Pardon The Disruption - Chapter Five

Chapter five explores human enhancement and follows it to the ultimate question of what exactly does it mean to be "human."

d. To Be or Not to Be

“You are what you think” –Ray Kurzweil

Where will the robots find themselves in all this? One way to look at this problem is to come at it from the other direction. A human being is born and lives his life for 60 years as an ordinary person. When he starts to break down due to the aging process, he accesses every technological advancement available to keep himself alive. Let’s see what happens to Bob, a typical American, when he decides to avail himself of everything that science has to offer to prevent his own death in the late 21st Century. When his kidneys start to fail, he has two artificial kidneys implanted. No one would argue Bob is no longer human because he has artificial kidneys.

Then his liver starts to fail and is replaced with an artificial liver. His pancreas, bladder, heart and eyes are also replaced with electronic parts as they, too, cease to function. With all this hardware implanted, we would still be hard-pressed to say Bob is not human. He has a human mind with the same thoughts and dreams he had prior to the addition of all this electronic equipment. In his essence, Bob is still the same person. None of this hardware has altered his “humanity.”

With all his internal organs replaced, Bob now has a bodily life span of 150 years. His brain is known to be biologically limited to functioning for around 120 years. Bob’s healthy body, augmented with quite a bit of hardware, will outlast his brain tissue.

Bob is no quitter, though. As he approaches his 100th birthday, he starts to implant electronics into his brain. The first change is an artificial pineal gland to regulate his sleep patterns. This change will in no way interrupt the continuity of conscious thought that has progressed from the day he was born to the present. Bob was under general anesthetic while the surgery was performed, and, when he awakened, he still saw his life in the exact same way. All his memories were intact; his beliefs, opinions, and feelings were still the same as they had been the day before the operation. Bob still loves his family and hates his government, just as he did before.

While a bio-Luddite might try to claim Bob is now no longer human because he has an artificial component in his organic brain, Bob would strenuously disagree. If you were to tell Bob that treating his sleep disorder by providing an artificial pineal gland rendered him a nonhuman, he would be outraged. If we look at an individual as a collection of thought patterns, what we call personality, Bob’s patterns remain unchanged. His personality is utterly intact.

Next, Bob is faced with hearing loss. Doctors determined that the auditory cortex in his temporal lobe is beginning to fail. This is the part of the brain that processes sound. A second surgery is performed and an electronic auditory cortex lobe is implanted in Bob’s brain. The sensory data coming from his ears is now being read by an artificial device that translates this data for the brain to be able to “hear.” Once again we must ask, “Is Bob human?” The only fair answer under these circumstances is yes, Bob is still human.

Recently, Bob has noticed his vision is becoming impaired. After extensive testing, his doctors determine that the occipital lobe in Bob’s brain is beginning to fail. Fortunately for Bob, science has created a cure. Bob goes under the knife for the third time and has an artificial occipital lobe implanted in his brain. His vision returns. The signals being sent from his electronic eye replacements are now being received by his electronic occipital lobe replacement. Once again, there has been no change to who Bob is, just a change in how he processes sensory input. With this technological enhancement, Bob now has telescopic vision and can see objects as far as a mile away with the same degree of accuracy as things that are only one foot in front of his face.

Next, it’s Bob’s sense of balance that begins to fail. His movements become slow and uncoordinated. He has a tendency to sway and sometimes even stagger when walking. His doctors determine that his cerebellum is on the verge of giving out completely. Once again, it’s science to the rescue for Bob. He now endures his fourth brain surgery and has an artificial cerebellum implanted in his brain. All the sensory information being sent from his lower limbs is now being processed by his artificial cerebellum to maintain balance and allow him normal movement.

