| Summary: | It seems reasonable to think in terms of rights, especially regarding sentient creatures, that is, creatures capable of experiencing physical and emotional distress and showing a certain degree of self-awareness. We observe an increasing autonomy of the machines run by “smart” algorithms, and this is enforcing the boundary between progress in the scientific community and the forecast ability of science fiction narrative. Science fiction has often wondered about the ethical obligations to be assumed with regards of an artificial intelligence with the same degree of consciousness (if not even superior) to man. The answer to these questions has always been quite unanimous: if one day an assembled machine would show mental states and abilities similar to ours, those robots would be entitled to a moral consideration similar to the one we generally devote for our species. In all likelihood, however, the first conscious machines will not resemble us at all, they will have different minds from ours, perhaps in a radical way. They will be creatures with mental abilities and behaviours comparable to those of an insect, an ant, a bee, or perhaps those of different animals: a mouse, a dog, who knows, an orca. What to do with these aliens “differently conscious” subjectivities? We must begin to reflect on whether, and under what conditions, these AIs with degrees of subjectivity and intentionality similar to those of the animal kingdom are entitled to the recognition of same ethical consideration. The study tries to apply concepts such as ‘intersubjectivity’, ‘consciousness’ and ‘sentience’ to Artificial Intelligence, more precisely to the EAI, because its new “embodied” approaches are committed to understanding the role of the body in cognitive processes. Above all, EAI and the philosophy of animality, social robotics and the human-animal studies, are linked together by artificial ethology, a domain that uses robotic modelling to analyze and explain animal cognitive behavior. It is clear then that the question: “what kind ...
|
|---|