Difficult to Discern

You wake up in the hospital, your right arm is in a cast and you’re feeling a little dizzy. As your eyes come into focus, there is a pleasant looking doctor standing by your bed. She says her name is Dr. Smith and informs you that you have been in an accident and were banged up pretty bad. You curse yourself for getting on that hover board when you knew you didn’t know any tricks, and ask the doctor how long you were out. She brings you up to speed on your broken arm and concussion and you are so pleased with your care you want to shake her hand, of course with your left hand. When you shake her hand, it’s cold to the touch and just as you look up with surprise an identical looking doctor walks by your bed to the person next to you. Suddenly, your head clears as you realize she is a medical robot. Everyone knows that doctors have been replaced by the much more efficient robodocs, but the concussion must have left you a little foggy. You shake your head in bewilderment. “She’s just a robot”, you think as it moves on to the next patient.

 

Clearly, that was a fictitious story, but it demonstrates the situation this website is built around. I am not here, however, to argue if or when AIs will become sentient. I leave that in the capable hands of the reader’s research and imagination. Rather, I begin with the assumption that at some point artificial entities will be difficult to differentiate from a real human. Hence, in the first paragraph, in the situation it is not clear if the “robodoc” is a sentient entity, but our daredevil friend certainly had trouble telling at first. At this point in society, something will need to be implemented to protect both the people and the robots and thus I present two potential proposals for handling such a situation.

 

It is important to note that these proposals are working purely in the hypothetical realm. There is currently, at least to my knowledge, no AI that would solidly fall into this category. In no way am I proposing that we just give Siri or Cortana rights. I am confident, however, that at some point AIs will be developed that require “a degree of moral consideration” greater than the average personal assistant we play with on our phones (Schwitzgebel 99). Such AIs would not, unquestionably necessitate rights, but would certainly raise the question of their true state of mind. Herein lies the niche for the following proposals, that point where we begin to wonder if an artificial entity could be comparable to a human being.