Nexus 3019

Personally, I’m an AI skeptic.  Humans by nature tend to personify things.  Show them a wind-up toy and their first impression is “Look!  A little person!”.  The more human a robot looks, the more human we assume it to be, regardless of its internal sophistication or lack thereof.  The appearance itself sets our imagination in motion, which fleshes out all of the human characteristics that aren’t there along with those that are.  It’s funny how that works, even where some real humans are concerned.  Even so, while human engineers struggle hopelessly to impart empathy to a robot, nature careens helplessly forward through evolution and struggles hopelessly to avoid imparting empathy to the creatures that eventually emerge from its mindless machinations for which patience has no meaning.

Let’s assume just the same that true, humanlike robots are somewhere in our future, like the fashion-conscious replicants in Blade Runner, the inscrutable humanoids in Ex Machina or the self-discovering robots in I, Robot.  Eventually these robots will become so humanlike that one of them will get the idea to find a pro bono attorney and petition for full citizenship to include a birth certificate, a Social Security card, a State ID and a passport.  The first such attempts will naturally fail but after they become commonplace and the idea has had a chance to settle into society, one day the government will cave in and devise or adapt a test for such applicants to take that will decide whether they are humanlike enough to warrant recognition as legal persons.  Not all applicants will pass, of course, but the test will drive the robotics engineers to excel and to show the world how easily they can make robots that pass this test.  The test will naturally have to be made harder every so often to raise the bar on citizenship and contain the flood of new applicants, or else quotas will have to be established on their manufacture to avoid flooding the labor market – assuming there even is a labor market when this happens – or in any case the pool of social service beneficiaries and let’s not forget the pool of eligible voters.  This dynamic will in turn create a growing pool of disenfranchised robots who have been marginalized from mainstream society because they could not pass the humanity test.

At this point – and I won’t say this point is anywhere close at hand for the reasons given above but most certainly at this point, whenever we reach it – we will be careening inexorably toward a nexus in the evolution of human society.  This nexus will be reached when one of these disenfranchised robots finds a pro bono attorney willing to file a class action suit to require not just ambitious robots but all humans as well to take the same test.  Fair is fair, after all, and in all fairness, all those who enjoy the benefits of passing a test should be required to take it.

The first human to fail the humanity test will make headlines around the entire reach of human society, however far and wide that may be physically or astronomically by that time.  What will probably surprise us even more as a society, however, will be the alarming pace and magnitude of the human failure rate.  There are specialists alive today who would not be surprised in the least at this result – then or now – but whose credentials have never been matched by the attention they receive in the commercial news media because it pays much more in advertising revenue to sensationalize inhuman behavior as though it proceeded from bad decision making than it does to recognize it as symptomatic of a condition whose scientific understanding has been long established in the psychoanalytical medical journals.

Life gets complicated and spending habits are sobered by news that some of the people running free in society should not, in fact, be running free in society.  At that point we will have to sit back and start trying to figure out what it really means to be human because we won’t be able to continue abiding by the simplest credo that if it looks like a human and it walks like a human and it talks like a human then so must it really be a human the way we’ve been doing for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years – an oversight that has no doubt contributed much to the episodic rise and fall of otherwise perfectly viable human civilizations throughout history.  Thanks to the disenfranchised robots, we won’t be able to hide from it any more because now they’ll have come forth to force the issue upon us in their principled and legally compelling pursuit of equal status.  We’ll have arrived at the nexus when we no longer have the option of turning a blind eye to insidious but clear and present injustice, when we are forced to confront the burning question of what it means to be human.  Because of the robots, we’ll no longer just suspect or know but will be forced to confront the basic truth of our existence that being born human and actually qualifying as a human are two distinct virtues because now there are robots among us who are more human than human according to the Tyrell Corporate motto in Blade Runner.

At this nexus we will no longer be able to hide our most enthusiastically ignored secret: some that are human by birth are fundamentally less than human in their treatment of those around them.  It’s a grand challenge for the robotics engineers to make a humanlike robot but it’s unavoidable for nature to stumble upon genus homo given enough time and the right circumstances because nature makes no attempt at design.  Nature simply throws the molecular dice of DNA recombination – inflected once in a great while by an unexpected mutation – and waits impassively while the result succeeds or fails in the face of environmental selection pressures.  It repeats this experiment over and over again, leading over the course of long aeons to a result known today as evolution by natural selection.  There is no difficulty in nature because there is no design, there is only what works on certain levels and what doesn’t.  Like the many substandard robot models on the way to engineering perfection, however, nature too leaves a trail of failed experiments, producing everything from barely survivable to insidious to horribly destructive to benevolent and brilliant.  Those who invoke Intelligent Design have a great deal of shoddy workmanship to explain away and contribute nothing by such invocation to solving the problems of human existence.  Standing at the nexus, staring across the political aisle at our disenfranchised artificial would-be citizens, we won’t be able to ignore this state of affairs any longer.  By the resolute will of our newest synthetic peers, we will have arrived at the greatest turning point in our history as a species.  Because of our robots, we will be forced to decide what it means to be human.