This is from an article at TimesOnline (quoted without permission):
A study commissioned by the Government that suggests robots could one day have rights was attacked by leading scientists yesterday as a red herring that has diverted attention from more pressing ethical issues.
Researchers studying robotics said that the Robo-rights document, published in December and sponsored by the Department of Trade and Industry, amounted to pointless philosophical speculation founded on poor science.
While there are important questions to be asked about the direction of robot technology, these have been obscured by considering “robot rights” that no scientists take seriously, the experts said…
Noel Sharkey, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield, said: “The idea of machine consciousness is a bit of a fairytale. I’m not certain it won’t happen, in the same way as when I was seven I wasn’t certain about Santa Claus not existing, but I was fairly sure.”
Machine consciousness “a bit of a fairytale”, eh? God, I could be so scathing about that, if only I had strong views one way or the other.
Actually, I do have strong, or at least deeply-rooted views, but unfortunately, they’re right down the middle. It’s a matter of opinion, people! Whether anything other than an actual human being is conscious, that is.1 The question is whether any robot or other machine will ever be consistently treated as conscious by anyone. Though there’s also another question: whether anyone will ever invest what it would cost to design and build a machine that could tempt someone consistently to treat it as conscious.
I’m really going to have to write something substantial on this soon.
Note 1: Technically, it’s a matter of opinion whether a human being is conscious too, but to view humans as not conscious is highly unnatural, impractical, and will lead to anti-social consequences, so it’s an opinion that’s not factually wrong, but is wrong even so.
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