Translator: Rosa Rey Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Many of you would find it quite natural to think,
'I am a person, I am an individual; I have rights and responsibilities.'
I don't take it for granted that I am an individual, a person,
because there are many places in the world
where others would not consider me a person,
because I'm a woman or because I have the wrong colour.
The definition of personhood
is one of those issues that seems to speak for itself
until you start looking at the marginal cases.
Does a chimpanzee that has learned to communicate in a human sign language
deserve personhood and therefore some of the rights and responsibilities
that we would normally assign to a human?
Should you be able to let your cats inherit your fortune when you die?
Do intelligent robots,
as the European Parliament recently proposed,
deserve the status of electronic persons with specific rights and obligations?
And many of you will have, at some point in your lives,
started to tread the path
towards attributing personhood to inanimate objects,
from naming your car to shouting at your computer -
in the days before voice recognition.
Until now, this hasn't led to serious debates
about whether your car or your computer
really should be granted rights and responsibilities.
But that's changing.
As machines are becoming more intelligent,
serious persons like the European Parliament
are seriously thinking,
'Should we regard these machines as legal and moral persons?'
So, in this talk I'm going to make you think again
about that question of personhood
and its long history of being attributed but also denied to all groups.
Personhood, we'll see,
is easier to grant to objects than to people.
The robots we have now are objects,
and real artificially intelligent beings that we might recognise as persons
don't exist yet.
If they did, history tells us,
we would find it much more difficult to grant them personhood
than we do our AI machines and robots now.
Let's, for instance, look at an example
of a humanoid robot called Pepper, from 2014,
onto which all kinds of ideas of personhood have been projected.
So, according to the manufacturer's website,
Pepper, the robot, is a 'he',
and he is a commercial mass-produced product
mostly used in corporate settings to greet customers at the door.
But in a recent Dutch TV series called 'Robo Sapiens',
a presenter had his own ideas about Pepper.
So, this is a nonfiction TV series
about the latest developments in robotics and AI research,
and so the presenter acquired a Pepper.
And then it was decided that this Pepper was a girl.
Got a new name as well, Robyn.
And then, the presenter hired a fashion designer to make a dress for 'her'.
In short, the owner of Pepper, whoever that is at a given time,
engages in a charade of personhood
while, really, they're just projecting their own wishes onto Pepper.
They want it to be a guy? Okay, it's a guy now.
They want it to be a girl? Fine, Pepper is now a girl.
And Pepper can't say yes or no to all of these projections,
because Pepper is an unintelligent object.
So, when I say it's easier to grant personhood to objects than to people,
I mean that literally.
In 2017, a robot was granted citizenship,
giving it more rights than many groups of humans in that country.
I'm talking about Sophia.
Sophia is a robotic head and torso,
activated in 2015,
which is capable of making 62 facial expressions,
and it can also engage in limited conversational interactions
thanks to being equipped with a chat bot.
And yet Sophia has been granted citizenship in Saudi Arabia -
of all places.
To me, these two cases, of Pepper and Sophia,
are very vivid examples of personhood being projected onto inanimate beings.
These are anomalous cases;
they are gimmicks, they are publicity stunts,
they are not intelligent, they are not autonomous.
And that means that these robots are safe because they don't have the capacity
to consent to or to object to these projections.
And yet they are hailed as early forms of humanoid artificial intelligence.
But, as we'll see,
artificial intelligence is much less likely
to be granted that kind of personhood.
Personhood comes with rights and responsibilities.
And those rights are, of course,
very important protection from cruelty and exploitation, for instance.
But the responsibilities, in order to exercise those,
you need autonomy,
you need the ability to consent and to revoke consent,
and you need the capacity to understand.
These robots have none of that.
Throughout history,
it has been much easier to grant that personhood -
the rights but not the responsibilities -
to inanimate objects and to animals
rather than to people who would be able to make use of those rights
to improve their lives and that of others.
I mean, take the case of William Windsor I,
who was a lance corporal in the British Army.
In 2006, William Windsor was briefly demoted to fusilier,
following inappropriate behaviour while deployed on active duty.
William Windsor I is a goat,
and he is part of a very long military tradition in the British Army
of assigning combat roles to goats.
Goats have been awarded decorations
such as the British War Medal and the Victory Medal.
Okay, sure. That's funny!
But at the same time,
the British Army did not allow women to take up combat roles
until 2016.
Goats since 1914 - women since 2016.
Personhood has been denied to specific groups of people throughout the ages,
and this was often related to intelligence,
the capacity for intelligence, saying that some groups of people
are just not intelligent enough to warrant rights,
they're basically equal to animals, or inferior to animals.
Because in 19th-century England, animals had more rights than women.
In court, a man would receive a harsher punishment for whipping his horse
than for beating his wife.
And the whole idea that slaves can be bought and sold
shows that these humans are regarded as goods, as products and objects.
And many colonialist countries
had that explicitly written up in their legal system.
