Do we need to write laws about artificial life now?

electricitylikesme

There's a lot of science fiction concerned with worlds where the development of artificial life rapidly outstrips the bounds and empathy of property and personhood laws, creating a new underclass. Usually a vehicle to discuss or reflect on the abuses of the past and present, its nonetheless slowly becoming relevant into the future.

But it's projects like this (the Blue Brain Project) which make me think that, in an effort to avoid repeating past mistakes - it would be prudent to start trying to implement laws regarding the creation and experimentation on artificial life now. I'm less concerned with the practical effects of linking together a few billion subprocesses like neural nets, and more with what we do if we create questionably sentient entities capable of passing a Turing test.

This isn't an area where it only applies to possible silicon-based life. Adult stem cell technology has been used to grow tiny human brains representing stages of very early foetal development. These aren't problematic at their current level, but the possibility starts to get extremely alarming when you consider that there's no known reason why, given the right conditions you couldn't just keep growing these until you were dealing with a mass of human neurological tissue equivalent to an adult, but devoid of a body (or indeed, possibly any sense input).

Currently, these issues are largely dealt with by ethics committees at universities, which are far more likely then the general populace to create rational guidelines for such research in my view. But, it does still feel like we might be rapidly approaching a time where we need some minimal level of legal precedent to guide how we'd deal with interactions in the future between such creations and the general public. If you smash a mass of neuro-tissue in a vat, are you guilty of murder? What about if you delete or disconnect a suitably intelligent AI? And how should we make such determinations?

We already regard chimpanzees as essentially honorary humans when it comes to research and rights, at least on paper. It seems prudent to me that we start determining, at least, the legal criteria by which personhood would be granted to equivalently intelligent entities into the future.

redx

I am really torn between not wanting to have to fight the same battles for the rights of sentient/sapient beings, and the ability for these sort of laws to be used by conservatives to stifle research.

Like, to me there is a certain irony that the very same people who I feel would likely most oppose these laws if such life were to exist, would use them to prevent such life from existing.

Honestly, I think this is science that needs to happen. I think, as truly nightmarish as some of the outcomes might be, I think artificial life and intelligence are too valuable to humanity to have their research restricted.

I'd like to see protections for anything shown to be able to suffer, and right for anything shown to be able to think. However, in the US, we are steadily degrading things as simple as a woman's right to choose what to do with her body. The right has been allowed to stand in the way of stem cell research.

I won't risk giving them any more tools to fight progress, even if it may lead to something worse than slavery until these battles can be fought and won to protect beings who exist.

electricitylikesme

My line of thinking is that this is at the very least the type of thing we should be thinking about at the level of the UN, so we have some type of guidelines ready to go as a reference for when these issues become more pertinent. At the very least, I'd like to see us broaden some of the language we use so it's less human-specific and more sentience/sapience specific - this would have the added advantage of allowing us some useful standing on which to argue about primate rights and the like.

When you get right down to it, the important battles here will be fought entirely over the existence - anywhere - of precedent, when the time comes so words on paper seem like they'd probably be the best defense.

ElJeffe

Right now, I think we're best served by letting the ethics committees at universities keep tabs on things, and not trying to involve the stupidity of the general public. Because: what redx said.

Beyond that, I live ELM's suggestion that we basically draft regulations and maybe even som protolegislation just so we have it handy, and when we get closer to having some legitimate AI or sentient non-human thing nigh, we're ready to go.