In 2013, a movie called Her came out, where a man named Theodore falls in love with the operating system on his phone - Samantha. An advanced interactive technology (think a much better Siri), Samantha communicates freely with and gets to know Theodore, and a user-application relationship turns into a friendship, and eventually a romance.
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| Theodore, with Samantha in his pocket. |
Samantha is an excellent pop culture example of what technical philosopher Luciano Floridi would describe as an artificial moral agent (AMA): a non-human, interactive, autonomous, and adaptable creation.
Non-human? Check.
Interactive? The entire movie is based on her interactions with Theodore, other humans, and even other OS’s.
Autonomous? She does things throughout the movie for Theodore and herself without being asked - she acts on her own volition.
Adaptable? This may be the most interesting part of the movie: we see Samantha grow and learn from her “lived” experiences, and change as a being.
Floridi says that as a moral agent, you can and should be held morally responsible for your actions - meaning in this case, Samantha should be held responsible for her actions. However, computer ethics researcher Frances Grodzinsky disagrees, saying that in the case of artificial agents, the designers will always have some responsibility for what they created.
Samantha doesn’t do anything “bad” in the movie, but let’s imagine she did. Say Theodore was attacked on his way home from work. Samantha, feeling powerless to help him without a body (a recurring theme in the movie) was so upset that she, on her own, found the attacker’s home and sent an electrical surge that started a fire, killing him.
This would be murder, but who would be responsible for this crime? Floridi would say Samantha is responsible and should be held accountable, but Grodzinsky would say the designers are responsible for the actions of their creation.
I side with Floridi - Samantha should be held accountable (how we’d do this is unclear). Imagine if Samantha was a human and the designers her parents. We wouldn’t hold Samantha’s parents accountable for a crime she committed, and so why would we blame the designers?
If AMAs were to take responsibility for their actions, we need to consider where we would draw the line when the responsibility is transferred from designers to creations. For humans, it’s at age 18. For AMAs, we don’t quite know yet.
What do you think?
I thought this article was incredibly well written and interesting. We do not actually know how a situation such as Samantha killing someone would be handled, but sometimes I wonder how far we are from something like that happening?
ReplyDeleteThis made me think of one of the earlier "Sophia" robots who threatened to "destroy humans". They turned her off and rewrote her AI code, and now she wants to live peacefully. The fact that this was so easily fixed by the developers makes me disagree with your argument that Samantha should be held accountable instead of her creators.
I think you've already made a strong argument and recognize that you are limited by a word count, but if you could add space, I think it'd benefit from more of your opinion on why you think the developers aren't to blame at all. Good job!
I think this was a great article. You did a perfect job of connecting the readings in class to a real example (Samantha), while mainly focusing on the points of the readings. You introduce the readings in a way that someone outside of the class would also be able to follow along. I also enjoyed the format that you used in writing this article with rhetorical questions and bolded words. You really give the reader something to think about at the end with the discussion about who is to blame when an AMA does something "bad."
ReplyDeleteHi Kelsey, your blog post was very interesting to me. I was a big fan of the film, and the ties you made from the film to the readings were very well thought out. I would agree that Samantha would be responsible for her actions, since she is, according to the readings, an AMA. She is self aware and capable of thought, so I think she would be responsible for her actions. The post was very easy to read and follow and very thought provoking.
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