I want to be a machine
So I was watching the TV show Humans (brilliant show if you haven't seen it) on Channel 4 last night, which is about AI robots; and, after it committed a crime, this robot wants the same legal rights as humans. Basically, the robot wants to be identified as a human. So this made me think: why can't I identify as a machine, or a robot? I mean, I am just a biological robot/machine. Why does society get to choose my identity - an identity that apparently means that I have free will and a soul.
There's a part in Terminator 3 where Arnie gets angry and starts beating up a car whilst shouting "I AM A MACHINE" because I think he was expected to act human. Sometimes I feel like that: I am limited by my genes, my upbringing, and all the biology, so sometimes people expect too much from me, to be something I am.
So, do you think that humans should have the right to legally be recognised as machines or robots?
There's a part in Terminator 3 where Arnie gets angry and starts beating up a car whilst shouting "I AM A MACHINE" because I think he was expected to act human. Sometimes I feel like that: I am limited by my genes, my upbringing, and all the biology, so sometimes people expect too much from me, to be something I am.
So, do you think that humans should have the right to legally be recognised as machines or robots?
Comments (25)
"A machine without an owner is a contradiction in terms."
How so? Would that mean an AI self sustaining robot would not be a machine? We already have vacs that are self sustaining in that they return to their docking stations to recharge, or the Mars rovers that use solar power.
If humans created AI, then I would argue that evolution created humans. Therefore I could identify as EA: Evolutionary Intelligence.
You have simply become the means to someone else's end (something the rest of us human beings have been historically trying to escape).
[citation needed] also which country
If that's true, do you know the reason for it?
That's pretty much par for the course in any country. You join the military and Uncle Sam owns your ass. You can't even legally get a tatoo or cut your hair some funky way without being subject to the UCMJ. The reason is that "Ours is not to question why, our's is just to do or die" when on the front lines. You jump when they tell you too and duck as well and if you can't trust those in charge they may wind up dead.
www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/ucmj.htm
Ctrl-f tattoo = 0 results
Ctrl-f hair = 0 results
Where's that citation from the law of whatever country? (you did say 'legally')
Ah, that does sound bad.
I think you should be able to be treated as a machine, but I am a machine like you, and I have been programmed to not treat you like a machine. Sorry.
Because resistance is futile. Submit to assimilation.
Therefore, become a Stoic.
But this is the questionable presumption - that you are just a biological machine.
Biology would see it as the other way round. Life arises as a form of machinery imposed on nature - that is, constraints on material freedoms. So yes, there is mechanism involved. But it is not fundamental. It is superimposed in regulatory fashion to restrict dynamical chaos.
So if we jump ahead to humans and societies, we find that individual biopsychology is the new level of "material chaos" that is in need of mechanistic regulation. A functioning human emerges as a result of a suitable period of regulative training. Raising and educating the child, we call it. :)
And as Wuliheron points out, modern society has achieved the kind of complexity where it has systems for turning out virtual automatons. You can be put through the military mincer. You can become another call centre drone. Even being trained as a "creative" is another process of careful social moulding. If you go to fine arts school, there is a way you are meant to turn out.
None of this is a bad thing in itself. It is just the truth of the phenomenon we call life and mind.
Which ought to make you question the specific role that the current crop of cyborg mythologising plays in modern culture (and I'm enjoying Westworld at the moment).
Of what social value is this Romantic questioning of the image of humans as deterministic automata? Why would we concern ourselves, through dramas, with robots that "wake up" with "proper minds"?
Quoting DanEssex
In part, that does happen. There is some recognition that crimes may have been committed under orders, or due to "biological hardware" incapacity.
But the main task of society - if it wants to impose its mechanistic regulatory frameworks on our chaotic psychologies - is to convince us all that we have a soul. We are selves. We are moral agents.
So the legal system goes along with that (in modern "civilised" democracies). It wants to foster the belief that we are entirely accountable for our every action and as unlike a machine or robot as it is possible to be.
There is cute irony in all this. We can't be coerced by a system of rules and regulations until we have first learnt how to be a "we" that can function that way.
And as I say, none of this is inherently bad. Humans after all are evolved to be this kind of composite creature - a mix of biology and culture held together by language.
You may very well be a wet robot, and should not have any human rights. I, however, am neither a robot nor a machine.
Please get it right: "Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated."
"a mix of biology and culture held together by language."
I would argue that culture is biology in that culture only exists because of us, and we are only biology
There is so much we can't explain, yet when it comes to humans society is black and white. You are either good or bad, you chose to do those bad things or good things. So if im not black and white how can society define us so easily?
My eyes are like cameras.
My ears are like mics
My legs are like wheels
My heart is just a pump
My kindeys are just filters
My brain is just like a computer
So I am a biological machine, a product of evolution.
But what does the actual evidence say on this?
The human infant is born spectacularly helpless and reliant on social care. The brain is a sponge for language learning and enculturation up to the age of 7. Homo sap even evolved the further 10 year stage of adolescence to allow for social fine tuning of the higher cortical pathways.
So in many ways that aren't shared by chimps, gorillas or even moderately recent hominids, Homo sap is biologically set-up for the expectation of language-based cultural regulation.
So "we" are not just biology. The very idea of being a self - the capacity for being introspectively self-conscious - is a social construction of recent evolutionary origin.
I agree that is not part of the standard modern romantic mythology - the popular cultural view that we are souls locked inside skulls. But that is what social psychology tells us. (And yes, I have studied this particular question as a field, so at worst I'm offering an informed opinion here.)
However don't take these comments the wrong way. I thought your OP raises an important issue in an interesting fashion.
To the extent we are "machines", then how should the law apply? We face that with psychopathic killers whose brain scans might reveal a tumour in some critical empathetic and moral reasoning pathway.
Does it make sense to blame and punish the mechanical? But on the other hand, is there any issue in simply disposing of a defective machine?
We actually do have a responsibilty to understand the true nature of being human to justify our notions about justice.
So then if there is a God that made us, then that would make us machines? Is god a machine?
As usual in a philosophical discussion, terms need to be clarified before the discussion itself can have any meat to chew on. What is a machine?
Oh, by the way, Welcome to the Machine.
What, like a washing machine or a vacuum cleaner? Why would you want that?