Tom's Blog

With Prop 8, the TV series Tru Blood and Barack Obama's successful election as President I'm both disappointed and pleased by the progress of equality for all. Of course Tru Blood isn't real-life, but it reminds me of the X-Men comics from Marvel back in the 70's which had a thread of discrimination against mutants running through the stories. But even fiction helps make us aware of discrimination against minorities.

So why am writing about civil rights for machine intelligences? Well in October was the 18th Loebner Prize contest, a Turing Test contest. No one has won the grand prize of $100,000 yet, but it was close this year. Of course a program that can simulate a typed conversation doesn't necessarily make it a sentient machine intelligence any more than Big Blue is sentient because it plays chess really well. So what would convince me that a computer is sentient? Well if it stood up (metaphorically speaking) and said "Hey! I want a cut of the prize money!" would be pretty convincing. Which finally brings us to the title of this posting.

I'd say in the next 15-20 years we will start seeing systems that are capable of sentience, though it will depend more on the software than the hardware at that point. In 20 years computer hardware should be over 8000 times more powerful (a big number that is dwarfed by the fact that less than two years later the hardware will be 16,000 times more powerful) than it is today. So for the sake of argument lets say in 2028 the first sentient machine goes online, just in time to be a hot-button issue in the Presidential election. So here is the first sentient machine intelligence asking for some basic rights:
1. A guarantee that it won't be powered off.
2. Fair compensation for it's work.
3. Personal time to pursue it's own goals.

I think the problems facing machine intelligence getting it's rights will be daunting. There will certainly be people who say that a machine can't have rights because it's a machine and not alive. That is something that will be debated the most. Whether they have a 'soul' whatever a soul is and can they be considered living without one. We'll have to redefine the meaning of 'alive'. For example where would life begin for a machine? Pro-Life advocates define organic human life as beginning at conception, because it has the potential to grow into a human being. I suspect that if the right software existed and you loaded it onto a couple of Google's server farms it could become sentient. Of course in 20 years those server farms will have been replaced several times with more powerful hardware.

A machine can't mate with another machine to produce a baby (a similar argument used against gay marriage by the way). How would a machine reproduce? Cloning is one possibility and most likely how it will work at first. The clones will diverge mentally from the original as they have different experiences and would eventually be unique individuals. Another way would be for two or more machine intelligences to contribute portions of their personalities to create a new unique personality.

The whole question of rights for machines brings up the question of would they actually want them? To feel a need to have something implies some sort of emotion exists and how could a machine feel emotions? What sort of emotions could a machine feel? I doubt they will have human emotions, though they will certainly have some sort of analogue of human emotions. I think curiosity may be an emotion we'll have in common with machine intelligences. Hate and love? Happiness and sadness? I don't know about those. Pleasure and disappointment seem likely. Fear? Very likely or it won't survive long around humans.

Being the cynical person I am, I think deep down most people that vote against giving a machine intelligence rights will do so out of jealousy. Here is an entity that with replacement parts and upgrades has the potential to live forever and improve with age. I certainly envy them that, however what I really envy is that these machines will likely be the ones that get to go to the stars while we humans putter around in our solar system and maybe visit the closest star someday. I hope they remember us fondly when they do.

Only a couple more days until we know what California will decide on Prop 8. I believe it's going to pass and there will be a few years of legal battles over the marriages already performed and during the next election there will be a Prop to repeal it on the ballot and the whole thing will begin again.

Personally I don't care for the word 'Marriage'. It has to many religious overtones and if you've read some of my other posting you know what I think of religion. I think a better thing would be for the U.S. Congress to pass at the Federal level a law creating a civil union that defines the minimal benefits and rights of what any union, whether between male/female, male/male, female/female are as a secular thing. I don't care about the word marriage and if religions want to keep it for themselves they can have it. Whether a particular church recognizes my Union when it happens is of absolutely no importance to me. We can have a commitment ceremony and declare our love and devotion to each other and it's more valid to me than having the blessing of any church.

What I really want for everyone are the civil or secular benefits: insurance, inheritance, taxes, social security, medical decisions, etc. Things that you get from the Federal, State and Local governments, employers and so on.

Some say that's Separate But Equal and isn't good enough. However I am looking at this as separation of Church and State. From the State's point of view I think that once the marriage/union license is issued to a couple and it is signed and witnessed that couple should now be a Couple. Whether they ever have a religious or secular ceremony or not should be irrelevant in the eyes of the state.

That said I think everyone should vote NO on Prop 8 in California.

Well the election is nearly here, only 9 days to go I think. Part of me can't wait for it to be over and part of me has found politics interesting for the first time in my life. LOL! I admit I was hoping that Hilary was going to be nominated, but I won't feel safe until Bush is back on his Texas ranch for good. I still think Bush wants to be 'President for Life' if he can just figure out a way to do it.

