While Marvin is a fictional robot, Scholar and Author David Gunkel predicts that sentient robots will soon be a fact of life and that mankind needs to start thinking about how we’ll treat such machines, at present and in the future.

For Gunkel, the question is about moral standing and how we decide if something does or does not have moral standing. As an example, Gunkel notes our children have moral standing, while a rock or our smartphone may not have moral consideration. From there, he said, the question becomes, where and how do we draw the line to decide who is inside and who is outside the moral community?

“Traditionally, the qualities for moral standing are things like rationality, sentience (and) the ability to use languages. Every entity that has these properties generally falls into the community of moral subjects,” Gunkel said. “The problem, over time, is that these properties have changed. They have not been consistent.”

To illustrate, Gunkel cited Greco-Roman times, when land-owning males were allowed to exclude their wives and children from moral consideration and basically treat them as property. As we’ve grown more enlightened in recent times, Gunkel points to the animal rights movement which, he said, has lowered the bar for inclusion in moral standing, based on the questions of “Do they suffer?” and “Can they feel?” The properties that are qualifying properties are no longer as high in the hierarchy as they once were, he said.

While the properties approach has worked well for about 2,000 years, Gunkel noted that it has generated more questions that need to be answered. On the ontological level, those questions include, “How do we know which properties qualify and when do we know when we’ve lowered the bar too low or raised it too high? Which properties count the most?”, and, more importantly, “Who gets to decide?”

“Moral philosophy has been a struggle over (these) questions for 2,000 years and, up to this point, we don’t seem to have gotten it right,” Gunkel said. “We seem to have gotten it wrong more often than we have gotten it right… making exclusions that, later on, are seen as being somehow problematic and dangerous.”

Beyond the ontological issues, Gunkel also notes there are epistemological questions to be addressed as well. If we were to decide on a set of properties and be satisfied with those properties, because those properties generally are internal states, such as consciousness or sentience, they’re not something we can observe directly because they happen inside the cranium or inside the entity, he said. What we have to do is look at external evidence and ask, “How do I know that another entity is a thinking, feeling thing like I assume myself to be?”

To answer that question, Gunkel noted the best we can do is assume or base our judgments on behavior. The question then becomes, if you create a machine that is able to simulate pain, as we’ve been able to do, do you assume the robots can read pain? Citing Daniel Dennett’s essay Why You Can’t Make a Computer That Feels Pain, Gunkel said the reason we can’t build a computer that feels pain isn’t because we can’t engineer a mechanism, it’s because we don’t know what pain is.

“We don’t know how to make pain computable. It’s not because we can’t do it computationally, but because we don’t even know what we’re trying to compute,” he said. “We have assumptions and think we know what it is and experience it, but the actual thing we call ‘pain’ is a conjecture. It’s always a projection we make based on external behaviors. How do we get legitimate understanding of what pain is? We’re still reading signs.”

According to Gunkel, the approaching challenge in our everyday lives is, “How do we decide if they’re worthy of moral consideration?” The answer is crucial, because as we engineer and build these devices, we must still decide what we do with “it” as an entity. This concept was captured in a PBS Idea Channel video, an episode based on this idea and on Gunkel’s book,  The Machine Question.

To address that issue, Gunkel said society should consider the ethical outcomes of the artificial intelligence we create at the design stage. Citing the potential of autonomous weapons, the question is not whether or not we should use the weapon, but whether we should even design these things at all.

“After these things are created, what do we do with them, how do we situate them in our world? How do we relate to them once they are in our homes and in our workplace? When the machine is there in your sphere of existence, what do we do in response to it?” Gunkel said. “We don’t have answers to that yet, but I think we need to start asking those questions in an effort to begin thinking about what is the social status and standing of these non-human entities that will be part of our world living with us in various ways.”

As he looks to the future, Gunkel predicts law and policy will have a major effect on how artificial intelligence is regarded in society. Citing decisions stating that corporations are “people,” he noted that the same types of precedents could carry over to designed systems that are autonomous.

“I think the legal aspect of this is really important, because I think we’re making decisions now, well in advance of these kind of machines being in our world, setting a precedent for the receptivity to the legal and moral standing of these other kind of entities,” Gunkel said.

