The recent South by Southwest festival in Austin Texas this year featured the US premiere of a new movie about artificial intelligence called Ex Machina. The movie, directed by Alex Garland, has received mostly positive reviews, principally for its attempt, in the words of the reviewers, to explore issues about the nature of artificial intelligence and ultimately, its dangers to humanity.

Unfortunately, the film sacrifices real intelligent argument for drama and ultimately the danger from AI manifests itself in a fairly predictable way. The human creation, a sexy, female robot called Ava (Alicia Vikander), ultimately becomes truly autonomous and thinks for itself. In perhaps a sign of true intelligence, Ava decides that life is going to be better without her creepy male creator, tech CEO Nathan (Oscar Isaac) and takes matters into her own cybernetic hands.

The final player in the three-hander is a programmer called Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), who is brought in to do a “Turing Test” by Nathan to ultimately test how good Ava is at being intelligent. This apparently comes with a challenge for Nathan in that Ava begins flirting with him, rapidly diminishing his ability to think and being prepared to believe anything after a while.

Whilst the film may be entertaining, it builds on stereotype and cliche concerning AI. One of these cliches is the idea that artificial intelligences as learning machines can become “superintelligent” and outstrip the intellectual capacity of their human creators. This theme was explored in the movie “Her” in which computer operating systems collectively became so intelligent that humans would no longer be able to understand even their most rudimentary thoughts. In Her, the AIs were benign and essentially left humanity to get on with their lives whilst they explored their sentience.

However, the fear that is often espoused, is that as in the movie “Terminator”, the machines will turn against humanity and take control. Unfortunately, this idea has been given more credence by prominent technologists and scientists discussing in public, their fears of the dangers of AI. Former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Stephen Hawkins have all voiced their opinions that we should fear the possible dangers of uncontrolled AI.

A group calling themselves the Future of Life Institute comprising of academics, actors, company CEOs have formed with the aim to “mitigate existential risks facing humanity” they are “currently focusing on potential risks from the development of human-level artificial intelligence.”

Of course, what this translates into is a pitch for funding for research into AI which in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing. It seems a shame however that it has been presented with the trappings of a semi-religious cult. The actual output of the group in terms of recommendations for research have been more understated. In particular, their published paper on areas of future research noted that “There was overall skepticism about the prospect of an intelligence explosion”. Intelligence explosion is the phenomenon of machines teaching themselves to become super-intelligent.

The nuance here has largely been ignored with the press latching onto the threat of a Terminator -like uprising of “killer robots”.

Ex Machina is more of a film about a male fantasy of having a perfect, and subservient, sex robot than it really is about an “existential” threat. In that respect, the AI aspect is incidental and the story is similar to that of the horror film “The Stepford Wives” in which a town’s women are turned into automata who are mindless and totally submissive; the ultimate perfect housewife. The drama in Ex Machina comes from the ultimate male fear, a woman that fights back and asserts her independence.
The Pew Research Centre released a report in 2014 in which they asked a range of technologists about their prediction of the future of robotics. Only 48% of those asked felt that there would be significant displacement of blue collar and white collar jobs in the next decade. This is about the same time frame in which we will see an increase in cars becoming more autonomous.

We are still a very long way off having the capabilities of artificial intelligence depicted in Ex Machina. On a more prosaic level, we don’t even have the technologies to support the hardware that would be needed to provide that level of intelligence in a robot form. With today’s technologies, a phone battery barely lasts a day. If Ex Machina were real, Ava would have been constrained more by needing to be constantly plugged in and recharging from a power source than by the limits of her intelligence.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.

From The Terminator to the Matrix, science-fiction movies have captured our fear of dystopian futures where we are ruled or subjugated by our own robotic creations. But Neill Blomkamp’s new film Chappie features a far more humanised robot. Along with other recent films like Ex Machina, Hollywood has acknowledged that our future struggle with the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) will be much more complex than previously considered. Why? Because of the issue of robot rights.

