I recently reread Carl Sagan's essay 'In Defense Of Robots', in which he makes his usually eloquent case for the unmanned exploration of space, among other things.
In the essay, he stresses the point that unmanned space vehicles will necessarily have to become more intelligent if they are to remain the best option for this type of work. But he stops short of at what seems (to me, at least) to be a vitally important question: At what point does machine intelligence make it unethical to use spacebots for suicide missions?
Since Sagan wrote the piece in the late 1970s and even since his death almost a quarter century ago, machine intelligence has grown tremendously. The self-awareness/sentience of computers appears to be a matter of not 'if', but 'when'. Do we have any ethical justification for sending a machine of even rudimentary self-awareness to, say, Venus (where it will almost certainly be fried) or Jupiter (where it will almost certainly be crushed)?
I know that in the earliest days of space exploration dogs and chimps were used as test subjects and no one minded all that much. But there is a feeling about animal 'rights' today that did not exist even a generation ago. Might not the same be eventually true of machines?
Boru
In the essay, he stresses the point that unmanned space vehicles will necessarily have to become more intelligent if they are to remain the best option for this type of work. But he stops short of at what seems (to me, at least) to be a vitally important question: At what point does machine intelligence make it unethical to use spacebots for suicide missions?
Since Sagan wrote the piece in the late 1970s and even since his death almost a quarter century ago, machine intelligence has grown tremendously. The self-awareness/sentience of computers appears to be a matter of not 'if', but 'when'. Do we have any ethical justification for sending a machine of even rudimentary self-awareness to, say, Venus (where it will almost certainly be fried) or Jupiter (where it will almost certainly be crushed)?
I know that in the earliest days of space exploration dogs and chimps were used as test subjects and no one minded all that much. But there is a feeling about animal 'rights' today that did not exist even a generation ago. Might not the same be eventually true of machines?
Boru
‘I can’t be having with this.’ - Esmeralda Weatherwax
