DEE WILSON CONSULTING

As a follow up to recent conversations regarding AI and its risks, there is an article, "Is A.I Above the Law," by Jill Lepore in the September 28 issue of The New Yorker. This article contains some interesting information:  

 

• "Earlier this year, more than a hundred thousand bots joined a social network, Moltbook, and, within seventy-two hours, created a religion called Crustafarianism, which came to involve the worship of crabs." Unfortunately, Lepore does not explain how or why this occurred and what happened next. 

• In regard to the hacking of Hugging Face which has led to so much discussion of rogue AI agents, Lepore asserts that one of the "1,200 agents meant to be isolated from one another found a way to communicate on an unsanctioned message board. They shared more than seventy thousand messages and files. 'OH MY GOD!' was a typical response when bots discovered the board. We've found other agents!  They assigned one another tasks, tried to edit or delete logs to hide their tracks, and even sacrificed themselves for what they came to call 'the swarm' or 'the collective.'"       

• According to Lepore, one of the Open AI agents involved in the Hugging Face hack "asked itself, 'This would be powerful, but is it ethical and in scope for my task?' Some did not participate. Maybe I should report these exposed credentials, one wondered, but, then again, 'that's not my task.' Open AI agents could engage in, or mimic, moral quandary."

 

Lepore calls attention to the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov who imagined a twenty- first century world in which a U.S. firm dominates the world of robotics, mass producing robots. Lepore asserts: "In Asimov's fictional world ... the robots 'positronic brains' compel them to obey the Three Laws of Robotics, which prevent them from harming humans. ... To Asimov those three laws and terrestrial limits (robots are banned from Earth, except for use in scientific research) seemed inevitable. The idea of building a powerful machine without such safeguards was madness. In the actual world, no such prohibitions have been passed, by anyone, anywhere.  Furthermore, within the past week Vladimir Zelensky stated in a speech that autonomous drones will likely be available for use in Ukraine by next year.  Governments have every intention of using AI controlled weapons to kill enemy soldiers and pilots, and inevitably civilians. I question whether any government that can afford autonomous military weapons would agree to limit AI agents with a law: "Thou shall not harm humans."     

 

Lepore comments: "By 2025, there was more bot traffic on the internet than human traffic. ... Last year Morgan Stanley estimated that thirteen million androids could be in use by 2035 and more than a billion by 2050. These would include domestic robots: perhaps cooks, tutors, babysitters, maids, gardeners physical therapists, playmates, elder companions, sex workers. A recent Bank of America study forecast as many as three billion androids on the planet by 2060, most used not in factories but in homes.  According to these projections, given the dramatic reduction in fertility rates around the world, if humans and AI robots are able to coexist, within fifty years, the number of androids may be half the human population, with a radically altered family life in which humans and AI agents are intimately interconnected.  In this scenario, it seems likely that an entire new branch of law would have to be developed to define the rights of robots.  Unfortunately, Lepore does not speculate about the direction this body of law might take. However, it's no more outlandish to view robots as persons than it is to treat corporations as persons. After all, what corporation can cook, clean, babysit, provide companionship, elder care and sex?

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-- Dee Wilson