When is it Okay to Abuse Your Robot?

This article is about why artificial intelligence is challenging our views on human and animal rights. How intelligent should my robot be before it is morally unacceptable to beat it? When does a robot stop being an inanimate object and start being ‘someone’? Do we even have a moral framework which is sufficiently robust to have this conversation? The chances are that if you have thought about any of this, then you have probably thought about human and animal rights.

But before we proceed, I have a few disclaimers: that is not me in the photo, I don’t have a baseball bat and I have not harmed a robot. I did accidentally step on my Roomba 980, once, and I had not consulted my dog before I bought the robot. But here, I am going to take us to a whole new level, although the story is not as cute as a Roomba with a hello-kitty theme.

I will untangle some thorny philosophical topics on ethnics as we proceed. Of course, many great philosophers have written notable works on ethics, but few have successfully grappled with the conflicting criteria by which someone or something is bestowed rights — John Locke, Immanuel Kant, René Descartes, Thomas Aquinas, Peter Carruthers are notable exceptions.

But rather than appeal to those works, I will start by acknowledging mankind’s long history of complicity in the mistreatment of other humans and animals. We turn to a moral crime scene involving slavery and abuse (and sexism), then revisit some pertinent evolutionary biology before tackling ‘robot rights’ as a special case of animal rights.

The Slave and the Chimpanzee

William Smith’s ‘A New Voyage to Guinea’, dated 1744, describes an explorer’s account of the animals of Sierra Leone. At that time, most Europeans had dismissed the notion of hairy human-like creatures as myths. One animal, known by the white colonials as a ‘Mandrill’ was particularly intriguing. Its remarkable resemblance to a human and not of an ape, captivated the colonists.

“Their bodies when full grown, are as big in circumference as a middle-sized man’s — their legs much shorter, and their feet larger; their arms and hands in proportion. The head is monstrously big, and the face broad and flat, without any other hair but the eyebrows; the nose very small, the mouth wide, and the lips thin. The face, which is covered by a white skin, is monstrously ugly, being all over wrinkled as with old age; the teeth broad and yellow; the hands have no more hair than the face, but the same white skin, though all the rest of the body is covered with long black hair, like a bear. They never go upon all fours, like apes; but cry, when vexed or teased, just like children….”. [extracted from Thomas Henry Huxley. ‘Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature’]

William smith was asked to present one of these strange animals aboard Mr. Cummerbus’s slave boat. He brought a six month old female baboon like creature on board. The slaves knew how to feed and nurse it as it was a tender animal. The sailors would tease it, some loving to see its tears and hear it cry. One even hurt it, because he disliked its snotty nose.
This sailor is said to have told the slave caring for the creature that ‘he was very fond of the women in Sierra Leone and asked the slave if he should not like the creature for a wife?’.

‘No, this no my wife; this a white women — this fits wife for you’ wittingly replied the slave. The next morning, the creature, no doubt a chimpanzee, was found dead under the windlass.

This story succinctly captures the primitive rhetoric of racism and speciesism that these colonial predators adopted. A blatant disregard for anything different than himself, whether a slave or an animal, no matter how much a like or vulnerable — the signature hallmark of a colonist or a predator. No doubt, the sailors had been desensitized by the horrific scenes involving the slaves, hardened by the sea and the dire consequences for a sailor not conforming with the pack.

In that story, we see that a child-like creature is tormented and killed. The slaves had compassion and the sailors did not. From a behavioral perspective, these three characters, are functionally similar. Each has the ability to process information from the environment around them, to convey and perceive emotions, to make decisions based on sensory information from the environment and perceived emotions of other beings in that environment. While all three may experience different sensory stimuli and exhibit variable degrees of executive reasons, their mechanism of learning and interacting with the environment for mating and survival is likely very similar.

Yet, if I told that story to many in the world, most would relate to the suffering of the slave, but less so to the chimpanzee. Perhaps that it was an infant chimpanzee would play to its advantage. But many would reason that the slave and the sailor are human and therefore bestowed human rights. The chimpanzee is an animal and is therefore not bestowed the same rights.