“I don’t think this will just be the purview of a few philosophers who study robotics. Engineers are going to be talking about it. AI scientists have got to be talking about it. Computer scientists have got to be talking about it. It’s got to be a fully interdisciplinary conversation and it’s got to roll out on that kind of scale.”

Image Credit: LinkedIn

As the line between tabloid media and mainstream media becomes more diffuse, news items such as Ebola, pit bulls, Deflategate, and Donald Trump can frequently generate a cocktail of public panic, scrutiny, and scorn before the news cycle moves on to the next sensational headline. According to Robotics Expert and self-proclaimed “Robot Psychiatrist” Dr. Joanne Pransky, the same phenomenon has happened in robotics, which can shape public perception and, by extension, the future development of robots and AI.

“The challenge, since robotics is just starting to come into the mainstream, is that most of the country is ignorant. So, if you believe what you read, then I think people have a very negative and inaccurate picture (of robotics),” Pransky said. “I spend a lot of time bashing negative headlines, such as ‘ROBOT KILLS HUMAN,’ when actually the human killed himself by not following proper safety standards. A lot of things are publicized about robotics, but there’s nothing about the robot in the article. It leads people on the wrong path.”

Hedging the Negative Media

Pransky has spent much of her time trying to present an accurate depiction and provoke thoughtful discussion about robotics that separates fact from science fiction, as elaborated upon in this well-written TechRepublic article. To that end, she’s spent almost her entire career educating the public on the real issues facing robots and robotics. Showing an actual robot in action, she believes, is the best way to educate the public about the potential, and limits, of robotics.

Pransky noted that YouTube videos, such as the Boston Dynamics Big Dog robot videos, are great for presenting robotics in a positive light. Yet a similar video, showing a human kicking the BigDog robot to test its stability, can also present a negative image to the general public — that robots needs to be kicked around because they’re dangerous, unintelligent, or won’t work otherwise.

On the contrary, futuristic feature films such as “Her” and “Ex Machina”, while still presenting darker plots, are a robot psychiatrist’s dream, she added. “What is it like to have a robot live with us? And to (have that robot) be a nanny and a lover and how will it change the whole family dynamic? These things, to me, are not science fiction, they’re inevitable,” Pransky said. “Whether or not it occurs exactly the way you see it in science fiction in our lifetime is a different question. To me, it’s not a question of when… it’s happening.”

A Call for More Logic — and Empathy

The area that Pranksy believes is most misconstrued is the media’s depiction of autonomous weapons in the military. The biggest problem, she said, is that most people now believe there are completely autonomous weapons in use. What the public overlooks is, even if the military did have autonomous robots, it doesn’t necessarily mean those machines would be 100 percent unsupervised by humans in the decision-making. The larger issue, she believes are the related moral issues, which need to be discussed.

“I really believe, when it comes to humans, the most important thing is not the future of intelligence and AI, it is social intelligence and emotional intelligence. If we’re going to be working with entities that technology has merged together, how are we going to get it right with something that’s not 100% biological versus nonbiological?” she said. “I think there should be more emphasis on issues like moral laws and stages of moral development. I think that is very important in any of these discussions.”

On a broader scale, the recent concerns about uncontrolled AI expressed by Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates shined a lot of negative light on robotics, Pransky said. She recognizes Musk, Hawking and Gates as some of the top minds in the world on the topics of future AI and robotics, but notes that “they’re not sociologists or psychologists”. Given that, Pransky said the public should take their views about the future of robotics with a grain of salt.

Looking to the future, Pransky sees the need to address the public’s concerns about robotics before the industry has a “Pearl Harbor moment”. She believes that robots are still “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” for much of the general public, and thinks lawmakers need to consider how the robotics industry will develop before the urgent, last-minute need arises.

“Recently, computers stopped United Airlines on the same day it stopped the stock market and we paid attention more. It’s human nature that, unless there is something catastrophic, we don’t respond as well or as quickly, but we don’t have to be so ‘doomsday’ about it,” Pransky said. “Robotic law is a very huge deal. We absolutely need to bring laws and regulation to federal attention.”