Robots are People Too?

I love all things tech. And today we're gonna talk about the concept of granting personhood or personality two robots, not a personality in the sense of this robot is Chipper and this one's depressed, but rather the concept of granting robots some of the aspects that we say humans have from a legal standpoint, and there are numerous arguments both for and against this concept. Uh. I've talked about artificial intelligence extensively, not just on this show but on

other shows as well. And one of the elements about artificial intelligence that tends to pop up, especially in things like science fiction, is what happens when artificial intelligence is able to take actions that could negatively impact people? Uh, what do we do? What sort of framework do we make if that were the case, where we can determine

who's responsible for this? And then the interesting thing is that for me anyway, the European Parliament, a group out of the European Parliament kind of a working group, put together a proposal a couple of years ago about the possibility of this and the idea of granting personhood to robots in a way to create an established framework of law and accountability, because at the moment there's not really anything formalized there, so they put together a proposal. The

proposal UH is still online. It was originally published on May thirty one, two thousand sixteen. It was submitted in draft form. The title of the draft was Draft Report with Recommendations to the Commission on Civil Law Rules on Robotics and it's a fascinating report. It's actually a lot of fun to read. I highly recommend checking it out

if you have some time. The general purpose of the proposal was to start official discussions in the European Union about developing policies and guidelines in the field of robotics, particularly since there were individual member states of the EU s several nations that were developing their own policies over time, and the European Parliament Working Group was saying this could be a problem because if we have one set of policies that are in play and let's say France, and

a different set that are in play in Germany, that starts to create conflict, and in the European Union, you're supposed to be able to move throughout the union and take jobs wherever and live wherever within the Union. And therefore it would work a lot better if everyone had the same set of rules and regulations on something like this, especially something that's going to factor so heavily in industry

and economy in the workplace. So really this was mostly a kind of a warning saying we need to start talking about this. The introduction of that proposal is phenomenal in its own right. It cites lots of literary works, including Mary Shelley for Frankenstein, The Pygmalion, myth Uh. It references Carol Capex Are You Are? That is the play

that originated the word robot. So it's pretty interesting just from the fact that it's referencing science fiction and horror literature way more than you would expect in your typical government proposal. It's it's much more entertaining than reading a draft of, say, uh like your typical agricultural report, which is still incredibly important. Don't get me wrong, those are

very important reports. They just don't tend to be page turners. Now, those citations are all there to establish that we humans have been really fascinated, maybe even fixated with this idea of creating intelligent machines or even intelligent life in the case of Frankenstein's Monster, that this has been something that we have really aspired to on some level, the idea that we create something that itself could be said to

be intelligent. Section B of the introduction, as the introductions long enough to have different sections, would say that we're

on the threshold of a new industrial revolution. That the first industrial revolution that took place in the nineteenth century was all about creating factories, harnessing the power of coal building, railroads, steam power, assembly lines, all of that stuff transformed the world from what what had been a really a grarian society into more of an urban one in these industrialized nations.

And the section was saying that artificial intelligence was going to fuel a new revolution that would be just as impactful as the previous industrial revolution, that no part of

society would go unaffected by that revolution. So therefore, since it was going to be such a big part of our lives moving forward, it would be really smart for us to think about the implications of that out before it happens, and prepare for it and to put into place protections for people before it becomes reactionary, you know, before there's a problem and then we have to figure out, oh,

how can we fix this. The argument of the proposal was, let's be proactive, let's try and figure out what problems may confront us in the future and solve them now before we are dealing with a catastrophic experience. So then the proposal goes and points out that robots sales have been on the rise over the past few years. They

they've increased year over year. The automotive industry in particular was called out, and it also stated that robots will provide numerous benefits in the short to medium term and potentially what they called virtually unbounded prosperity in the long term. So the idea being there are some real positive outcomes

to employing robots. However, the flip side of that is those advances might quote result in a large part of the work now done by humans being taken over by robots end quote, and that that would affect not just employment, but systems like social security which rely upon employment taxes for funding and other things that are tax supported. And what happens when a robot fails in some way? What

if it creates damage to a person or property? And how will robots interact with our personal data, even you know, personal data that we haven't necessarily given consent to share. The more intelligent the system, the more proactive it might be in taking that data and using it in some way without us even saying anything about it, especially if you haven't built in specific rules for the robot or artificial intelligent program or whatever to follow so that it

doesn't do that. Now, before I go much further down that particular line of reasoning, I do need to point out that AI and automation and their effect on jobs is still a matter of considerable debate. No one is sure right now to what extent it's going to have

