, in 1956, when a group of academics and students set out to explore how machines could intelligently think.⁷ However, the idea of AI goes back much further.⁸ The creation of intelligent beings from inanimate materials can be traced to the very earliest stories known to humanity. Ancient Sumerian creation myths speak of a servant for the Gods being created from clay and blood.⁹ In Chinese mythology, the Goddess Nüwa made mankind from the yellow earth.¹⁰ The Judeo-Christian Bible and the Quran have words to similar effect: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”.¹¹ In one sense, humans were really the first AI.

In literature and the arts, the idea of technology being used to create sentient assistants for humans or Gods has been around for thousands of years. In Homer’s Iliad, which dates to around the eighth century BC, Hephaestus the blacksmith is “assisted by servant maids that he had made from gold to look like women”.¹² In Eastern European Jewish folklore, there are tales of a rabbi in sixteenth century Prague who created the Golem, a giant human-like figure made from clay, in order to defend his ghetto from anti-Semitic pogroms.¹³ In the nineteenth century, Frankenstein’s monster brought to the popular imagination the dangers of humans attempting to create or recreate, intelligence through science and technology. In the twentieth century, ever since the term “robot” was popularised by Karel Čapek’s screenplay Rossum’s Universal Robots,¹⁴ there have been many examples of AI in films, television and other media forms. But now for the first time in human history, these concepts are no longer limited to the pages of books or the imagination of storytellers.

Today, many of our impressions of AI come from science fiction and involve anthropomorphic manifestations that are either friendly or, more usually, unfriendly. These might include the bumbling C-3PO from Star Wars, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s noble Terminator or the demonic HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

On the one hand, these humanoid representations of AI constitute a simplified caricature—something to which people can easily relate, but which bears little resemblance to AI technology as it stands. On the other hand, they represent a paradigm which has influenced and shaped AI as successive generations of programmers are inspired to attempt to recreate versions of entities from books, films and other media. In the field of AI, first science then life imitates art. In 2017, Neuralink, a company backed by serial technology entrepreneur Elon Musk, announced that it was developing a “neural lace” interface between human brain tissue and artificial processors.¹⁵ Neural lace is—by Musk’s own admission—heavily influenced by the writings of science fiction authors including in particular the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks.¹⁶ Technologists have taken inspiration from stories found in faith as well as popular culture: Robert M. Geraci argues that, “[t]o understand robots, we must understand how the history of religion and the history of science have twined around each other, quite often working towards the same ends and quite often influencing another’s methods and objectives”.¹⁷

Although popular culture and religion have helped to shape the development of AI, these portrayals have also given rise to a misleading impression of AI in the minds of many people. The idea of AI as only meaning humanoid robots which look, sound and think like us, is mistaken. Such conceptions of AI make its advent appear to be distant, given that no technology at present comes remotely close to resembling the type of human-level functionality made familiar by science fiction.

The lack of a universal definition for AI means that those attempting to discuss it may end up speaking at cross-purposes. Therefore, before it is possible to demonstrate the spreading influence of AI or the need for legal controls, we must first set out what we mean by this term.

2 Narrow and General AI

It is helpful at the outset to distinguish two classifications for AI: narrow and general.¹⁸ Narrow (sometimes referred to as “weak”) AI denotes the ability of a system to achieve a certain stipulated goal or set of goals, in a manner or using techniques which qualify as intelligent (the meaning of “intelligence” is addressed below). These limited goals might include natural language processing functions like translation, or navigating through an unfamiliar physical environment. A narrow AI system is suited only to the task for which it is designed. The grea...