Maybe this is just because I spent most of my weekend lying motionless on my sofa with a 104 degree fever watching the Battlestar Galactica Season 1 DVD set that Al lent me, but I think it's safe to say that even if we did at some point create artificially intelligent machines, they still shouldn't be allowed to vote.
If you think the media spin-doctoring has too much influence over voting habits now, just imagine what would happen once a political party could launch a "vote virus" the night before the election, infect all of the robots, and then gain a landslide victory the next day.
Even worse, consider that if robots could vote, we could just build voters. Elections wouldn't simply be won by the individuals who had the most money backing their campaign, they would be won by the people who had the most money going into the literal construction and fabrication of their constituency. Even if the robots weren't necessarily programmed to think they were either Republibot or Democon, the old "I gave you life, now you owe me your vote" would be a hard argument to thwart.
Okay, so that's a pretty silly scenario...except this was precisely the kind of argument that took place when trying to decide which Englishmen should be granted suffrage after Parliament executed King Charles I and set up the English Republic. Some argued that allowing non-landowning servants to vote would equate to giving their masters extra votes (for who would contradict their master?). This was also the same argument that led black slaves to be counted as less than whole men in early American government. If a slave was counted as a whole person, it would give every slave-holding state extra seats in the House.
But what if we could program artificial intelligence to think conservatively or liberally (whatever those terms mean)? Or, perhaps less satirically, what if we could determine if some kind of genetic programming could lead people to think one way or another?
It would be easy to predict where the road would lead us if we allowed ourselves to be duped into subscribing to such a determinist view of human behavior. At some point, a threatened political body would argue that people who think in a way contrary to its own political ambitions were following a programmed script of bad political choices. Nothing more than robots with apparently infinitely recursive and self-destructive subroutines...they shouldn't be allowed to vote, or, worse yet, they shouldn't even be allowed into the mainstream society.
Then again, isn't this exactly what happens whenever you hear someone say that conservatives are incapable of thinking logically?
If our degree of concern for the environment was somehow predetermined genetically, don't you think some whacky environmentalist would advocate aborting all of the pollution-loving babies in order to save Mother Earth from her ungrateful children? (Actually...aren't the zero population growth people already arguing for this...)
As we probe deeper and deeper into prenatal testing, one thing that will always remain a surprise is what kind of thinker the baby will be. And it should stay that way, lest we end up in a world where everyone thinks exactly the same way...and that would really be the world run by robots.
A professor here advertised his class on robotics with posters including images from the Terminator movies and the tagline "Hasten their arrival". Then at the first lecture, he expressed his surprise at the fact that robots taking over the world is so often portrayed in a negative light!
Posted by: the mad engineer | February 26, 2007 at 06:23 PM
I don't know that robot overlords would really be all that worse than any of the human overlords we've had to deal with...
Posted by: PeterTerp | February 26, 2007 at 07:11 PM