Saudi Arabia becomes first country to grant citizenship to a robot

[radtech497]

Meet Sophia, the world's first non-biological citizen. She has been granted citizenship rights by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Thoughts?

Radtech497

[stevebowers]

Ben Goertzel has been a member of the OA community in the fairly distant past; he has some pretty good, and pretty wacky ideas.

[Worldtree]

https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/26/saudi-...en-sophia/

this sums up my thoughts on the matter

"Was the whole thing a depressingly empty, unironic attempt at publicity for Sophia’s human captors? Almost certainly yes, but only time will tell about how international law will handle the advent of AI-powered populations, a future that seems more certain to arrive with each passing day."

i'm guessing we'll continue to see this as another example in a long line of of artificial / corporate citizenship in conflict with or contrasted with the rights of actual people in the foreseeable future/ early OA timeline.

[iancampbell]

https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/26/saudi-...en-sophia/

this sums up my thoughts on the matter

"Was the whole thing a depressingly empty, unironic attempt at publicity for Sophia’s human captors? Almost certainly yes, but only time will tell about how international law will handle the advent of AI-powered populations, a future that seems more certain to arrive with each passing day."

i'm guessing we'll continue to see this as another example in a long line of of artificial / corporate citizenship in conflict with or contrasted with the  rights of actual people in the foreseeable future/ early OA timeline.

Indeed. Even in a non-fictional context, I've thought for a long while that there is something fundamentally wrong with the whole concept of corporate personhood. For at least two reasons; one is that a corporation is potentially immortal (which is certainly not true for humans in 48AT) and that the very presence of a legal fiction such as a corporate person shields real living, sapient, breathing and vulnerable-to-punishment people from the consequences of their actions if they happen to be officers of said corporation.

The Bhopal disaster and the banking crash of 2008 are examples of the possible negative consequences of corporate personhood, IMHO.

[ProxCenBound]

Does Saudi Arabia really think they're fooling anyone, trying to act future oriented and progressive? Despite being wealthy due to oil, they are really very backward - this is a country that doesn't even allow women to drive.

[radtech497]

Does Saudi Arabia really think they're fooling anyone, trying to act future oriented and progressive? Despite being wealthy due to oil, they are really very backward - this is a country that doesn't even allow women to drive.

Saudi Arabia now allows women to drive.

Radtech497

[Rynn]

https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/26/saudi-...en-sophia/

this sums up my thoughts on the matter

"Was the whole thing a depressingly empty, unironic attempt at publicity for Sophia’s human captors? Almost certainly yes, but only time will tell about how international law will handle the advent of AI-powered populations, a future that seems more certain to arrive with each passing day."

I'm quite skeptical of this whole story and this quote is a good summary of why. If you search for the story you'll find dozens of western news sources and blogs talking about it but like a lot of modern news most are carbon copy stories of each other (because no one can afford to not have the latest hot news even if they've done no research or verification themselves). But there's nothing on sites like Al Jazeera or Arab News (nothing on the website of the company that made the robot either). The website of the organisers lists no such thing (the only listing they have for the robot is on the list of speakers). The twitter account for the Future Investment Initiative did retweet an independent article about Sophia but that's it.

There's also a typically vacuous level of real information in the dozens of news articles running this story. Which body or official approved the citizenship? Where are the papers for it? Where is absolutely any evidence beyond the robot claiming it on stage that this is nothing more than a publicity stunt? This all looks like a complete storm in a teacup and it's depressing how normal it is for modern "news" to contain more quotes of random people on twitter than actual facts.

Having said all that if it is true and some member of the Saudi Government pushed through citizenship for a non-human entity I'd wonder what the motive of that was. Beyond setting itself up as a future robotic haven in order to massively boost it's economy in event of a hypothetical robot slave uprising...seems little more than PR. And people blowing their mind about a robot being given citizenship should look into how corporations are viewed by the law. They are legal persons in many senses, hell in the US the concept of Corporate Citizenship exists and was clarified by the supreme court in 2010 (though admittedly it's more of a legal abstraction than a proper document). Still though the idea of a robot citizenship as a precedent is interesting, would certainly help any future robotic civil rights movements (should one ever exist in a recognisable way) rather than the usual SF cludge fix of having a robot be the sole share holder of a holding company that solely owns another company whose only asset is the robot.

[iancampbell]

Sorry for the rant about corporations. To make a somewhat more OA-relevant point, IMHO in the real world (as opposed to the plausible future history that is OA) at some point we are going to have to make decisions about the sapient rights issue. An AI with the same degree of sapience as and equivalent levels of vulnerability to humans would make a very good case for allowing equivalent rights. (Not equivalent, because the needs of an AI would presumably be different from those of a human. For example, early AIs will probably have limited mobility and need a fairly large amount of power with reasonable reliability but OTOH wouldn't need food, water or even air.)

I said "have to make decisions" rather than a wish to make such decisions because the consequences of not doing so at an early stage could well be disastrous for H. sapiens. Slaves generally don't like their captors much and tend not to be good to them if the slaves get the upper hand; how much more so if the slaves aren't only of a different species but a different domain? Actually, the difference is greater than that - all Earthly life has essentially the same biology and AIs and vecs would be totally different, but I don't know of a word to denote organisms of a completely different biology.

And, of course, this whole forum and the OA site assume one or more Singularities. If we don't treat our early mind-children well, how are they going to treat us a few decades later?

[Rynn]

And, of course, this whole forum and the OA site assume one or more Singularities. If we don't treat our early mind-children well, how are they going to treat us a few decades later?

If such entities were not intelligent enough to realise how structural issues in human society lead to immoral situations and instead seek some sort of petty revenge then I'd question whether or not they were post-singularity beings at all. Which isn't to say that a forced restructure of human society to limit abuses to sapient organisms by humanity would necessarily be comfortable...

[iancampbell]

And, of course, this whole forum and the OA site assume one or more Singularities. If we don't treat our early mind-children well, how are they going to treat us a few decades later?

If such entities were not intelligent enough to realise how structural issues in human society lead to immoral situations and instead seek some sort of petty revenge then I'd question whether or not they were post-singularity beings at all. Which isn't to say that a forced restructure of human society to limit abuses to sapient organisms by humanity would necessarily be comfortable...

True. However, the first of the AIs won't be transapient. Which doesn't mean that they won't be a great deal more powerful than humans, taken one versus one. An AI with thinking power 100-1000 times more thinking power than a human would still be troublesome to say the least.

And it wouldn't have to be petty revenge either - simply acting in the interests of their own survival. Are we necessarily acting out of petty revenge when an entire village goes after a man-eating tiger, for example?

It's also OA canon that transencion doesn't necessarily mean a personality change. Which does mean that the transapient might hold a grudge and act on it.

As evidence of this sometimes happening, witness something that is actually an S3 or maybe an S4 (I think); the Queen of Pain. Talk about holding grudges...