an effect on people in general. So the worst case scenario that some people say is that robots and AI automated systems are going to replace the vast majority of jobs within a few decades, and that this will happen before we've ever built out any sort of infrastructure that would take care of people that would help them transition either into new jobs that were created as a result of this, jobs that we don't have today because they we don't need them, but we may have a need

of them once this automated future comes upon us. Or maybe that isn't the case. Maybe we don't create new jobs, Maybe we don't have a system where we can actually take care of people and and separate the concepts of making a living and being employed, having some other system there so that people could meet their needs to make ends meet. How do we do that without having it tied to jobs? But there are other people who also think we're not likely to see that huge of a change,

at least not in the relatively near future. We're more likely going to see AI and automation take over individual tasks, but not entire jobs. So the future might be one in which our work is augmented by AI, but we are not replaced by AI. The justification for that argument is saying, look at machine learning as it stands right now. It is very impressive, but it also shows that there

are severe limitations in machine learning right now. It's just not sophisticated enough to be able to take over for everything that a human can do. Uh, and it requires a lot of training and a lot of stuff can go wrong, So it's not likely that we're gonna see computers take over lots and lots and lots of jobs, but they might take over repetitive tasks that your job happens to include, and then you can focus on the stuff that isn't repetitive and predictable. Who's to say, who's

right not me? I don't know. It could be either one of those. But the argument of the proposal I think still holds true, which is that we need to at least consider what the worst case scenario is and have a plan to alleviate the outcome of that. Then there's the question of how robots are going to impact

stuff like human dignity. So in the future, if we have robots that are acting like caretakers for the sick or the elderly or the young, what impact is that going to have on those people, How is that going to make them feel? What impact will have on their health?

And uh, and hey, what if those robots were to get really effective, really smart, like maybe smarter than humans smart, So again, not necessarily intelligent in the same way humans are, but better able to process certain types of information than humans are. The proposal in the introduction, it raises that question as well. Could robots actually represent a danger to the human species. It's something that we have to consider

before it becomes a reality. Now, with all of this in mind, says the introduction, the EU should get off its butt and start talking about those ideas and work on a strategy to avoid problems in the future. And the proposal would then go on to have a few suggestions of its own. I'll get into those in just a second, but first let's take a quick break to

thank our sponsor. So the proposal has a solutions and Suggestions section, and under general principles, the report would cite Asimov's Laws of Robotics and would say that designers, producers, and operators of robots should keep these in mind, which is amusing to me. I mean asthma asthmava. Isaac Asimov was a famed science fiction and speculative fiction author wrote some amazing stuff, and those laws of robotics have become sort of iconic in artificial intelligence. The original three laws

of robotics are probably the best known. So law number one is a robot may not harm a human or through in action, allow a human to come to harm. Law too is a robot has to obey any order given to it by a human unless it would violate the first law. So you could tell a robot, hey will pick that up for me, and it would have to do it. But you couldn't tell robot, hey, go push that guy into traffic, because that would violate the

first law. The third law was a robot would have to protect itself from harm unless doing so would conflict with either of the first two laws. So if a robot were to see that a car were coming, it was coming down the street, it was gonna hit a little old lady, and the robot would be able to push the little lady out of the way, but as a result, it was going to get hit by this car.

The robot would have to do it because even though it has a law stating it has to protect itself, it that gets superseded by law number one, which says it cannot through in action, allow a human to come to harm. It would have to take action in that case.

Then there's a fourth law called law zero that was considered to be the top of the this ladder, the most important of all the laws, which is a robot may not harm humanity or by inaction allow humanity to come to harm, so not just an individual, but humanity as a whole. Under the liability section of the report, it suggests that it will not be long before the European Union either needs to classify robots under a category such as persons or to create a brand new category

just for robots. So AI and machine learning are really changing how robots interact with environments. Before you would program all the ways that a robot would interact with its environment, and mostly you would try to control the types of environments your robot was going to be in. You know, the more predictable and the more stationary the robot, the

easier it was to program. Right, So if you've got a robot, like a giant robotic arm that's doing welding in a car manufacturing line, that robot is going to be stationary. It doesn't move around. It stays in one spot along the assembly line. The car has come to it, it does its work, next car comes to it, it continues. Uh. That is one way of programming a robot, and it's

easy comparatively speaking. But these days we now have robots that use machine learning that encounter situations and then process information come up with a conclusion. It might be a way to act, might be UH, you know, a specific um request, it might make whatever you may think, it has to come to that conclusion, which means that we don't know how robots are always going to react to their environments. Environments can be very chaotic things with lots

