21 Grams, Artificial Intelligence, and the Path to Robot Suffrage
In 1901 a doctor from Massachusetts found himself facing a puzzling question. The doctor, Duncan MacDougall, wished to reconcile the two major influential factors in his life: medicine along with the science that underpinned it, and religion.
Put another way, MacDougall both understood and did not understand the human body. He knew much about its limbs and muscles, its nerve endings and the function of its internal organs, and yet he found himself at a loss to explain the whole in the same way he could its parts.
He was, and is, in good company. We are often highly dismissive of religion, and while that is arguably entirely fair given the coercive superstructure which stands atop its web of fiction there are questions which remain for which only religion has an answer. And these are the big questions.
What happens to us after we die? Where were we before we were born? What is our place in the universe, and are we special or commonplace? And, perhaps most pressingly of all, what are we?
I know, for example, that I am conscious. I am aware of my surroundings. And yet nobody can point to the part of the human anatomy and say “that is what gives me consciousness, and this is the mechanism that generates it.”
MacDougall was looking for a scientific basis for this, he was searching for a tangible sign of a human soul. His work in nursing homes placed him close to the dying, and he determined to measure them at the point of death: if a soul was real, it might have weight. And if a patient’s weight decreased at the moment of death, might that be the soul leaving the body?
His famous result whereby a soul is popularly recorded as weighing 21 grams is not widely accepted, but in his search he touched on something we fundamentally do not know, something others have also recognized. What, in essence, are we?
And once this question is tabled, it leads to some very interesting ideas indeed.
Everyone’s a Robot
Perhaps the best place to begin is with French philosopher Rene Descartes and his famous observation cogito ergo sum. Descartes and MacDougall were looking at the same problem, each within their own framework, and Descartes’s conclusion was the answer of a philosopher: I think, therefore I am.
Descartes dovetailed life and consciousness into awareness: he knew he was real because he was aware of his reality, and that of others around him. But herein lies a problem, or rather a limitation with his thinking: he knew he was real, but this line of thought offered no such comfort for those around him.
This is a branch of philosophy known as solipsism, which effectively boils down to the fact that we cannot tell how much of our surroundings are real. Just because we know we are real doesn’t mean we can be sure that anyone else is. They could be animatronics masquerading as human, or delusions our brain feeds us. We could be living in the Matrix right now, and in fact some argue we almost certainly are, none the wiser.
For the vast majority of human history this didn’t really matter: we had more pressing things with which to be getting on. For almost all of the rest of history we may not have had an answer, but at least there was a clear line to which we could point that divided the conscious and the inanimate.
But this line is changing. To this day there are many who argue that animals are not conscious, even when this is clearly undermined by the evidence of our own eyes and ears. Why else the difference in treatment between animals we consider pets and those we consider food? We prefer not to think of a chicken as conscious because its flesh is delicious, but if we accept the world around us as real then it must be: it has all the faculties we have, al the components for a soul as we do.
Those who reject this viewpoint usually point to intelligence as the defining factor, and we are certainly more intelligent than chickens. But this concept, that consciousness is an emergent property of intelligence, comes with some serious baggage.
In 1949 the English mathematician and codebreaker Alan Turing created his famous “Turing Test.” Under the rules of the test, a human was placed in a conversation and had to ascertain, based solely on the content of the conversation, whether they were speaking to another human or a machine imitating a person. If they spoke to a machine and could not tell it was not a human, that machine had passed the test.
In the last few years we have reached a point with Artificial Intelligence where we interact with machines which can pass this test. Nobody thinks these programs are conscious, even though we name them as such, but the solipsists would argue that we don’t know anyone else is conscious, either.
The fact is, we are as baffled as MacDougall was. Absent any evidence as to what consciousness actually is, we are all guessing, whether we think chickens are conscious, or computer programs, or nobody but ourselves.
So, should we have “computer rights” in the same way as we have animal rights? Should “artificial” intelligence be given the same rights as “natural” intelligence? After all, it is clear we can’t tell the difference between the two, at least for those that pass Turing’s test.
It may seem ridiculous to give AI rights, but it would not be the first time in history we have disenfranchised a portion of our population who, despite clearly being able to rationalize and act as we do, we have decided to be lesser. In creating such new intelligence in our machines and them treating them as lesser beings we have rediscovered slavery.
We are only at the very start of our journey with non-human intelligence, but our choices in how we treat these nascent entities as they struggle to understand the world around them will speak volumes about who we are. We are used to looking down on everything around us, masters of our domain. But all that might change, and in the far future of a robot-run world we would certainly hope for the same from them.
Are robots conscious? For the moment, probably not. Could they become conscious entities? Until we can solve MacDougall’s riddle and tell what consciousness is, the only honest answer is that we do not know.
Header Image: This picture of Artificial Intelligence was itself created by Artificial Intelligence. It is, in effect, a self-portrait. Source: Alenoach / Public Domain.
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