Sociology, Personal Experience, Robot Rights, A.I.
Duality is a strange concept. Ying and Yang. Good and evil. Ketchup and maple syrup. We live in a world of opposites. Sure, trying to boil down existence to an endless sequence of binary choices would be impossible. Life is not a video game, limited by a series of preprogrammed responses. At any point, I could suddenly run naked in the street for no apparent reason. It would be ill-advised and probably illegal, but I could do it. Somebody could go a year without washing, quit their job and runoff to join the circus or do any number of things.
That does not mean life is devoidof all elements of duality. Roman mythology gives us the figure of Janus, a two faced man who looks simultaneously into the past and future. The first month of the western calendar is called January because it sits at the crossroads between years. After the New Year, we look back at everything which has happened so far whilst also planning for our future. Time itself is a duality of past and future, the present stuck like a pin on the tiny smidge of balance between the two. Our lives embody this struggle. Old friends have to give way to new ones as we develop, causing us to lose touch with those that once defined our sense of purpose. Grievances of yesterday shape our decisions in the now, even though the choices we decide to make are totally irrational. The Beatles said it best.
Yesterday
All my troubles seemed so far away
Now it looks as though they're here to stay
Oh, I believe in yesterday...
Yesterday, The Beatles
Our minds also are subject to a similar form of duality. When faced with difficult decisions, people are often told to think with their hearts not their heads or vice versa. Logic and emotions. Again, we have a dichotomy. Logic tells you to marry rich, get a good job and follow the rat-race to stable prosperity. Emotions, your heart, tells you to go exploring, adventure and disappear to live in a Macedonian shed. Which is the right answer? How should you live your life? I don't know.
Personhood cannot be boiled down to either side of the coin. No matter how rational a person, there will always be certain decisions they make out of instinct, irrespective of the consequences. For example, my brother smokes. He knows smoking is bad for your health. It can ruin your taste buds, blacken your teeth and increases your chances of cancer— he does it anyway. The same goes for doctors. People say it's hypocritical when you see them smoking outside hospitals. However, we have to remember that at that moment, those doctors aren't being doctors. Whilst on their break, they're just normal people, like you and me. Just like how a cleaner can have a messy house, medical professionals can engage in the occasional vice. They don't have to live a perfect life.
Conversely, although probably slightly less relevant to our present discussion, nobody acts entirely on emotions. I don't know anybody who would jump from a plane without a parachute out of spite. There's always some tiny inkling of logic which stops you going off-the-rails entirely. Take my earlier example of running nude in the street. Some people are all about that life— nudist beaches are a thing for a reason. 'Fear' of the law keeps most on the straight and narrow. Our minds do not simply unshackle themselves of worldly concerns. It's why the older you get, the more risk averse you become. Kids, car payments and mortgages all stop you from chasing the fantastical.
So, where do machines fit into all of this. Well, if people are governed by both emotions and reason, to be people, robots require both qualities. Remember when I said SOME robots should not be slaves? It's this duality which I was going on about. Toasters are not deserving of emancipation because they are all reason. Their whole existence can be summarised by a set of logic gates. If plunger is pushed down, set the timer. If timer equals twenty seconds, release the plunger and pop up. Aside from external interference, there is no unpredictable element. Nothing in the state of affairs jumps out as being emotional.If a computer's plans for the future are formed simply through analysing streams of date, it is not a person. If an android's memories are just a set of recordings, it is not a person. Ever heard of the phrase 'rose tinted glasses'? It certainly doesn't mean we see too much red in our memories. Rather, it is a gentle reminder of how imperfect we all are. Past Christmas' are remembered because of the fun everybody had— most of us tune out the fights over who gets the biggest slice of turkey. Unless machines can manifest a similar bias, then they lack a perspective of their own. They are simply part of the furniture, time capsules to catalogue humanity's rise and inevitable fall.
I'm not arguing that machines are incapable of having the necessary intelligence to be people. There are probably machines out there which have already jumped that hurdle. What I am trying to say though is that intelligence is not the only requirement. Homo sapiens have their own perspectives, a creativity if you will, that cannot be reduced to zeros and ones. No doubt given long enough, a computer could write a new play in the style of Shakespeare. Leave them without any guidance at all though and the playwrights task becomes a whole lot harder. Yes, I know they could use an infinite amount of time to come up with a Dawkinesq solution. An infinite number of monkeys on typewriters will eventually churn out the complete works of Shakespeare. By the same logic, they will always write a play so similar to Shakespeare in style that you can't tell the difference. Sadly, that's not good enough.
Have you ever seen a Banksy? Apart from the artist's anonymity, what makes his work so brilliant is it's simplicity. The works of Banksy do not need to show off technical skill because it's his eye for the dramatic which grabs people's attention. No doubt a computer could randomly replicate Banksus Militus Ratus. That misses the point. A random jumble of atoms is less impressive than one with a powerful message, a composition which can be logically explained. Even without knowing the cause of the Pompeii statues, they are impressive. Knowing that there are bodies trapped in the ash though puts you in complete awe of nature.
Creativity and intelligence are another duality found in the human psyche. There are instances of creative geniuses, however the two can equally exist in isolation. Using a towel to stop the toilet flooding is certainly creative, but if you broke the toilet in the first place by smashing the cistern, you were hardly being intelligent. Reconstructing the lost works of Shakespeare through carefully analysing every line he's ever written is clever, but if you're just applying a method your supervisor showed you for the purpose, it's not very creative. At the moment, AI is very good at doing the latter. Give them a method and they will execute it perfectly. Require them to come up with something on their own and they're stumped.
If the world is viewed with logic alone, it is a place of black and white. To stop a pandemic, you lock everybody indoors indefinitely, economy be damned. To solve world hunger you ration food, even at the expense of luxuries like chocolate and coffee. If you're willing to do the extreme, difficult problems have easy solutions. Feelings prevent us undertaking this drastic course. Nobody likes being told what to do or how to live their life. If society became draconically rational, revolute would soon ensue. Hence, duality infects everything we do. Life is a balancing act.
This article paints a stark picture— some might even call it pessimistic. What I've said suggests that our every action boils down to a conflict. However, there is no escaping the simple truth. Duality is a part of all of us. Until robots develop that same dichotomy, they can never really be one of us.