Let’s breakpoint here and untangle this logic. The problem with this rhetoric is multi-fold:

Humans are animals but animals rights are not human rights

First, there are complex structures of species and genuses that transcend a continuum. If we, as many of the anatomists of the eighteenth century, delineated species by anatomical functions, then we unquestionably arrive at the homo sapien being separate from the other species. Of course, at that time, there was much dispute over the classification of primate species, but few scientists would argue today that the anatomical classification distinguishing humans from apes is clear. It is also clear that we were once apes and we have ‘mutated’ into humans to adapt to the environment. The chimpanzee’s (Pan troglodytes) genome is 98.8% similar to the human genome. The bonobo (Pan paniscus), which is the close cousin of chimpanzees, differs from humans to the same degree.

Geneticists use a variety of techniques to calculate these percentages. The 98.8% chimp-human distinction, for example, involves a measurement of only substitutions in the base building blocks of those genes that chimpanzees and humans share. A comparison of the entire genome, however, indicates that segments of DNA have also been deleted, duplicated over and over, or inserted from one part of the genome into another. When these differences are accounted for, there is an additional 4–5% distinction between the human and chimpanzee genomes.

Regardless of the technique used to estimate the percentages, humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos are more closely related to one another than either is to gorillas or any other primate.

So if we cluster ape species by genealogy, we are in the same group as apes. This DNA evidence is arguably the greatest discovery in modern times: humans are in the ape evolutionary tree; We are animals.

Richard Dawkins has famously posed the thought experiment on how much an ape has to be like a human before it is bestowed the same rights as humans. Is it 99%, it is 99.9%? It seems more than a little arbitrary that we have come up with one set of rules for us, and entirely another for the rest. Sounds like the 99% and 1% anti-wall street rhetoric and more broadly the hallmark of elitism! We actually share genes with all living organisms and so a biological kinship between us and all animals is well established.

Should we treat someone disrespectfully because they are less intelligent?

Of course, by our definitions of intelligence, we have higher cerebral capacity. But why does more intelligence give license to deny someone or something with less intelligence the same rights? Should we treat a low functioning child with less dignity than an intelligent adult? Should we treat a victim of Alzheimer’s disease with less dignity? What about someone in a coma?

Where does respect for life and intelligence come from?

I offer one perspective on how I have come to develop respect for all forms of life here. I write software, research machine learning, and have a math and engineering background. I am overwhelmed by how complex the anatomy of an insect is, let alone an animal. I can not make that. I might at best be able to simulate part of its behavior, but even a cockroach is an extremely complex organism. There I am, perched at my laptop trying to write machine learning code for processing data from a sensor with an embedded linux operating system, and a fly lands on my hand while I am typing. This creature is bewilderingly complex compared to the scientific and engineering problem that I am researching. I can not train my sensor to be as autonomous as the fly — the fly exists in the real world, my code is limited to what ever vessel I run it in. Even if my sensor was mounted on a drone, it will need to be managed by someone. The fly is free, it operates entirely independently. Note that I am deliberately avoiding the biggest philosophical black hole — consciousness. Suffice to say that respect for life comes from a variety of sources, religion of course, but also borne from a scientific and child-like sense of wonder and awe. If you don’t see anything special about a fly, try to make one.

Regardless of whether you have respect for all forms of life or not, are you willing to commit to leaving this world in a better place than you left it? That doesn’t mean going to live music concerts and getting high off peace vibes, but maybe that opens you up to being a richer and more compassionate human being?

It’s just a pig, who cares?

The prevailing rhetoric among humans when they see a pig in a slaughterhouse, beaten and bruised, quivering in pain and deprived of any dignity, is ‘That’s just a pig. Who cares?’. The rhetoric wouldn’t ultimately change if it were the image of a chimpanzee undergoing vivisection in the name of scientific progress. I imagine the rhetoric would have been the same if you were white and had witnessed the torrid conditions of negro slaves in the southern states of the US in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. ‘They are not us. Therefore we have the right to exploit them’. Isn’t the definition of a bully someone who strikes out at someone or something that can’t fight back? No doubt, this is the pattern of perpetuating abuse — transferring suffering onto those who do not have the capacity to push back.

Others who I have discussed this topic with react to my rhetoric with accusations of overthinking the issue. ‘You are taking this to a whole other realm’, said one critic implying that I am delusional and out of touch. I am dismissed and ostracised as a new age yoga zealot who has more money and free time than sense (none of which is true). While much of the religious teaching of Buddha resonates with me, I do not personally believe that we should adopt an eastern philosophy tomorrow any more than we should denounce our greek philosophical roots.

