Examining Spike Jonze’s ‘Her,’ AI Sentience, and the Implications of Granting Robots Rights
After watching the movie “Her” by Spike Jones what do you think: are Theodore and Samantha actually in love? Why or why not?
Her was an interesting movie about a love story made by Spike Jonze after a decade after his divorce from Sophia Coppola. In the film is largely focused on a guy named Theodore in the precipice of divorce to his wife and his search for companionship, he befriends an AI named Samantha to fill in that space. I believe that the relationship between Theodore and Samantha is open to interpretation, but it can be inferred that Theodore falls in love with Samantha as the movie progresses. However, as Samantha is an AI, it is not clear if she is capable of feeling love in the way that humans do. Throughout the film you can see notes of jealousy from both parties which I do not think would happen if they did not have some soft love for each other.
Amy Web her paper “Mind and Machine” considers a question that scientists and philosophers have been asking for centuries: can machines actually think? What is her answer?
I think this is a very complex question that many different fields have had a hard time identifying and with the recent adaptations we have built into our tech over the years. I believe that the writer Amy Webb argues that current AI systems are not truly sentient, as they are only able to perform specific tasks within a limited set of parameters, rather than possessing true intelligence or consciousness. The idea of machines “thinking” like humans is a popular misconception, and that a more accurate way to understand AI is as a tool that can be used to augment human capabilities. AI at this point has a harder time being able to transfer skills like humans can, “In fact, Baidu figured out something that even Zero couldn’t yet do: how to transfer skills from one domain to another. It’s an easy task for humans, but a tricky one for Al”.
According to David Chalmers what is consciousness? Can digital systems be conscious? Why or why not?
According to David Chalmers a philosopher and cognitive scientist, he argues that consciousness is the experience of awareness and perception. The ability of trying to figure out what consciousness is exactly has been coined the Hard Problem. He argues that while we can understand the neural processes that give rise to perception, understanding the subjective experience of perception is a separate, difficult problem that is not fully explainable by current scientific understanding. Even though we have built advance machine we have yet built one that is close to general intelligence, “No existing digital systems are yet close to general intelligence”.
De Graaf et co explore a variety of conditions and contexts for granting robots rights. Of the lists of possible reasons they give for robotic rights, which one do you find most compelling and why? What potential problems do you see with giving robots rights?
In his research paper, Maartje M. A. De Graaf and his team explored the idea of who wants to grant robots rights. There are a couple of problems that I see with giving robots rights that we give to people and animals. The big problem is that robots, unlike animals, are made by humans to perform certain tasks which makes our lives easier which would be mundane or dangerous. Maartje and his team believe that, “This is an interesting development particularly because robots cannot suffer and do not value things, which makes it problematic to grant them rights on the basis of their intrinsic properties.”. The right I find most compelling should be to receive the right to receive fair wages for the work they perform, The reason why I like this is because many companies replace human labor to increase their profits but if robots get paid than it will decrease the speed at which humans get replaced or the wages granted can be taxed to contribute to universal income given to the population.
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