of different variables. And while you might program a robot so it will behave in a very predictable way for certain situations, you're not gonna be able to predict every possible situation situation in every possible environment. So because of that, and because we're using machine learning in more applications, this program was saying, or this this UH report was saying, we need to keep that in mind. And while we wouldn't necessarily call even the most advanced AI conscious or

self aware, it's not. It's not doesn't appear to be. We are seeing more applications that allow machines to learn from their environments and adapt their approaches to complete certain tasks, and that is something we need to keep an eye on now. Right now, you could argue that if a robot malfunctions, you would say the company that made the robot should be held liable or the programmer who programmed in either the routine the robot was following or the

basic artificial intelligence that the robot would use as guideline. However, as robots depend more and more upon machine learning to interact with their environments, this gets really murky because again, those environments are filled with predictable variables, and the robot might quote unquote learned to do something in a way that's harmful, or it's inefficient, or it's ineffective. This doesn't

necessarily mean it would cause harm to people. It might just mess things up in like an industry environment and cause financial harm. So the proposal argues that as machines become more advanced, it makes less sense to blame the manufacturer. It's less effective, and there might need to be new rules and definitions for liability that would hold the machines themselves responsible. So the proposal quote considers that a system of registration of advanced robots should be introduced end quote.

That would involve creating the criteria to decide which robots would be required for registration, and it would also call for more funding from the European Union for research projects, particularly those that involve the social and ethical challenges raised by advances in robotics, and that the EU should create a quote Legislative Instrument on legal questions related to the development of robotics and AI end quote that would look ahead ten to fifteen years, which is super hard to do.

It's really hard to predict what will happen in technology in five years, let alone ten or fifteen. But they're saying you should try and consider as many different possible situations as you can. So why are they saying this, Well, if I create a machine learning program and I have a robot that follows it, and the robot is put into an environment that's got a lot of these variables, I may not know how my robots going to react

in every single situation. The more advanced the robot is, the less certain I can be of exactly what it's going to do based upon any given scenario. I might feel like the guidelines I've created are enough to keep the robot out of trouble. But the world is a chaotic place, and we've talked about this with autonomous cars. I'm actually going to talk about it more. I plan on doing a whole suite of episodes about the history an evolution and challenges of autonomous cars in the near future.

That's gonna be a multi part series. But with autonomous cars, we know that there are situations that can end in accidents, even fatal ones. We've seen examples of that, and that this raises questions of what ultimately is what should we hold accountable, who who is responsible for this? With driving scenarios, we know we can predict maybe let's say nine of the different scenarios you would encounter on a typical drive, but that means there's ten percent and the stuff out

there that happens, it's just not normal. It's not something you would typically encounter. And these outside scenarios pose a problem because you cannot anticipate every single one in program into your machine when this happens, make sure you do

this other thing. The machine will encounter scenarios in which it has to make a decision for itself, and it's at that point that we don't know where responsibility falls, where the accountability falls because the programmer could not possibly have anticipated this, So is it really fair to hold them at fault. The manufacturer may have made it exactly

the way it was supposed to be made. There are no faults in the manufacturing process, So are they at fault the owner of the robot that put it in whatever situation it found itself in the first place, maybe they're at fault, or maybe the robot itself is at fault. So this proposal goes on to call for a legal solution that doesn't restrict the type or extent of damage as a person can seek based solely on the fact

that the damage was caused by a non human agent. So, in other words, a court should should not be allowed to say, well, we can only award you this amount. We can't give you any more than this because the thing that caused harm to you was a robot, not a person. If it were a person, we would be able to award you more money. The proposal says, we want to make sure that does not become the case.

And like I said, we're already seeing this in cases with autonomous cars, where a company can say, well, you know it was it was not the fault of the programmer, was not the fault of the company. It was a situation in which the car itself made that decision. The car is at fault, not us. That is a problematic thing. One of the things that the the report suggested was that the producers of a robot are liable for damage on a level that is proportionate with the amount of

instructions the producers gave to the robot. So the more locked down the robot, the more responsible the producers are for that robot's behavior. So if you have that stationary robot that that is welding on an assembly line and it malfunctions or it starts causing huge amounts of damage and its behavior it's it's perhaps ruining several cars along the assembly line as it's going through this process, you would say, all right, the company that made this robot

is at fault. Something they did was wrong because the robots only following the instructions that this company gave it. It's not making any decisions on its own. But the more the decision making process is on the robot, the less you can hold the manufacturer accountable, according to this report, which is a pretty radical idea, and the proposal also states that the longer a robot has received quote unquote education, the more liable the robots quote unquote teacher is for

