Machines Like Me

While mounted policemen charged at miners, and manufacturing towns across the country began their long, sad descent in the cause of free markets, the subject of robot ethics was born. The international automobile industry consulted philosophers, judges, specialists in medical ethics, game theorists and parliamentary committees. Then, in universities and research institutes, the subject expanded on its own. Long before the hardware was available, professors and their postdocs devised software that conjured our best selves – tolerant, open-minded, considerate, free of all taint of scheming, malice or prejudice. Theorists anticipated a refined artificial intelligence, guided by well-designed principles, that would learn by roaming over thousands, millions, of moral dilemmas. Such intelligence could teach us how to be, how to be good. Humans were ethically flawed – inconsistent, emotionally labile, prone to biases, to errors in cognition, many of which were self-serving. Long before there was even a suitable lightweight battery to power an artificial human, or the elastic material to provide for its face a set of recognisable expressions, the software existed to make it decent and wise. Before we had constructed a robot that could bend and tie an old man’s shoelace for him, there was hope that our own creations would redeem us.

The life of the self-driving car was short, at least in its first manifestation, and its moral qualities were never really put to the test over time. Nothing proved more vividly the maxim that technology renders civilisation fragile than the great traffic paralyses of the late seventies. By then, autonomous vehicles comprised seventeen per cent of the total. Who can forget that roasting rush-hour evening of the Manhattan Logjam? Due to an exceptional solar pulse, many on-board radars failed at once. Streets and avenues, bridges and tunnels were blocked and took days to untangle. Nine months later, the similar Ruhr Jam in northern Europe caused a short economic downturn and prompted conspiracy theories. Teenage hackers with a lust for mayhem? Or an aggressive, disordered, faraway nation with advanced hacking skills? Or, my favourite, an unreconstructed automobile maker loathing the hot breath of the new? Apart from our too-busy sun, no culprit was ever found.

The world’s religions and great literatures demonstrated clearly that we knew how to be good. We set out our aspirations in poetry, prose and song, and we knew what to do. The problem was in the enactment, consistently and en masse. What survived the temporary death of the autonomous car was a dream of redemptive robotic virtue. Adam and his cohort were its early embodiment, so the user’s manual implied. He was supposed to be my moral superior. I would never meet anyone better. Had he been my friend, he would have been guilty of a cruel and terrible lapse. The problem was that I had bought him, he was my expensive possession and it was not clear what his obligations to me were, beyond a vaguely assumed helpfulness. What does the slave owe to the owner? Also, Miranda did not ‘belong’ to me. This was clear. I could hear her tell me that I had no good cause to feel betrayed.

But here was this other matter, which she and I had not yet discussed. Software engineers from the automobile industry may have helped with Adam’s moral maps. But together we had contributed to his personality. I didn’t know the extent to which it intruded on, or took priority over, his ethics. How deep did personality go? A perfectly formed moral system should float free of any particular disposition. But could it? Confined to a hard drive, moral software was merely the dry equivalent of the brain-in-a-dish thought experiment that once littered philosophical textbooks. Whereas an artificial human had to get down among us, imperfect, fallen us, and rub along. Hands assembled in sterile factory conditions must get dirty. To exist in the human moral dimension was to own a body, a voice, a pattern of behaviour, memory and desire, experience solid things and feel pain. A perfectly honest being engaged in such a way with the world might find Miranda difficult to resist.