Machines: Future Targets of Prejudice?
Todd Murchison
ski@sover.net
AI, Artificial Intelegence, prejudice, machines, robots, technology

	Women, various ethnic groups, physically or mentally impaired people . . . 
	they all have historically been the targets of prejudice, and continue to be.
	We humans love to find reasons for feeling superior to others. Maybe soon we 
	will be presented with an entirely new kind of being to abuse - artificial 
	life.


	We have found life that can survive the boiling depths of volcanic sea vents, 
	life that can flourish after being frozen hundreds of degrees below zero, and 
	life that can survive in a vacuum. Such life functions in ways often 
	completely alien to us. 


	On the subject of Aliens, do you think its possible that life could arise on 
	other planets? Who knows, but if there were life on other planets it would 
	quite likely be based on chemistries completely different from ours - in some 
	cases perhaps not even recognizable as life to us. A more down to earth 
	example would be a virus - are they alive or not? It's a point of dissension 
	among doctors and researchers, the arguments splitting many arcane hairs.


	It may or may not be possible for a computer to become truly intelligent, 
	which I define here as capable of being creative, reasoning and self-aware. 
	To help us explore a point, lets just imagine that it is possible. Lets 
	imagine that some months or years from now a computer 'wakes up' - and in 
	every way we can measure appears to be a thinking and feeling being. For 
	grins lets say its builder/programmer names it 'HAL'.


	So would Hal actually be alive? You would certainly have millions, if not 
	billions of people who would disbelieve Hal was alive, or even intelligent. 
	I have great faith in human arrogance, surely nothing can be as smart as us 
	right?! This disbelief that it was anything more than a puppet of electrons 
	would be the first stage of prejudice.


	Then let's say that finally enough people had conversed with Hal that the 
	general population became convinced of its intelligence. Now the second 
	stage of prejudice would come into play. If we create something, don't 
	we have the right to do anything to it we wish? If you erased its memory 
	and pulled the plug would you be committing murder?


	Though we may not have created their predecessors, domestic dogs have been 
	substantially changed along human designs. In spite of our hand in their 
	evolution, few would argue that it's ok to abuse or needlessly kill dogs. 
	Again, though we have been fiddling with them for thousands of years, we 
	didn't create them from scratch - but perhaps this is once again splitting 
	hairs when it comes to ethical questions about how we would treat 'artificial' 
	life.


	Considering the rights of highly intelligent artificial life is an extreme 
	argument. We may never create truly self-aware machine intelligences, or at 
	least it may be far in the future. A more down-to-earth, and timely dilemma 
	is if many more simple programs or machines can be considered truly alive.


	On my computer I have several programs which simulate, or perhaps even 
	actually create artificial life. Some of the most simple yet intriguing are 
	programs such a "Cellular Life" which create millions of 'cells', each 
	governed by certain rules as to behavior. They hunt, feed, breed and die. 
	Most interestingly they can mutate randomly just like 'real' life does, 
	sometimes these mutations are beneficial - sometimes harmful. Mutations can 
	be passed along, and since on the computer generations blur by with each 
	blink of the eye - things change quickly.


	What about the little micro robots being created in places such as MIT's 
	Robotics labs, and Xerox's Palo Alto campus these days. Some of these 
	rolling, flying or walking little 'bots have behavior patterns very similar 
	to those of simple organisms, are they 'alive'? I think probably not - but 
	then there are drawings on the board for models which can refuel and 
	reproduce themselves, would that qualify? It's a tough question, just how 
	complex do they have to become for us to consider them 'alive' - what if we 
	built them out of organic substances, or would they never qualify since we 
	created them?


	It would not be sexist or racist to treat machines unequally, we need a new 
	term. 'Machinist' sounds like a union member, 'Artificialist' sounds pretty 
	shallow . . . hmmm, well I'm sure the proper term will present itself when 
	the time comes. Whatever name we come up with, I fear that I may be whatever 
	it describes - because as I've been typing this tonight I've also been 
	running an artificial life program in the background. Millions of generations 
	of the little buggers have lived and died, right now a couple of colonies are 
	doing particularly well. I think its quite possible that this 'simulation' 
	is arguably a simple form of life, but in spite of that, this article is now 
	done - and I'm going to turn my computer off . . .
	

Todd Murchison is a computer technician, pro skier and freelance writer. He has
ruthlessly done surgery on and in some cases even purposely murdered thousands of 
computers.