Chappie tells the tale of the world’s first robot police force, who are tackling spiralling crime in Johannesburg in 2016. One of these robots is injured during an operation, and is then reprogrammed by its creator Deon (Dev Patel), to think for itself. This robot, christened Chappie, grows from inception as a meek child learning to speak and paint, to an adolescent “gangsta-robot”. Deon’s colleague Vincent (Hugh Jackman) sees Deon’s thinking robots as unnatural, and tries to destroy them all with his own heavily-armed human controlled droid, the Moose.

As such, Deon and Vincent represent the two extremes of human concern over artificial intelligence. Should Chappie be treated with the same concern as any other intelligent being? Or is he unnatural, dangerous, to be eliminated?

Biggest threat to humanity?

Many of the ethical issues raised in Chappie have been echoed by world-leading scientists and engineers. Professor Stephen Hawking recently warned:

The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race… It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate.

Bill Gates has also expressed concern at the advance of AI. And Elon Musk has donated $10 million for research to be “beneficial to humanity” due to considering AI our “biggest existential threat”.

Their fears are based in part on the theory of technological singularity, which suggests that advances in AI will surpass human evolution. In such cases AI could become all-powerful by an ability to evolve and rewrite their own programming, leaving us as unwanted competitors for scarce resources.

Such use of robots is perhaps not as far in the future as it may seem. Robots and AI are already used from factory floors to voice recognition in smart phones. The use of Predator drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan and Syria, represent the ability of human controlled robots to be used to kill other human beings.

Robot laws

Human Rights Watch and other human rights advocates support the Stop Killer Robots campaign, which seeks to outlaw autonomous robots that can target humans. They are Vincent’s side of the debate in Chappie. The thinking behind this is that robots are unable to respect the laws of war. These laws require humans to distinguish civilians from combatants, and to only use force that is proportionate and militarily necessary.

While advanced AIs could have complex algorithms to process such issues, they require very human and subjective decision-making, one that values human life. The campaigners argue that robots do not have the emotions or compassion that enables making humane decisions. Although some argue that the use of robots in conflict will limit the risks to human soldiers, it will also increase the likelihood of conflicts and civilians being caught in the crossfire.

These fears are seen in Chappie when the Moose robot uses missiles and cluster bombs that violate the principles of the laws of war. This scene also reminds us that it is not only robots who are a threat to humanity, but the human controllers that wield such great power.

So laws would need to be created that governed these killing robots. In his 1950 book I, Robot, Isaac Asimov suggests that in the future robots could be governed by the Three Law of Robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

This might seem simple enough. But Asimov then goes on to describe various situations where such rules conflict. Writing laws for humans is difficult enough – writing laws that robots would comply with and couldn’t find loopholes in, with their potentially infinite amount of processing power, would be a very different thing.

Robot rights

And so the only answer would be to programme robots with an innate respect for human life. And in relation to the use of autonomous robots for warfare, there remain limits with our current technology that have yet to pass the Turing test of human communication. Building robots that can appreciate nuanced human needs is an extraordinarily long way off. The difficulties of holding robots accountable for killing humans, and not their human controllers, also raises sincere questions for their future development.

But the film Chappie doesn’t only ask this one legal question – how and if we could curtail the power of AI. It also asks about the laws that might be written to protect robots. The robot Chappie, despite not being limited by any rules, more often than not tries to protect his human maker and adopted family. This is a robot with some sense of innate respect for human life.

And so while Chappie runs over familiar concerns of AI’s impact on humanity, its robot human-likeness raises moral concerns as to the worth of existence, consciousness and dignity beyond our mortal coils.

The question remains how we can best regulate such technology to our benefit, while potentially developing sentient life for robots. Robots could be our greatest achievement, or mark our own downfall. But if we are successful in developing conscious robots, like Chappie, we need to ensure that they have some basic rights of existence, as well as responsibilities to protect humanity.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.