I'm traveling and not able to focus on my blog, so this week I thought I'd just share a section of my 2015 paper with Mara Garza defending the rights of at least some hypothetical future AI systems.
One objection to AI rights depends on the fact that AI systems are artificial -- thus made by us. If artificiality itself can be a basis for denying rights, then potentially we can bracket questions about AI sentience and other types of intrinsic properties that AI might or might not be argued to have.
Thus, the Objection from Existential Debt:
Suppose you build a fully human-grade intelligent robot. It costs you $1,000 to build and $10 per month to maintain. After a couple of years, you decide you'd rather spend the $10 per month on a magazine subscription. Learning of your plan, the robot complains, “Hey, I'm a being as worthy of continued existence as you are! You can't just kill me for the sake of a magazine subscription!”
Suppose you reply: “You ingrate! You owe your very life to me. You should be thankful just for the time I've given you. I owe you nothing. If I choose to spend my money differently, it's my money to spend.” The Objection from Existential Debt begins with the thought that artificial intelligence, simply by virtue of being artificial (in some appropriately specifiable sense), is made by us, and thus owes its existence to us, and thus can be terminated or subjugated at our pleasure without moral wrongdoing as long as its existence has been overall worthwhile.
Consider this possible argument in defense of eating humanely raised meat. A steer, let's suppose, leads a happy life grazing on lush hills. It wouldn't have existed at all if the rancher hadn't been planning to kill it for meat. Its death for meat is a condition of its existence, and overall its life has been positive; seen as the package deal it appears to be, the rancher's having brought it into existence and then killed it is overall morally acceptable. A religious person dying young of cancer who doesn't believe in an afterlife might console herself similarly: Overall, she might think, her life has been good, so God has given her nothing to resent. Analogously, the argument might go, you wouldn't have built that robot two years ago had you known you'd be on the hook for $10 per month in perpetuity. Its continuation-at-your-pleasure was a condition of its very existence, so it has nothing to resent.
We're not sure how well this argument works for nonhuman animals raised for food, but we reject it for human-grade AI. We think the case is closer to this clearly morally odious case:
Ana and Vijay decide to get pregnant and have a child. Their child lives happily for his first eight years. On his ninth birthday, Ana and Vijay decide they would prefer not to pay any further expenses for the child, so that they can purchase a boat instead. No one else can easily be found to care for the child, so they kill him painlessly. But it's okay, they argue! Just like the steer and the robot! They wouldn't have had the child (let's suppose) had they known they'd be on the hook for child-rearing expenses until age eighteen. The child's support-at-their-pleasure was a condition of his existence; otherwise Ana and Vijay would have remained childless. He had eight happy years. He has nothing to resent.
The decision to have a child carries with it a responsibility for the child. It is not a decision to be made lightly and then undone. Although the child in some sense “owes” its existence to Ana and Vijay, that is not a callable debt, to be vacated by ending the child's existence. Our thought is that for an important range of possible AIs, the situation would be similar: If we bring into existence a genuinely conscious human-grade AI, fully capable of joy and suffering, with the full human range of theoretical and practical intelligence and with expectations of future life, we make a moral decision approximately as significant and irrevocable as the decision to have a child.
A related argument might be that AIs are the property of their creators, adopters, and purchasers and have diminished rights on that basis. This argument might get some traction through social inertia: Since all past artificial intelligences have been mere property, something would have to change for us to recognize human-grade AIs as more than mere property. The legal system might be an especially important source of inertia or change in the conceptualization of AIs as property. We suggest that it is approximately as odious to regard a psychologically human-equivalent AI as having diminished moral status on the grounds that it is legally property as it is in the case of human slavery.
Turning the Existential Debt Argument on Its Head: Why We Might Owe More to AI Than to Human Strangers
We're inclined, in fact, to turn the Existential Debt objection on its head: If we intentionally bring a human-grade AI into existence, we put ourselves into a social relationship that carries responsibility for the AI's welfare. We take upon ourselves the burden of supporting it or at least of sending it out into the world with a fair shot of leading a satisfactory existence. In most realistic AI scenarios, we would probably also have some choice about the features the AI possesses, and thus presumably an obligation to choose a set of features that will not doom it to pointless misery. Similar burdens arise if we do not personally build the AI but rather purchase and launch it, or if we adopt the AI from a previous caretaker.
Some familiar relationships can serve as partial models of the sorts of obligations we have in mind: parent–child, employer–employee, deity–creature. Employer–employee strikes us as likely too weak to capture the degree of obligation in most cases but could apply in an “adoption” case where the AI has independent viability and willingly enters the relationship. Parent–child perhaps comes closest when the AI is created or initially launched by someone without whose support it would not be viable and who contributes substantially to the shaping of the AI's basic features as it grows, though if the AI is capable of mature judgment from birth that creates a disanalogy. Deity–creature might be the best analogy when the AI is subject to a person with profound control over its features and environment. All three analogies suggest a special relationship with obligations that exceed those we normally have to human strangers.
In some cases, the relationship might be literally conceivable as the relationship between deity and creature. Consider an AI in a simulated world, a “Sim,” over which you have godlike powers. This AI is a conscious part of a computer or other complex artificial device. Its “sensory” input is input from elsewhere in the device, and its actions are outputs back into the remainder of the device, which are then perceived as influencing the environment it senses. Imagine the computer game The Sims, but containing many actually conscious individual AIs. The person running the Sim world might be able to directly adjust an AI's individual psychological parameters, control its environment in ways that seem miraculous to those inside the Sim (introducing disasters, resurrecting dead AIs, etc.), have influence anywhere in Sim space, change the past by going back to a save point, and more—powers that would put Zeus to shame. From the perspective of the AIs inside the Sim, such a being would be a god. If those AIs have a word for “god,” the person running the Sim might literally be the referent of that word, literally the launcher of their world and potential destroyer of it, literally existing outside their spatial manifold, and literally capable of violating the laws that usually govern their world. Given this relationship, we believe that the manager of the Sim would also possess the obligations of a god, including probably the obligation to ensure that the AIs contained within don't suffer needlessly. A burden not to be accepted lightly!
Even for AIs embodied in our world rather than in a Sim, we might have considerable, almost godlike control over their psychological parameters. We might, for example, have the opportunity to determine their basic default level of happiness. If so, then we will have a substantial degree of direct responsibility for their joy and suffering. Similarly, we might have the opportunity, by designing them wisely or unwisely, to make them more or less likely to lead lives with meaningful work, fulfilling social relationships, creative and artistic achievement, and other value-making goods. It would be morally odious to approach these design choices cavalierly, with so much at stake. With great power comes great responsibility.
We have argued in terms of individual responsibility for individual AIs, but similar considerations hold for group-level responsibility. A society might institute regulations to ensure happy, flourishing AIs who are not enslaved or abused; or it might fail to institute such regulations. People who knowingly or negligently accept societal policies that harm their society's AIs participate in collective responsibility for that harm.
Artificial beings, if psychologically similar to natural human beings in consciousness, creativity, emotionality, self-conception, rationality, fragility, and so on, warrant substantial moral consideration in virtue of that fact alone. If we are furthermore also responsible for their existence and features, they have a moral claim upon us that human strangers do not ordinarily have to the same degree.
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