Sunday, April 22, 2018
Do sexbots have rights?
Slavoj Žižek
The current wave of
politically-correct moralism reared its head in recent debates about the need
to regulate relations between humans and sexbots (sexual robots).
First, for context, allow me
to quote from a news report:
“last year a sex robot named
Samantha was ‘molested’ and seriously damaged at a tech industry festival; the
incident spurred debate on the need to raise the issue of ethics in relation to
machines... while the developers of sexbots have claimed that their projects
will do anything to indulge their customers’ desires, it seems that they might
start rejecting some persistent men... people ignore the fact that they may
seriously damage the machine, just because it cannot say ‘no’ to their
‘advances’... future humanoid sex robots might be sophisticated enough to
‘enjoy a certain degree of consciousness’ to consent to sexual intercourse,
albeit, to their mind, conscious feelings were not necessary components of
being able to give or withhold consent... in legal terms, introduction of the
notion of consent into human-robot sexual relationships is vital in a way
similar to sexual relations between humans and it will help prevent the
creation of a ‘class of legally incorporated sex-slaves.’”
Although these ideas are just
a specific application of a proposal for the EU to impose the basic “rights”
for AI (artificial intelligence), the domain of sexbots brings out in a clear
way the implicit presuppositions that determine such thinking. We are basically
dealing with laziness in thinking: by adopting such “ethical” attitudes, we
comfortably avoid the complex web of underlying problems.
Indeed, the initial suspicion
is that the proponents of such demands do not really care about the AI machines
(they are well aware that they cannot really experience pain and humiliation)
but about aggressive humans: what they want is not to alleviate the suffering
of the machines but to squash the problematic aggressive desires, fantasies and
pleasures of us, humans.
Moral Maze
This becomes clear the moment
we include the topics of video games and virtual reality: if, instead of
sexbots – actual plastic bodies whose (re)actions are regulated by AI, we
imagine escapades in virtual reality (or, even more plastic, augmented reality)
in which we can sexually torture and brutally exploit people – although, in
this case, it is clear that no actual entity is suffering, the proponents of
the rights of AI machines would nonetheless in all probability insist on
imposing some limitations on what we, humans, can do in virtual space.
The argument that those who
fantasize about such things are prone to do them in real life is very
problematic: the relationship between imagining and doing it in real life is
much more complex in both relations. We often do horrible things while
imagining that we are doing something noble, and vice versa. Not to mention how
we often secretly daydream about doing things we would in no way be able to
perform in real life. We enter thereby the old debate: if someone has brutal
tendencies, is it better to allow him to play with them in virtual space or
with machines, with the hope that, in this way, he will be satisfied enough and
not do them in real life?
Finding Answers
Another question: if a sexbot
rejects our rough advances, does this not simply mean that it was programmed in
this way? So why not re-program it in a different way? Or, to go to the end,
why not program it in such a way that it welcomes our brutal mistreatment? (The
catch is, of course, will we, the sadistic perpetrators, still enjoy it in this
case? Because a sadist wants his victims to be terrified and ashamed.)
And one more: what if an evil
programmer makes the sexbots themselves sadists who enjoy brutally mistreating
us, its partners? If we confer rights to AI sexbots and prohibit their brutal
mistreatment, this means that we treat them as minimally autonomous and
responsible entities – so should we also treat them as minimally “guilty” if
they mistreat us, or should we just blame their programmer?
Nevertheless, the basic
mistake of advocates for AI rights is that they presuppose our, human,
standards (and rights) as being the highest form. What if, with the explosive
development of AI, new entities will emerge with what we could conditionally
call a “psychology” (series of attitudes or mindsets) which will be
incompatible with ours, but in some sense definitely “higher” than ours
(measured by our standards, they can appear either more “evil” or more “good”
than ours)? What right do WE (humans) have to measure them with our ethical
standards?
So let’s conclude this detour
with a provocative thought: maybe, a true sign of the ethical and subjective
autonomy of a sexbot would have been not that it rejects our advances but that,
even if it was programmed to reject our brutal treatment, it secretly starts to
enjoy it? In this way, the sexbot would become a true subject of desire,
divided and inconsistent as we humans are.
Mitch McConnell Gets his Own Chapter in the Story of America's Dying Democracy. And it's Devastating
It is Mitch McConnell, more
than anyone else in Washington, who has turned the notion of comity into
comedy.
It’s kind of trivial, perhaps,
but one of my favorite odd facts about the
1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom — the epic event that
produced Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech — is that not one but
two college kids in the bobbing sea of faces crammed around the Reflecting Pool
listening to King’s immortal words would grow up to become U.S. senators many
years later.
One future senator would —
over the course of his
50-year-long, 1000-1-shot rise to political prominence — remain
remarkable true to the expansive vision of that 1963 march, with an almost
annoyingly loud but consistent, laser-like focus on expanding economic
opportunity and fighting for the working classes.
The other young man in the
shadows of MLK grew
up to become Mitch McConnell.
Unlike the
young Bernie Sanders, McConnell must have been taking a dip in the
Reflecting Pool or even dozing off when King said that “with
this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation
into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.” To the contrary, the Kentucky
Republican has risen to the pinnacle of U.S. power, as Senate majority leader,
by turning up those “jangling discords” to a nearly deafening level — with no
moral or ideological compass other than following
the Big Money that promises political power in our warped 21st
century, with a win-at-all costs mentality that crushes norms of basic
democracy that had survived for a couple of centuries. It is Mitch McConnell,
more than anyone else in Washington, who has turned the notion of comity into
comedy.
The latest episode in
McConnell’s sad odyssey came this week, when senators
from both parties started circulating a bill that would curb the power of the
executive branch— now in the person of one Donald John Trump — to fire a
Justice Department special counsel such as Robert Mueller, who is probing the
events surrounding Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and
the possible role of all the president’s men and women, including perhaps Trump
himself.
The fire alarms for democracy
are clanging all across America. The notion that a president can arbitrarily
fire the prosecutor looking at possible criminality in that president’s
campaign is the power reserved for a dictator, not the leader of a democratic
republic. The public gets that — literally
hundreds of thousands have pledged to hit the streets if Trump makes a move on
Mueller or the deputy attorney general overseeing him, Rod
Rosenstein. (Police
brass in Pittsburgh even told cops to bring their riot gear to work —
an overreaction, but it does speak to the gravity of the potential
constitutional crisis.)
Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell doesn’t take the threat to our democracy as seriously as the Pittsburgh
police. Indeed, the only threat he sees from the tangled politics of Trump and
Mueller is the threat to the only thing that matters to McConnell anymore — his
51-49 hold on the Senate majority. He is dead set on using his considerable
power over the legislative process to make sure that protecting Mueller and
averting this crisis never comes up for a vote, even though it seems that a
majority of lawmakers in his upper chamber currently support it.
“We’ll
not be having this on the floor of the Senate,” McConnell told Fox News on
Tuesday. His logic is that the bill isn’t necessary because he doesn’t believe
that Trump is planning to fire Mueller. As one of my astute Twitter followers
pointed out, the majority leader’s stance is akin to refusing to buy car
insurance because you have no plans to get into an auto accident anytime in the
future. But trying to apply common sense to virtually anything that happens in
Congress these days is a waste of time. I’ve followed politics closely for all
of McConnell’s career in Washington, and I’m hard pressed to think of anything
the Kentuckian stands for — beyond self-preservation.
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