“If you leave your iPad untouched for a few days, you probably won’t worry about a dead battery or accumulated emails. But computers with artificial intelligence may very soon have their own code of 'rights' that could allow them to sue you for being dismissive of them,”said the leading scientist.
Professor Marcus du Sautoy, a mathematician at the University of Oxford, suggested that once our devices are equipped with artificial intelligence to develop their minds, they will need their laws to protect their rights. He argues that technologies that have consciousness can be considered alive and their rights can be equated with human rights.
It has only been a year since a judge defended the rights of chimpanzees, setting a precedent for the rights of other primates to be regulated by law.
"At some point we will be able to say that this thing has awareness of itself, and perhaps this will be the line beyond which this consciousness arises," said Professor du Sautoy.
Many scientists believe that the process of "technological singularity", when computers are close to the ability to independently develop their intelligence, is inevitable.
The main problem is how to determine whether a machine or an animal is conscious. However, Professor du Sautoy is confident that today's advances in brain scanning technology can already do this.
“We are living in a golden age. A bit like Galileo with a telescope, he said. "We now have a telescope in our brains, and this gives us the opportunity to see things that we have never seen before."
Currently, programmers use the "Turing test" to determine the ability of a machine to exhibit intelligent behavior. In the test, a person evaluates the conversation between a person and a machine that is able to pick up appropriate sentences on different topics. If the evaluator cannot distinguish between the computer response and the human response, the device is considered to have passed the test.
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New technologies allow scientists to actually measure consciousness, and since computers are designed to mimic the activity of neurons in the brain, this can be applied to them. For example, the neural activity of the brain on waking is very different from when a person is sleeping or unconscious. Researchers have used such methods to determine whether vegetative patients can be aware of those around them or not.
Scientists can use this to determine the "coefficient of consciousness" by which one can measure the sense of self of any computer, according to Professor du Sotoy.
“I think there is something like a boiling point in brain development,” he said. - This is the moment of the emergence of consciousness. If it can be determined that computers have a certain level of consciousness, then they could have the equivalent of human rights."
“This is an exciting time,” summed up Professor du Sautoy.
Voronina Svetlana