Relativity of Absolute Values

APRIL 12, 2022
BY DARIA KRIVONOS

Recently, over dinner, I raised the question of whether machines should have rights. The immediate response was a blunt ‘no’: A calculator should not have the same rights as a human, an animal or even a plant, as it has no feelings and no (known) consciousness. But what if it were R2D2 or WALL•E? What about even more humanlike future machines?

Ethical standards are aften considered absolute pillars, but as science and society develop, ethics are updated and renewed. Covid-19 has reignited forgotten debates, forcing us to revisit the value of a human life vis-à-vis socioeconomic priorities and of one human life to another, the young vs. the old, the rich vs. the poor, etc. So, what other developments are dilemmas just waiting to happen?

History is an informative starting-point and reveals that most of our ‘absolute’ values have proven relative and subject to contemporary beliefs. In the 19th century, it was OK to exhibit ‘indigenous’ peoples in zoos all over the continent, with ‘civilised’ Europeans queuing up to see the ‘primitives’. Native inhabitants perceived as inferior to the colonial settlers were deemed fit for parading in cages or in the ‘daily life exposé’ of villages built in zoos in Europe and North America. The last of such ethnological displays took place in the 1930s! Such history does not bode well for the welcoming of possible future inhabitants, in the form of artificial general intelligence, i.e. human-level intelligence.

Today, machines take the role of slaves serving at our behest, produced and decommissioned at our whim. But we need to start preparing for a different future. Prof. D. Gunkel raises some relevant questions: “At what point might a robot, algorithm, or other autonomous system be held accountable for the decisions it makes, or the actions it initiates? When, if ever, would it make sense to say, “It’s the robot’s fault”? Conversely, when might a robot, an intelligent artifact, or other socially interactive mechanism be due some level of social standing or respect?”. And perhaps we will not be the ones to ‘assign’ such rights at all. As Nick Brostrom puts it: “... as the fate of the gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves, so the fate of our species would depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence”.

The tension between ethics and science is especially visible in medicine. In the 1970s, when in vitro fertilisation made headlines, it was deemed at odds with nature. The Catholic Church formally opposed it. Today, it is a common procedure to aid couples or women for whom natural conception has proven impossible. When Dolly the cloned lamb appeared in 1996, it stirred a public outcry. And while the ethics of human cloning remain unresolved, you can commercially recreate your favourite pet. The next frontiers of reproduction lie in studies of artificial wombs, which implicitly would circumvent the female body entirely, except for the necessary genetic material and eggs. Time will tell if we will ever embrace such pursuits of human (re)productivity.

CRISPR is another ground-breaking technology that is knocking at our door. In essence it allows us to edit our genetic code in a copy-and-paste manner and harbours enormous potential for alleviating human suffering and eradicating conditions that currently erode the quality of human lives. But it also raises the inevitable dilemma of playing God with our genes and in particular with our germline. Germline editing differs from somatic therapies as the latter affects only the patient and cells being treated, while germline editing affects all cells, including eggs and sperm, and is therefore passed on to future generations.

The question is, is it OK to employ the technology to, for example, eliminate the risk of blindness in an unborn child if the flipside may be the ability to develop universal soldiers who don’t feel pain? Or what if we can tweak cognitive ability while removing the risk of HIV, as was the case with the criticised experiment by Dr. He Jiankui which resulted in the CRISPR twins, Lulu and Nana? Not to mention the potential social implications of the technology being available only to the wealthy.

So, are we ready to discuss the rights of future intelligent lifeforms? And how does a cyborg in essence differ from someone with a pacemaker? Is germline editing really that different from nature’s own evolution, mutation, and natural selection? If anything, the future is filled with dilemmas to ponder, and perhaps some are better addressed before they arrive.

This article was published in SCENARIO Magazine, Issue 61 - available for purchase in the SCENARIO Shop