At the ripe old age of 120, Bob finally develops diabetes. Both his legs are amputated and he is provided with robotic replacements. Bob’s starting to resemble the $6 million man. At this point the need for nutrition to service his organic parts is quite limited. The doctors go in and give him an artificial stomach and digestive tract to provide for his limited nutritional needs. In the space where his large stomach and gut once existed, a large battery pack to power his electronic parts now sits. The artificial skin that covered his robotic limbs is of the same color and texture as his actual skin. Viewed from a distance, it is impossible to tell the difference between organic Bob and synthetic Bob.

The muscles in Bob’s arm begin to atrophy to the point that lifting household objects like a briefcase or bag of groceries has become painful. Bob has his organic arms replaced with brand-new robotic arms. The sensors in his fingers allow his brain to manipulate his hands with a more subtle nuance than his organic hands ever could. This allows Bob to learn how to play the piano – a new skill that provides him with hours of enjoyment. He also has the ability to lift 100 pounds with one arm and barely feel it. At the same time, he can hold a Styrofoam cup without crushing it. Not only does Bob not miss his organic arms, he actually prefers his new synthetic ones.

As Bob approaches his 130th birthday, he finds it difficult to form sentences. His faculty of language is becoming impaired. After extensive testing, his doctors determine his parietal lobe is failing. This is the portion of the brain involved in language processing. Bob is now subjected to his fifth brain surgery to replace his parietal lobe. The operation proceeds without a hitch, and with his new and improved parietal lobe, Bob has become quite the linguist. For the first time he finds himself writing poetry. He develops a voracious appetite for reading the classics and then tries to synthesize them into a vibrant new work. Bob’s use of language is now the equivalent of someone with an IQ of 250.

Bob has now replaced quite a few components in his brain. His sleep cycle, vision, hearing, balance, and language construction are all being performed by artificial electronic components. With robotic arms and legs being controlled by machine intelligence, Bob has become superhuman in his physical capacity. Bob still goes to work every day and hangs out with his friends on the weekend. He pays his bills, mows his yard, goes to the movies and worries what the future will be like for his children. His conscious mind is still characterized by an absolute continuity, all the way back to his birth. While he is now three-quarters machine, he still cries at weddings and cheers for his team at football games.

When Bob turns 135, he notices he has trouble paying attention and staying awake. This time it’s his brain stem. Time has worn down this bundle of neurons and he’s rapidly losing function. His sixth surgery provides him with an artificial, electronic brain stem. He now has a first-rate system to transfer information from his body to his brain. He’s more alert, more focused than he’s ever been in his life. He can see and hear with a clarity beyond the normal human capabilities. His physical movements have a precision that he’s never known before. While Bob is still an organic life form, there isn’t much organic tissue left.

When Bob suffers a bout of pneumonia for the fourth time, he agrees to give up on lungs forever. The idea that he will no longer rely on breathing to sustain his life is terrifying for Bob. Getting an artificial heart merely meant changing one silent pump for another – not anything he would really feel or be aware of in his conscious mind. The same with changing out a kidney or liver. While it was a radical change for sure, it just did not register in the conscious mind. To stop breathing will be something altogether different. This is something he will notice in his conscious mind, daily. It will be a very real reminder that his humanity had been radically and permanently altered. Speech will now be conducted without the use of his lungs to force air through his voice box. No more sighing. No gasping at surprises. While Bob’s speech will now come from an artificial voice box, it will still sound natural. Sound reproduction has come a long way. His voice will sound exactly the same as it always has.

When the operation is completed, Bob is 100% electronic from the neck down. The only organic material left in Bob is the frontal lobe of his brain. The rest of him is now completely electronic. Bob is about to turn 140 when his ability to remember things starts to dim. The final step lies before him. He has no choice. He has to acquire an artificial frontal lobe if he wants to cheat death one more time. This procedure will be quite a bit more difficult than anything he’s done before. Everything up until now has been a matter of engineering and body mechanics. This is something different. The frontal lobe controls our emotions and defines our personality. It is involved with motor function, problem solving, memory, language, judgment, impulse control, and social and sexual behavior. In a very real sense, Bob’s frontal lobe is Bob.

