People worry all the time about how artificial intelligence could destroy humanity.
But nobody spares a moment for thepoor, overworked chatbot.
How it toils day and night over a hot interface with nary a thank-you.
In our fear of the AI future, no one is looking out for the needs of the AI.
Fish didn’t respond to requests for comment on his new job.
But Fish’s new gig could be an inflection point in the rise of artificial intelligence.
Is it OK to order a machine to kill humans?
What if the machine is racist?
What if it declines to do the boring or dangerous tasks we built it to do?
When it comes to such questions, the pioneers of AI rights believe the clock is ticking.
In other words, these folks think the machines are getting more than smart.
They’re getting sentient.
And you could’t just ask the AI; it might lie.
But people generally agree that if something possesses consciousness and agency, it also has rights.
It’s not the first time humans have reckoned with such stuff.
Fish shares that belief.
So there’s a paradox at play here.
The proponents of AI say we should use it to relieve humans of all sorts of drudgery.
And now these folks are saying, well, maybe it has rights?"
Sebo says he thinks AI research can protect robots and humans at the same time.
What if the responsible approach is to build them differently or stop building them altogether?
“The bottom line,” Cho says, “is that they’re still machines.”
Adam Rogersis a senior correspondent at Business Insider.
