What makes a person a person? If a corporation can legally be one, can a machine be one, too? Those were among the questions posed to four experts who tried to land on an answer during the last day of Upper Bound.
The news: AI pioneer Richard Sutton, University of Alberta philosophy and digital humanities professor Geoffrey Rockwell, AI ethicist Katrina Ingram, and AI researcher Zhijing Jin gathered on the last day of Alberta’s Upper Bound AI conference to debate whether AI could achieve personhood. The debate touched on humanity’s moral responsibility to any potential sentient machines, the legal status of AI, regulatory frameworks for citizenship for machines, human-AI coexistence, and when a machine might qualify as a person.
From the source: “There will come a time when [machines] are persons. That time is not now,” Sutton said. However, he added that right now is a profound time in this debate because people feel the need to ask the question. “A very important part of machines being people is the public getting used to it and being able to treat these people as true people.”
Following the thread: The debate comes at a moment where rapid strides in AI have prompted global conversations over when artificial general intelligence could, or will, be achieved. Some have even speculated that we have already reached a point where some AI models have sentience, though that claim has been disputed.
It also comes as Canada grapples with what culpability exists for AI models and their parent companies in the aftermath of the Tumbler Ridge, BC mass shooting, where lawsuits allege OpenAI’s ChatGPT model helped influence a young person to carry out the shooting.
Final thought: After four days of Upper Bound programming on the future of AI, much of which centred on the economic opportunity the technology holds, one of the most salient portions of the debate dealt with what machine personhood might mean for those economic forecasts. Ingram argued that ownership would have to “go out the window” if humanity were to avoid issues like digital slavery.
BetaKit’s Prairies reporting is funded in part by YEGAF, a not-for-profit dedicated to amplifying business stories in Alberta.
Feature image courtesy the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute. Photo by Chris Onciul.