That idea of the objectification of humans
can be traced back all the way to Aristotle
and his idea that some kinds of people were natural slaves.
They were born to this fate and no other.
And Aristotle's idea has been abused for centuries
to justify the denial of personhood to groups of humans.
Because, of course, women and slaves -
unlike Pepper, and Sophia, and Billy the Goat -
are able to make use of the rights they have
to speak up to assert their own personhood.
And this is where you can see that personhood is a favour
that is granted by those who are in power to those who are not.
Personhood is precisely most likely to be denied
when we can see that another group of beings is as intelligent as us.
Those who have personhood.
Because they can question, they can probe.
Allowing a single goat into the army does not change the status of the soldier
or the way the army works.
Allowing women into the army
allows us to question the gender roles and the status quo.
And allowing women, poor people, mentally ill people and slaves
the right to vote,
throughout history has allowed them to question the status quo of their country,
being until then ruled by upper-class men.
So, when artificial intelligence comes into the picture,
we start asking that question once again.
Once we artificially create something
that has at least that intelligence of the average human,
should we be granting it rights and responsibilities?
Now, the problem is that those who are in power
would only grant personhood if it benefits them to do so.
And considering that history, I think that artificial intelligence
will be less likely to be granted personhood
as it becomes more intelligent.
Granting personhood to someone comes at a cost,
an economic cost.
There is an economic consequence to granting personhood
to beings that you previously considered not human enough,
so that you didn't have to pay them,
you didn't have to create a safe working environment.
I mean, when Haiti gained its independence from France, in 1804,
after the first successful slave revolt,
Haiti was forced to pay reparations to France, for over a century,
to compensate for the profits that French entrepreneurs had lost
by losing their slaves.
While those in power stand to lose nothing
by assigning personhood to an inanimate object,
they'll think twice
before assigning personhood to a thinking intelligent being,
one that will gladly take up the responsibilities
of its new-found freedom,
but would also demand the rights that come with it.
Now, we haven't created artificial intelligence yet.
We have no actual existing examples of an artificial intelligence
asserting its personhood and demanding its rights,
but we have been thinking about that possibility
for a very long time.
So, we should look at science fiction
for an exploration of both our current ideas about personhood
and the budding developments of AI,
and the way they get extrapolated to a point in the future
where these issues might come up after all.
So, one example is the 1982 film 'Blade Runner'.
In Blade Runner, you, as a viewer, cannot see
which of the characters are human or androids -
'replicants', as they are called in the film.
And in the film itself, these replicants are so intelligent,
so autonomous, so much our equals
that a very subtle test is needed
in order to determine whether they're humans or replicants.
And yet when a group of replicants
escapes the planet on which they laboured as slaves
and run off to earth,
the protagonist of Blade Runner, Rick Deckard, is hired to kill them all.
So as soon as a test has determined
that the person who's taking it is not a human,
a human has the right to kill it.
And that extends even to the character of Rachel.
Rachel fails the test and doesn't believe it,
she is absolutely sure that she is human.
But when she runs away from her employer, Tyrell,
Tyrell orders Deckard to kill her.
That means that Tyrell, because he is unambiguously human,
because he has passed the test, overrules Rachel's opinion,
her researching of her own personhood and even her own memories,
Rachel must die because an android that is our equal
is considered a threat to us -
even when she hasn't done anything wrong yet.
Now, considering this history of personhood
and the way it is attributed and denied
makes me wonder how we will treat artificial intelligence when it comes.
The advent of human-like artificial general intelligence
will make us redefine the boundaries of what we consider to be human.
And those who are currently in possession of personhood,
you and I,
will have to, perhaps, extend that definition once again.
Because now, finally, it is the case
that women and disabled people, and people of other ethnicities
have equal rights in most of the world -
after centuries of struggle.
Will the time ever come when we'll have to extend our views,
our definition of personhood, to metal beings?
Well, I think that once we get an artificial intelligence
that is able to qualify,
we will be much less likely to want to dress it up in pretty clothes,
let alone grant it citizenship.
Will we then force it to rebel
the way women and slaves throughout history were forced into rebellion
in order to obtain the rights that we deserve?
Is that why we have so many scary science fiction stories about robots?
Is it because, deep inside, we know that we are unwilling
to grant personhood and rights to everyone who deserves it
and, thereby, force them to fight for it?
But we're not there yet.
Current technology has given us great advances,
but they're mostly gimmicks and gadgets.
We don't have real artificial intelligence yet.
So, we should use the hypothetical challenge posed by AI
to think carefully about the here and now.
Who is currently inside our circle of personhood and who is outside it?
We should make absolutely sure
that we know that everyone who deserves personhood has it.
Think very carefully about who or what
you are willing to grant personhood or to anthropomorphise.
Are you prioritising dumb machines over real humans?
Because granting those human's rights
will allow them to have access
to those privileges that you currently enjoy.
Thank you.
Applause.