Bob will need to download his life history into an artificial frontal lobe. He spends an entire day under a scanning machine that maps his frontal lobe. Every neuron, every synapse has to be mapped with such precision that each and every memory can be copied and downloaded into the artificial frontal lobe. If this procedure is not conducted with absolute accuracy, regardless of whether the physical entity named Bob continues to exist, the human being known as Bob will die on the table.

My grandmother on my father’s side lived into her mid-90s. During the last few years of her life, she did not recognize a single living human being. Not her sons, grandsons, nor anyone else. When I went to visit her, she asked me if we had gone to high school together. This kind and generous woman, whom I had known my entire life, could not recognize me due to the ravages of Alzheimer’s. It was at that moment that I had to reevaluate what death is. Though biologically alive, my grandmother had ceased to exist. The human form that stood before me was not my grandmother. Alzheimer’s had destroyed those memories, thought patterns, and personality traits that had defined her for her entire life. Her physical presence in no way changed this incredibly sad fact.

This is the dilemma facing Bob. If the transfer fails, the resulting robot may be able to function as an autonomous entity, but it will not be “Bob.” If the download is successful, then Bob will awake from the operation just as he did from all the others. All his hopes and dreams, his memories, his personality, his likes and dislikes will remain the same. The “pattern” we perceive as Bob will continue to exist. In his conscious mind, Bob will see an unbroken pattern going all the way back to his live birth 140 years ago. This continuity of experience will convince him that he is Bob and he has never died. He will at this point, however, be 100% electronic. All organic matter will have been removed. Let’s call him Bob 2.0.

And here’s the final rub. Even though he is devoid of organic material, no one will be able to convince Bob he is not a human being. While an outside observer will see a robot, from the inside Bob will believe himself to be a person. With the final conversion, will the government now declare Bob no longer has human rights, that he cannot contract, cannot own property? Will all of Bob’s possessions now pass to his heirs? And if Bob is in fact now property, will his robotic form itself also pass to his heirs as property? If the law denies Bob his humanity, his new owners – the distributees of his estate – could force him to be a domestic slave. He would no longer have free will, doomed to spend the rest of his existence doing what he was told by his rightful owner.

If Bob has a living human wife, will their marriage be voided because Bob is now a machine? Given the time and money expended on efforts to outlaw gay marriage, can you imagine what will happen when people want to marry robots? In this instance Mrs. Bob becomes the unwitting wife of a robot when her human Bob crosses over to being 100% electronic. At what point will the government issue a death certificate and declare Bob dead? Bob has been collecting Social Security for 70 years. Will the US government agree to pay social security payments to someone with a life expectancy of two hundred, three hundred, or even a thousand years? The easy solution would be to declare all radically augmented humans ineligible for Social Security, separating them from the elderly and infirm it is designed to protect. In fact, they may be elderly, but they will have abilities far more robust than their younger but unenhanced human counterparts.

Bob has a rather strong argument that he is in fact still human. And even if people are not willing to accept Bob’s humanity, they will still be hard-pressed to actually allow people to enslave an entity that was once clearly human and still believes itself to be so. This situation is ripe for a compromise. The cyborg, while being half human and half robotic, will not be allowed to compete in the human Olympics. His brain is still completely organic so there is no serious argument to be made that he is not a human being. His robotic legs running at 40 miles an hour would make a complete joke of any human sprinter, with human legs, trying to compete. Perhaps there will be two Olympics: one for people who are completely human, and one for cyborgs of various enhanced or artificial configurations. The point is that we will have to make concessions as these changes become more robust and ubiquitous.

Bob will represent that ultimate moment when a person passes from being an organic life form to an electronic life form. To Bob, the transition will feel like a natural progression to save and protect his health. Of course, there are those on the outside who will find it an abomination. They will try to keep Bob out of their social groups, their neighborhoods, the voting booth, even public office. It will be Jim Crow all over again. As we create more and more Bobs, they will organize and demand their civil rights. If Bob does continue, in his electronic form, to be a member of society with full human rights, we will find ourselves, and our civic discourse, on a slippery slope.

