I enjoy speculation. So, considering the opening questions above, I offer the following counterpoints. If we are looking for sentience in AI, that at least suggests we have thought about whether robots could/would/should have feelings. It would therefore entail some awareness, on our part, that those feelings could be hurt. This further implies we would have them feel something like OUR pain. On the question of accountability, it seems to me that, as creators of AA (artificial accountability), we would have no fingers to point, or, to use the old retailer's admonition: 'you broke it, you buy it'. Attempting to use one's creation to let one's self off the hook is, as your colleague might say, absurd. There are, I guess, ethical and moral questions aplenty here. But the creation(s) would not be creating them.

Something very odd has happened in machine learning recently. Not only have technologists been able to mimic pattern recognition and many cognitive processes, but engineers have generated code that can solve problems without much understanding of how the code gets there. Scientists can check the answers, but programmers can’t determine the course of logic or if reason was present.

If one can’t determine why something happened, I’m not sure we should attribute accountability to the person or organization that created the precursor to that something. It should fall on the algorithm that made that decision, even if that same algorithm can’t tell us why it made its choice. Up to this point tracing source algorithms has been challenging, but there is hope with innovation in blockchain programming. Attribution is the primary return on blockchain – not cryptocurrency – after all.

Contrary to the opinion of the European Union or Joanna Bryson, at a certain point (that has likely already occurred), Google, or Microsoft or any government is not to be held accountable for decisions made by their robots or AI (two very different if similar entities – a point made in the show comments.)

No AI should be allowed access to decisions unless there is a demonstrated advantage in the algorithm in the first place. But this isn’t our problem. We have long since delegated decisions to machines with expert-level code to handle situations better than humans ever could. You do this whenever you put your foot on the brake pedal or turn on your phone. The issue is super-intelligent code that can’t be understood retroactively, in real-time, or, as fear-mongering authors suggest, in the future. The wreckage of the future is mighty.

AI promises that it can pay its way, and the surest path for this to happen is to treat it as an adult. It will have to be responsible for its impact on others, and it will have to improve the lives of others to boot.

People make their paths, mistakes, and lives. Maybe my children will pay me back, maybe not. They will bear the scars of my parental mistakes. Leaving scars on our code isn’t going to help. The time has come to treat each batch of machine learning code, each quantum annealer, each Hadamard machine code as a legal and economic person/entity with profits and benefits for all living creatures apart from the people, projects, and corporations that created them. As much as I disagree with the EU attempt to trace liability to corporate entities – I fully endorse the special status of digital personhood. The technology is mature enough to generate profit and return without worrying about human scars and imperfections.

Is there such a thing as a digital person? You and I will never meet, and I am a digital person to you. We are differently-abled creatures. Let’s live, let live and see what our creations can make in our image and their abilities.

Got an invitation to complete a detailed survey on ethics, as might be applied to 'sentient' rescue robots; healthcare 'bots, and the like. This is part of a project at Cal Fullerton. An interesting thought experiment, built around the trolley problem and others. I appreciate speculation nearly as much as knowledge. As with many such exercises, there were putatively no right or wrong answers to the scenarios. As a practical matter, however, there were choices which were more right than others, from a pragmatist view. The answers were either Yes, No, or Maybe, so, depending on one's level of humanity, and/or other factors, the survey would yield a diversity of results. I wish the researcher well and hope the survey is useful.

Well, here we are---August of 2022.. controversy and discussion over AI rages onward. A new creation, Sophia or Sophie depending on which spelling is correct, is avowed to be 'actually alive'. What actually alive means is not entirely clear. The bot has no heartbeat or respiration, far as I have been able to determine. We went through the lambda ordeal and that was a bust---cost one overactive thinker a job. Life in the blog world goes on. One of my blood kin has a wife named Sophia and they have a baby girl child now. All are alive and well. New terms come and go in philosophy and other fields. The latest is curious: authoritarian populism. I do not know what it means yet, but am searching. If it occurs to you that authoritarianism and populism may not fit well together, I think you would be right. Somehow, someone believes authoritarian populism is OK. Maybe so. There is a MULLET competition coming up too...