any damage the robot causes. Now, that might be the company that made the robot. It might be the person that programmed the robot, it might be the person who purchased the robot and then put it in an environment where it was learning, but it would be whoever was introducing these scenarios to the robot. So that's a really interesting concept. And again, this is just a proposal. It's not like this has been enacted into law. Uh. They

also created a suggestion for an obligatory insurance scheme. This is not that crazy. I mean, if you drive a car in the United States, you have to have insurance. It's a requirement by law. So it'd be similar to that, except in this case, the producers of the robots would pay out the insurance for the robots that it was creating. And the report also suggested that there should be or there could be, a compensation fund for the robots, which

sounds crazy. Like one of the things you think about about automation is that, well, it reduces the need to have paid employees. You've got robots, why do you need to pay them. Well, it's not to reward the robot. It's not to make the robot feel like it did a great job. Robots can't feel anything anyway. It's not even to you know, to to have this system, you know,

perpetuate the system of paying for work. It's rather to build a fund, a compensation fund that could cover the cost of any damages or harm that the robot might create. So you're not paying the robot and putting money into its bank account that then goes to spend on motor oil or something. You're accumulating money in the event that the robot causes damage, and then you've got money dedicated to that robot that you can use to pay out

and the event of damages being created by that robot. Uh, so you're essentially paying a robot so that in case it goes haywire and starts, I don't know, slapping people around, you can actually cover all those damages. The report also calls for specific legal status to apply to robots, thus creating assas that's equivalent to like electronic persons that have specific rights and obligations, including that of making good any

damage they may cause. And a lot of people say that this is confusing, that why would you grant this personhood to robots? And a frequent response to that, and I think it's got some validity to it as well. We already do it with businesses. We all are already grant the concept of personhood to corporations. Corporations can behave in legal matters as if they are people, human being people. And if a corporation can do it a business a

collection of work, then why not a robot. Then there's a section from the design of an Ethical Framework to make certain advances that uh that are made in robotics are made with consideration to how it impacts human safety, privacy, dignity, your who owns information. This proposal goes on to say that the risk of harm should be no greater than encountered in ordinary life. So, in other words, a future filled with robots should pose no more risk to a

person as that person would encounter today in ordinary circumstances. Now, to do all of that, the proposals just creating a new European Agency for Robotics and Artificial Intelligence and funding that agency and staffing it with technical experts as well as leaders in ethical and regulatory fields to start really susten this stuff out. The other sections in the report cover concepts like intellectual property, um, how do you protect

and encourage innovation? How do you call on new criteria to apply to copyrightable works that are produced by computers or robots. You may have listened to my episode, my recent episode about the artificial intelligence that created a painting. Who owns that painting? Does the machine own that painting? We don't have rules for this, and that's what this report is arguing is as we create more machines and systems that can produce stuff that we would normally protect

with stuff like a copyright, what do we do? Who owns that? Who should that go to? They also argue for standardization, the idea of making sure that these robots are all communicating with their various systems in a standardized way, so that way, when you move from one part of the EU to another, you don't have these conflicting communications standards,

data transfer standards. You want everything to work within the same umbrella of standards, sort of avoiding the problem that people often have, which is that you go to a different country and everyone there has this audacity to talk in a different language than you do, which means that you have to speak really slow and loud if you're an American. That's more of a joke about Americans being rude and foreign nations. But you don't want that to happen if you can prevent it, if you can create

the standards in the first place. They also call for more standards to allow for the testing of driverless cars and other autonomous vehicles rather than just this fragmented approach that we're seeing, and also had a section on care robots and medical robots general call to develop those robots with a human impact in mind, and also the concept of human repair and enhancement, which gets into this idea of using robotics to either heal injury for people or

to maybe even replace people parts to make people cyborgs. That's kind of a far off sort of thing that we could think about. It may never happen, but the report actually calls for a committee on robot ethics in hospitals and other healthcare institutions to kind of develop ethical guidelines for how that might be used. And then there's a short section about drones, which is becoming more and more important. I've got more to say about this, but

first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Now, according to one forecast that the reports sites, the European Union could face a shortage of nearly a million information

and communications technology professionals in the near future. And on top of that, it says that of all jobs will require some level of digital skills moving forward, so it calls for a revision of a digital competence framework to correct for that, and it also calls for designing programs doing courage people who typically don't go into these fields to pursue them, specifically young women, to get young women into the field of robotics, and that the European Union

and member states should quote launch initiatives in order to support women in i c T that's the information and communications technology and to boost their E skills end quote.

