, a Pepper model robot was hailed as the first non-human to give evidence in Parliament, after it issued pre-recorded answers to members of the UK Education Select Committee during a session on the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”. Rather than shedding light on the advance of robotics, this stunt further obscures it.
It is not the first time I have seen this phenomenon. I began researching AI ethics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1993. Doctoral students passing by what was essentially a statue made of motors, vaguely shaped like a human, said to me “it would be unethical to unplug that”. The robot was still under construction, and didn’t work at all until some years later. Other, functional robots shaped like insects lay around, but attracted no moral attention.
People desperately want robots and AI to be people. But robots are not our eternal super-powered offspring. They are extensions of the individuals or corporations that built them, deliberately designed, uploading our data to farms that are vulnerable to cyberattack.
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It is no longer a cute trick to pretend that a robot can testify in front of parliament, or to have a human tweeting for a robot on another planet in the first person, as NASA does with the Opportunity rover. When we think “AI looks, sounds and feels like a person”, we are vulnerable. . To maintain economic and legal coherence, our society needs to acknowledge that there is a fundamental difference between free citizens and something that is designed to follow commands.
Identifying where responsibility lies for the actions of AI systems is easier than doing so with humans, because we can log every step of the engineering of the system. We have done this already for driverless cars, because the automotive industry is well regulated. We can extend this sort of accountability into every other example of embodied Al – such as robots that give pre-recorded testimony delivered to parliaments. And we should.