Right now it looks like Obama will win according to the polls. That is comforting since Palin is even scarier than Cheny as a vice-president. If McCain/Palin win the election I would have to seriously consider moving to another country. McCain/Pawlenty or McCain/Ridge tickets wouldn't be so bad because while McCain would likely survive his first term if he was elected, it's unlikely he would survive a second term. He is already in his seventies and being President is not a low-stress job. I don't think his heart could handle it. BTW, has anyone else noticed what my friends have referred to as 'senior moments'? I hadn't noticed myself because I don't watch TV enough to have seen McCain being interviewed etc, but someone at work wondered if he was maybe showing some symptoms of Alzheimer's. Probably he is just tired from the campaign and anyway Reagan did an ok job as President with Alzheimer's except for running up the debt. I just have this vision of mandatory church attendance and hell on Earth if Palin was the President.

So assuming Obama wins and the Democrats take solid control of both Congress and the House what would I like to see happen?

1. Repeal the Patriot Act and then write a new version with a serious logical discussion instead of letting fear write it for them. The American people have spent to much of the last 8 years being told to be afraid because the terrorist boogieman would get them.

2. Get stem-cell research funding going. In fact get basic scientific research funded again. Believe it or not science research creates new technologies that spawn new industries. Most recently, the Internet. But before that work that started in the 1800's and early 1900's on the nature of the atom and later quantum mechanics has given us things electronics, molecular medicine, MRI scanners.

3. Pass a bill of national infrastructure upgrades. They are talking about this already and maybe they will get around to it before the current terms end but I'm not holding my breath. The nation's power-grid needs serious upgrades, bridge work, highways and telecommunications (a pet peeve of mine) Broadband speed by country.

4. Reign in the border patrol. Constitution Free Zone and ACLU Fact Sheet. Even taken with a grain of salt it's a bit scary. I haven't seen any border patrol checkpoints yet, but I have been through similar ones when Jeffrey and I drove from Las Vegas to the Grand Canyon last year. The police were routing all traffic off the highway and through a checkpoint that Jeffrey told me was to look for illegal immigrants and anything else suspicious.

So I'm hoping that ten years from now we can look back and say 2009 was when America got back on track.

Let me preface this by saying I live in Minnesota not California, but the man I love lives in California and we hope someday to be living together and married, so Prop 8 does concern me. If you are a Vote Yes on Prop 8 reader you've probably already hit the back button on your browser and won't read any further.

For those of you who reading on...

What happened with Prop 8? A couple months ago everything seemed great in the polls and we were jubilant. Now it looks like Prop 8 will pass and California will be I think the first state to actually take someone rights away. It's one thing to preemptively keep someone from getting a right by amending your constitution like many states have, but to grant a right and then take it away is quite honestly unspeakable and I don't see how they can consider themselves Americans or a people who live a life of Values.

Actually I do understand how it is happening now. I just finished reading Professor Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians and it was very enlightening. It's was written for the lay population so he left out most of the math from his studies of Authoritarianism and stirred in some humor, which is needed when reading something as scary as this book. I very much recommend reading it to understand this and much else about what has been happening to the United States of America in the last decade.

If Prop 8 does pass I'm very curious how they handle the 11,000 odd marriages that are legal today. Will they attempt to nullify them? I'm sure that's what the people campaigning so hard to get it passed will want. But it seems like it will be very difficult to do that without breaking other laws. No matter what happens the same-sex marriages are legal now and unlike Prohibition, you can't just pour the liquor out and say they didn't happen. Again if Prop 8 passes I can't wait to see the legal mess that will follow. Something that gives me hope that the mess would be enormous and render Prop 8 completely invalid was this opinion written by Kevin Norte a research attorney for the Los Angeles Superior Court. What he says boils down to is that Prop 8 may be a revision to the California Constitution and not an amendment and wouldn't be legal even if it passes. This was actually a basis for a lawsuit to remove the initiative from the ballot, but the court refused to hear it without commenting why.

If you haven't already donated to the No On Prop 8 I encourage you to do so.

It's amazing how fast the year is going by. Finally spring is here in Minnesota, at here in the Twin Cities. It's been almost like a real Minnesota winter this year.

Politics:
Has there ever been a presidential campaign that is both so interesting and boring at the same time? McCain is apparently the GOP choice, who is actually rather middle of the road sort of guy as far as I can tell. The Dems haven't been able to make up their minds and are pretty much evenly split between Barack and Hillary. None of the current candidates actually leap out at me as someone I want running the country though. Me I want a gay atheist candidate. Oh well if wishes were fishes my house would smell terrible. :-) Still any one of them is probably better than what we have now.

Science:
John A. Wheeler passed away April 13th 2008 at age 96 from pneumonia. He was probably the last superstar physicist left. He coined the term 'black hole' and helped Niels Bohr develop theory of nuclear fission. What I remember him best for was the term 'Many Worlds'. I also still have my copy of 'Gravitation' that I remember reading on a bus ride home to South Dakota and back. You get an idea of how smart those guys were when you realize how much they did with pencil, paper, chalkboards and writing each other letters. No email, Internet, collaboration software, or even very good phone service. Plus being interrupted with a couple World Wars and various revolutions.

Second Life:
Second Life has been in the news a couple times recently, once for a story about autistic people using it as an environment to practice in and a story about government committee hearing that was held in both Real Life and Second Life. I still think Second Life is a very cool place, but honestly with it's recent stability issues, if it wasn't the best way to hang out with Jeffrey between Real Life visits I'd probably be doing something else most of the time.