They also call for a system to monitor job trends to see where jobs are disappearing due to automation, where jobs are being created because of robotics, and to stay ahead of that to say, well, we see where things are going, so we know what to stress to people who are in school, like what areas of opportunity are there, so that people will go into those areas one to meet the demand that's going to be created, and to to avoid going into fields that would largely be obsolete,

meaning that they would have difficulty finding work after they came out of the education system, and maybe that the EU should introduce corporate reporting requirements on the extent and proportion of the contribution of robotics and AI to the economic results of a company for the purpose of taxation

and social security contributions. So not only does this report suggest that employers could quote unquote pay robots, although again that would be to put money aside in the event that something were to go catastrophically wrong with that robot, but that the robots would also have to pay into the social security system, or rather the company's employing those robots would need to And the report is saying that if it is a fact that overall we're going to

see a decrease in employment because of automation, that would be really bad. It would have a domino effect ripple effect on stuff like Social Security because it depends on employment taxes, and without those taxes, systems like Social Security would lose funding and people would be and put in

hardship because of that. So there would need to be some sort of tax on robots to help compensate for this, to to level out the fact that there would not be these employment taxes that employees would typically be UH paying for out of their salaries. So the proposal also suggests that all members of the EU consider a general basic income as a possibility in case this wave of automation does take large effect, because otherwise you could have a population that's largely out of work and has no

way of making a living. A general basic income, like a guaranteed basic income, would be an amount of money that the government would pay out to each and every citizen that would be used to cover basic needs. It would not prevent people from going out and getting a job and earning more income that they could do if they wanted to live above the basic line that had

been set by whatever the basic income amount was. But the idea would be that the basic income would would cover your your most important needs like a place to sleep, food, that kind of stuff. The proposal also lays out some guidelines for licenses. One set that would be meant for designers of these robots, one set that would meant be meant for the users of the robots. UH. They do

have a few interesting examples in the report. There's actually quite a few examples, but some of the fun ones like under designers there's UH integrate opt out mechanisms like kill switches consistent with design objectives. Make sure your robot is going to operate in a legal way, so you know, don't go making a gangster bot that would be dumb. Be transparent in the way that the robot is programmed, as well as the predictability of its robotic behavior so

people know what to expect when they use it. Develop tracing tools during the development stages so that when a robot behaves a particular way, it can be traced back to the design of the robot, and doing that would help other designers either incorporate good design elements into their approach or avoid designs that lead to you know, the crazy Viking robots that go on rampages in Northern Europe. Make sure that the robots are identifiable as robots as well.

That was a big one they said that should be part of it. People should know when they're looking at a robot that it is in fact a robot. Then for users, some of the things that were in the licenses included respect human physical and emotional frailty, so you should not have you know, robots employed as as strike breakers. You should respect other people's privacy, which includes turning off a robots video recording equipment if the situation warrants it,

and not to weaponize robots, which seems pretty you know, straightforward. Now, this was just a proposal, and it's still something that is being debated. In the European Union. There has undergone rewrites and tweaks since it was first proposed a couple of years ago, and in the EU there are still discussions that are happening happening regularly about you know, what, if anything, should the EU do about the development of machine learning, artificial intelligence and automation, and what are the

best courses of action. I think the report was a particularly interesting proposal. I think it had a lot of very ambitious parts to it. I don't know that all of them were even remotely realistic. Some of them certainly, but I don't know about all of them. But I thought that the most important thing was that it would get people talking. The problem is we're still talking because it's a complicated thing to think about and it requires a lot of subtle decision making that it's just not

easy to do. It requires very careful consideration, and things are changing so quickly that it can be difficult to even get a handle on what's happening right now, let alone figure out what might happen in ten years. It does not change the fact that we need to consider these things and to come up with some solutions. They

might not require granting personhood to robots. That might be a step too far, but it would be really good to get a stronger handle on what is coming down the pipeline so that we're not blindsided by it and we can limit the negative impact, if any, that it

would have on people in general. And I just think it's fascinating this idea that we are really having these conversations about how do we go forward as automation and AI and machine learning become more and more part of our lives, even if it's not in ways we directly observe on a day to day basis. That wraps up this episode. Like I said, pretty soon, I'm gonna do a suite on autonomous cars and talk about their development and the technology behind them, the ethical issues there. We'll

get into the trolley problem. It's one of my favorite logical problems or ethical problems to discuss. I talked about a little bit recently. We'll get into more detail about that because people are having to talk about it now and it's it's potentially scary stuff but also really fascinating.

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