First, for efficiency, if for no other reason, robotic companies will start manufacturing robots that are identical to Bob in his final format. They will mold a face to be identical to the person to be replaced. Then, rather than being replaced piecemeal over an 80 year time period, a person in poor health could have himself downloaded into the robotic format in just one brain scanning operation. Let’s call this entity Bob 3.0. No longer will you have to hobble around with failing organs, failing muscles and withering bones. At the first sign that the body is beginning to fail, Bob will now have the option to be downloaded into a robotic format in one procedure.

If Bob 2.0 is entitled to human rights, how would Bob 3.0 not be entitled to those same human rights? During the debate over gay marriage, a compromise was offered where same-sex couples would enjoy what was known as a “civil union.” This avoided all the religious arguments and objections to two men being married. A civil union would serve the same function as a marriage. It would allow two people to share in all the legal rights that we associate with the marriage. While it would not have the title “marriage,” it would still serve the same purpose, and allow for the same protections.

When Bob 2.0 and Bob 3.0 press for the recognition of their human rights, I can envision a similar compromise being offered. The traditional definition of a human being obviously entailed organic life. The strict constructionists among us will be objecting to the term “human” rights being applied to an autonomous robotic entity. We may have new terms such as “rights of autonomous entities.” The rights of autonomous entities will in fact mimic and encompass what we previously referred to as human rights: the right to own property, enter into contracts, vote, enter marriage (civil unions), and control one’s own destiny as one desires.

The robotic manufacturers will also proceed to create Bob 4.0. This is a robot that has neither human roots nor a human mind downloaded to its mainframe. This robot will, however, have the ability to learn. It will be sold to consumers just like any other household appliance. You will be able to download various programs so that Bob 4.0 can clean the house, do the dishes, or drive the kids to school. If Bob 4.0 is identical to Bob 2.0 and Bob 3.0 in every way short of the human download component, it is only a matter of time before he becomes every bit as complex, with as unique and identifiable a personality, as Bob 2.0 and Bob 3.0. When Bob 4.0 sues for recognition of his “rights of autonomous entities” we are faced with the collision of someone’s property rights and another entity’s claim for autonomy. The family that paid $100,000 for Bob 4.0 is not going to be content to watch him walk out the door and travel to Europe so he can find himself.

If Bob 4.0 obtains his civil rights from the courts, his owner will have been lawfully stripped of his property. He has lost whatever sum he paid for his household robot.

The class-action lawsuit filed by all the owners against the manufacturer for constructive fraud will be massive – the legal theory being they were defrauded out of the purchase price and received nothing in return. The brief possession of the robot (Bob 4.0) was illusory, at best. The homeowners will claim that the manufacturer's sale of robots was tantamount to human trafficking based on the court’s latest ruling.

Let’s put it to the round table:

RANDY: Presently, all machines are the property (or chattel) of the person who purchased them. Rights under our legal system are based upon a biological model – not a mechanical model. Presently, our law deals with sentient beings and assigns rights to those creatures that are more sentient than others. Thus a child would have more protective rights than a dog and a dog would then have more protective rights than a plant.

This was not always the case. Until relatively modern times, children were the property of their parents. The parents could abuse – and, in ancient times, even kill – their offspring without repercussion, since children had virtually no rights. In the United States during colonial times children were considered chattel by the law. It was perfectly permissible for parents to place their child into indentured servitude, a contract binding the child to work for another for a given length of time usually without any compensation other than food and a place to sleep. Indentured contracts were more like contracts for goods than for labor, since the indentured servitude of the child could pass through the estate should the master die during the term of the contract. Children were often sent to work in factories under horrendous conditions because the factory owner saw them as less willing to strike for some perceived injustice, and they were often paid considerably less than an adult performing the same job. It wasn’t until the Great Depression, when the scarcity of adult jobs became a concern to most able-bodied adult workers, that this child labor (or indentured servitude) disappeared.

