Three Takes on Engaging with AI
Three takes on how we can think about AI.
First, Bruce Schneier. “But there is something fundamentally different about talking with a bot as opposed to a person. A person can be a friend. An AI cannot be a friend, despite how people might treat it or react to it. AI is at best a tool, and at worst a means of manipulation. Humans need to know whether we’re talking with a living, breathing person or a robot with an agenda set by the person who controls it. That’s why robots should sound like robots.”
Second, Janelle Monaé. “I think that AI is a reflection of humanity. And when I used the Android, you know, and I paralleled it to the other and the other in today's society, who those people are, I said, when we are integrated with AI, when we're integrated with marginalized folks who are not the majority, how are we going to treat them? When you think back on history, how did we treat them? Because to somebody, black people were tools. We were meant to serve.”
Third, James Boyle. “For all of our alarms, excursions and moral panics about artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, we have devoted surprisingly little time to thinking about the possible personhood of the new entities this century will bring us. We agonize about the effect of artificial intelligence on employment, or the threat that our creations will destroy us. But what about their potential claims to be inside the line, to be “us,” not machines or animals but, if not humans, then at least persons—deserving all the moral and legal respect that any other person has by virtue of their status? Our prior history in failing to recognize the humanity and legal personhood of members of our own species does not exactly fill one with optimism about our ability to answer the question well off-the-cuff.”
The sequence is a deliberately persuasive argument created through juxtaposition. (Well-placed juxtaposition is like boil-to-simmer in cooking. The method transforms discrete ingredients into something unitary, new, and interesting.)
There’s something fundamentally different about talking to a person or AI now. It doesn't follow that there will be something fundamentally different about talking to a person or an AI in the future. Schneier insists on a distinction between persons and [a subclass of?] robots. Monaé reminds us that person/object distinctions have served us poorly in the past. Boyle asks why we would repeat the past when designing the future.
