June 16, 2014 - TECHNOLOGY - For the first time, a computer program passed the Turing Test for
artificial intelligence. A computer on Saturday was able to trick one
third of a team of researchers convened by the University of Reading
into believing it was human -- in this case a 13-year old boy named
Eugene.
The Turing Test, named
for British mathematician Alan Turing, is often thought of as the
benchmark test for true machine intelligence. Since he introduced it in
1950, thousands of scientific teams have tried to create something
capable of passing, but none has succeeded.
Until now.
And that outcome means we
need to start grappling with whether machines with artificial
intelligence should be considered persons, as far as the law is
concerned.
In 1920, Karel Capek introduced the mainstream world to the concept of artificial people in his play "Rossum's Universal Robots" (the word robot comes from the Czech word for serf labor). Since then, society has been fascinated by the idea of a robot walking among us, or even crossing over into personhood like a modern-day Pinocchio.
The fascination continues; just take a look at this year's box office. In the recent film "Transcendence," Johnny Depp starred as a sentient machine. In the critically acclaimed "Her," Joaquin Phoenix's character fell in love with an advanced operating system named Samantha. Coming attractions include more installments in the rebooted "RoboCop" franchise; "Star Wars: Episode VII," with its universally lovable droids; and, of course, "Terminator 5."
A question at the heart of all these movies is this: At what point does a computer move from property to personhood?
Robotic legal personhood in the near future makes sense. Artificial intelligence is already part of our daily lives. Bots are selling stuff on eBay and Amazon, and semiautonomous agents are determining our eligibility for Medicare. Predator drones require less and less supervision, and robotic workers in factories have become more commonplace. Google is testing self-driving cars, and General Motors has announced that it expects
semiautonomous vehicles to be on the road by 2020.
When the robot messes up, as it inevitably will, who exactly is to blame? The programmer who sold the machine? The site owner who had nothing to do with the mechanical failure? The second party, who assumed the risk of dealing with the robot? What happens when a robotic car slams into another vehicle, or even just runs a red light?
Liability is why some robots should be granted legal personhood. As a legal person, the robot could carry insurance purchased by its employer. As an autonomous actor, it could indemnify others from paying for its mistakes, giving the system a sense of fairness and ensuring commerce could proceed unchecked by the twin fears of financial ruin and of not being able to collect. We as a society have given robots power, and with that power should come the responsibility of personhood.
From the practical legal perspective, robots could and should be people. As it turns out, they can already officially fool us into thinking that they are, which should only strengthen their case.
The notion of personhood has expanded significantly, albeit slowly, over the last few thousand years. Throughout history, women, children and slaves have all at times been considered property rather than persons. The category of persons recognized in the courts has expanded to include entities and characters including natural persons aside from men (such as women, slaves, human aliens, illegitimate children and minors) as well as unnatural or juridical persons, such as corporations, labor unions, nursing homes, municipalities and government units.
Legal personality makes no claim about morality, sentience or vitality. To be a legal person is to have the capability of possessing legal rights and duties within a certain legal system, such as the right to enter into contracts, own property, sue and be sued. Not all legal persons have the same rights and obligations, and some entities are only considered "persons'" for some matters and not others.
Just last month, the Supreme Court heard arguments in the Hobby Lobby case about whether a corporation is person enough to ask for a religious exemption.
New categories of personhood are matters of decision, not discovery. The establishment of personhood is an assessment made to grant an entity rights and obligations, regardless of how it looks and whether it could pass for human.
To make the case for granting personhood to robots, it's not necessary to show that they can function as persons in all the ways that a "person" may be understood by a legal system. It's enough to show that they may be considered persons for a particular set of actions in a way that makes the most sense legally and logically. -
CNN.
Robot Doctors, Online Lawyers And Automated Architects Pose A Great Threat To Manual Labour
 |
| Technology is set to challenge traditionally safe professions. Photograph: Alamy |
Last year, reporters for the Associated Press attempted to figure out which jobs were being lost to new technology. They
analysed employment data from 20 countries
and interviewed experts, software developers and CEOs. They found that
almost all the jobs that had disappeared in the past four years were not
low-skilled, low-paid roles, but fairly well-paid positions in
traditionally middle-class careers. Software was replacing
administrators and travel agents, bookkeepers and secretaries, and at
alarming rates.
Economists and futurists know it's not all doom and gloom, but it is all change. Oxford academics Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A Osborne have predicted computerisation could make nearly half of jobs redundant within 10 to 20 years. Office work and service roles,
they wrote, were particularly at risk. But almost nothing is impervious to automation. It has swept through shop floors and factories, transformed businesses big and small, and is beginning to revolutionise the professions.
Knowledge-based jobs were supposed to be safe career choices, the years of study it takes to become a lawyer, say, or an architect or accountant, in theory guaranteeing a lifetime of lucrative employment. That is no longer the case. Now even doctors face the looming threat of possible obsolescence. Expert radiologists are routinely outperformed by pattern-recognition software, diagnosticians by simple computer questionnaires. In 2012, Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla predicted that algorithms and machines would
replace 80% of doctors within a generation.
In their much-debated book
The Second Machine Age,
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argued that we now face an intense period of creative destruction. "Technological progress," they warned, "is going to leave behind some people, perhaps even a lot of people, as it races ahead … there's never been a worse time to be a worker with only 'ordinary' skills and abilities to offer, because computers,
robots and other digital technologies are acquiring these skills and abilities at an extraordinary rate."
So where does that leave the professions, whose hard-won expertise is beginning to fall within the power of computers and artificial intelligence to emulate? The efficiency of computerisation seems likely to spell the end of the job security past generations sought in such careers. For many, what were once extraordinary skillsets will soon be rendered ordinary by the advance of the machines. What will it mean to be a professional then?
"We'll see what I call decomposition, the breaking down of professional work into its component parts," says leading legal futurist
professor Richard Susskind. Susskind's forthcoming book Beyond the Professions, co-authored with his son Daniel Susskind, examines the transformations already underway across the sectors that once offered jobs for life. He predicts a process not unlike the division of labour that wiped out skilled artisans and craftsmen in the past: the dissolution of expertise into a dozen or more streamlined processes.
"Some of these parts will still require expert trusted advisers acting in traditional ways," he says. "But many other parts will be standardised or systematised or made available with online service." In a previous book
Tomorrow's Lawyers, he predicts the creation of eight new legal roles at the intersection of software and law. Many of the job titles sound at home in IT companies: legal knowledge engineer, legal technologist, project manager, risk manager, process analyst.
"Many traditional lawyers will look at that and think: 'Yes, they might be jobs, but that's not what I went to law school for. And that's not what my parents' generation did as lawyers.'" That, says Susskind, is not his concern: whether we call these new positions lawyers or not, the legal sector will survive.
"What I often say is that the future of law is not Rumpole of the Bailey, and it's not John Grisham," explains Susskind. "It's not a version of what we have today slightly tweaked. It will be people working in the legal sector but offering legal services and legal help in new ways." It may be the end of the profession as immortalised in courtroom dramas, but as software eats the old jobs it will have to create new ones too.
"Those professions that do not change will render themselves obsolete," says Dr Frank Shaw, foresight director at the Centre for Future Studies. "Those that are able to transform themselves – and I mean 'transform' – will thrive and prosper."
No one knows for sure what the careers of the future will look like. But the people at the cutting edge are already watching old jobs disappear – and experimenting with the technology that has begun to create new ones. Here's how three of the professions –
medicine, architecture and the law – could be transformed, according to the people helping to reinvent them. -
Guardian.