Rethinking taxonomies: Would a behavorial approach be healthier?

The Linnaeus taxonomy is based on anatomical analysis. This taxonomy does not account for neural or behavorial variance which is not directly a function of genealogy. For example, if I were to classify a creature by its functional capacity, then we would arrive at a different taxonomy. We would of course see large differences between the behavior of predator and prey. We would also see differences between those that have trained an executive branch of the brain, the frontal cortex, to moderate and direct responses to stimuli.

I could easily reason that an identical twin who is a gambling or drug addict, has no filter or impulse control is more like an untrained dog, frantically peeing, chewing and humping everything than like her disciplined high achieving sister. Is a guide dog or mother elephant helping her child out of a ditch and dutifully protecting her young a better citizen than an obnoxious jock who spends his time partying on his dad’s boat?

In other words, the behavioral component matters. Clearly the law recognizes this aposterior the crime. But what if we attributed rights across species based on their responsibility and strength of character and not purely on biological traits defined by anatonomy? Of course, we do this when it serves us and we adopt the other argument ‘they are not us’ when we need to rationalize something that we are not ready to face. But let’s at least own it and have a post Lockean discussion about what it means to be deserving of human rights and how do we draw the boundaries.

Robot rights is absurd!

Some broader perspective may help those who are getting too caught up in whether or not we should bestow animals the same rights or think that appealing to animal rights to advance our discussion on robot rights is absurd.

You are someone. You matter. But you, like me, will be dead in the ground in probably less than 75 years from now. In 200 years from now, who will remember you or I? Will this page even be accessible? Whether we like it or not, we suffer the same ultimate fate as any other living creature. No amount of disruptive technology or Silicon Valley hubris can change that simple fact anytime soon. A robot has the potential capacity to operate long beyond a human life duration. It has the capacity to be an ambassador of our culture to the future, when we are long gone. Shouldn’t that be a factor in how we treat something and bestow rights, rather like a protected building?

We also have the capacity to bond or rely on something that has intelligence. Therefore harming that source of intelligence can indirectly harm us. If I take away your intelligent spam filter, it will hurt you. You will have nasty unpleasant emails in your inbox.

Abusing a Robot in Japan

Here’s a thought experiment. Is it ok for me to build an intelligent robot, head to, say, a Japanese airport, and then beat it in front of bemused and shocked travelers? It’s my robot. I own it. It doesn’t have any human rights. I am not breaking the law and I beat it so that it doesn’t shatter and harm anyone. I pick up the mess afterwards like my dropped candy wrapper. Ok, so I am disturbing the public peace. What if I do it quietly, on a street corner when no one is watching, like in the photo above?

Now suppose you are one of the travelers arriving at the Japanese airport, eagerly looking for a loved one to meet you. Knowing that a flight will arrive from Finland, I maliciously decide to decorate my robot with certain traits. The robot is given a Finnish flag, it is clothed in a national Finnish folk costume and it is programmed to speak Finnish. I might place a wooden Tobacco pipe in its mouth for that classic look.

As you glance with weary eyes for your loved one, you see that I have a pet robot and you observe me beating it. This robot is capable of registering damage orally and makes a familiar cry for help. How realistic does the sound have to be before it becomes unnerving? Is it wrong for me to beat the robot because it is likely to trigger unpleasant emotions in you and upset your sensibilities?

How intelligent does the robot have to me before the moral issue shifts from it being just about your own pain triggered from observed abuse and more about the welfare of the robot?

Why is any of this important?

If you are thinking about any of this, as hypothetical or esoteric as it might seem, then you have probably been instilled or developed sound ethical semantics to navigate this world. If you think it’s not immoral to abuse or exploit an animal, then why is it immoral to abuse an innocent human being?

Systemic abuse is born from a cultural norm which places someone or some creature at a lower level. Once we become aware of that, we can advance our discussion of human and animal rights to clearly defining what it means to be a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ creature and move away from a hierarchy which just sets us up from abuse. How we interact and treat people and creatures should be in response to behavior and conformity with good and bad values. Is it making the world a better place or destroying it?

The innocent are innocent, regardless of color, creed, species or type of synthetic autonomous intelligence.