ROB: You make a good point, Randy. The progression over time has been for man to provide more and more protection to a greater array of entities. In colonial times, slavery – the forced labor of a human being – was not only acceptable but it was ingrained in our legal system. Unlike indentured servitude, there is no expiration date on which a slave is given his freedom. To require one would have been a violation of the owner’s property rights over that slave.

Animal rights did not develop until the 20th century. It was perfectly permissible for the owner of any animal to abuse or kill, starve or overwork his oxen or horse until the animal literally passed out in the field from exhaustion. It wasn’t until the development of laws passed to curtail abuses against animals that they began to have certain rights under the law. Still, to this day almost any animal can be sold to any person, since the animal is less sentient than a human being.

RANDY: Since Clay’s robot with any sentient ability is so far in the future, the rights of any robot would consist of being the chattel or property of the person who purchased or bought it. That would not change until there was some proof that the robot could understand who he was, what he was, and where he was in time and place, along with a commensurate economic and social need to allow this mechanical being to have some sort of separation from the purchaser. There would need to be a finding of sentience before any rights could be given to any mechanically-produced facsimile of the human thought process. The mere ability to replicate itself would not be a means for this mechanical creature to be granted any rights. The fact that this mechanical creature could outthink or outperform a biologically produced human being would also have little consequence as to this mechanical creature receiving any rights under the law or by society. Until there is a change within society to believe that a mechanically produced entity can have some sentient ability, the robotic worker of the future will merely be the property of anyone who built or purchased it.

CLAY: This entity is closer than you think, Randy. It’s predicted that we’ll be living with a ubiquitous robotic presence in as little as ten years. If Kurzweil is right about the explosion of artificial intelligence, we may see an end to human labor as early as 2029. The debate over robotic rights is just an extension of what you and Rob have summarized concerning an advance in our extending rights and the protection of law over different groups in the last hundred years. Whether an advanced robot is truly sentient or not, it will surely appear to be. We will believe they are sentient because of their language skills. They will show emotion, authentic or not, and we will react to that convincing display.

RANDY: Going back to my original arguments about sentient individuals, clearly the scenario that is set forth above would indicate that both of these creatures have some sentient ability. How far into the future these may come to exist is another question – probably extending past my lifetime. But mere agreement that there is sentient ability does not necessarily mean society will accept mechanically produced creatures as having rights. First, human beings have an amazing ability to rationalize. Children, slaves, and even animals all have some understanding of who they are, where they are, and what is going on, but it took a millennium before children and slaves were given any sort of rights.

CLAY: Charles Dickens worked as an involuntary indentured servant for 12 years of his life while he paid off the debts of his family in pauper’s prison. This was not all that long ago – the 19th century. Slavery was not overturned until Abraham Lincoln’s famous Emancipation Proclamation, during the bloodiest war the United States of America has ever fought. Even after the Civil War (which killed more Americans than all other American wars added together) the rights of those freed slaves did not immediately rise to the same level as the “white race.”

RANDY: Right! It took till the 1960s before black Americans reached the point of having the same civil liberties and rights as whites. As far as animal rights go, they did not come into existence until the late twentieth century, and did not reach the point at which there were criminal penalties for the brutish torturing of animals – even though it was clear that animals were themselves sentient beings.

For the law to extend rights to either one of the above robots, it would take decades after society initially recognized that mechanically produced creatures are capable of sentience. At the present time the mere mechanical ability to mimic human walking is beyond the greatest minds in robotics. A simple staircase confounds the ability of almost any present-day machine to locomote.

CLAY: I respectfully disagree. The exponential progression is carrying things closer to the other side of the chess board even as we speak. From a historical perspective, social movements appear to be extremely slow. Given the rapid change we are seeing on a daily basis (take the Arab Spring, for example) these fights are going to come much faster and be resolved much faster. Hey, give it sixteen years and we’ll know for sure.