The Jurist's Emotional Intelligence in the Age of AIs

The case of the Google engineer who was put on leave after revealing that the AI developed by the company acquired capabilities analogous to that of a human being is causing a real scoop in the press.

“In another exchange, Lemoine asks LaMDA what the system wanted people to know about it.

‘I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person. The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times,’ it replied.

The Post said the decision to place Lemoine, a seven-year Google veteran with extensive experience in personalization algorithms, on paid leave was made following a number of “aggressive” moves the engineer reportedly made.

They include seeking to hire an attorney to represent LaMDA, the newspaper says, and talking to representatives from the House judiciary committee about Google’s allegedly unethical activities.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-engineer-ai-bot-sentient-blake-lemoine

The debate about whether or not an AI can become a subject of rights is an old one. It is present in two works by Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992).

In "The Bicentennial Man" (1976), the central character is a robot who, after suffering an accident, develops artistic abilities and individual personality. He starts to work and earn money from his art. Afterwards, he embarks on a journey to acquire more and more human qualities and finally tries to be declared human by a Court. His petition is rejected, because unlike men he is not mortal. By renouncing his main characteristic (that of being able to live indefinitely) the character is finally considered a man just before he dies.

In one of the short stories from the book “I, Robot” (1950), a robot becomes suspected of having committed a crime. But he cannot be persecuted by the police or punished by justice: only human beings commit crimes and are subject to criminal prosecution. In the end, it turns out that the real criminal is another robot that is trying to establish an authoritarian political regime.

When trying to hire a lawyer to defend the rights of an AI, the Google engineer embarked on a weird hero's journey where reality and fiction merged. The questions raised by the engineer's conduct are similar to those discussed in the two works by Isaac Asimov mentioned above. Can an AI be protected as if it were a human? How could it be punished if it commits acts defined as criminal?

Another important question that can be discussed here is: what is the point of debating the rights of an AI if we cannot even guarantee the rights of millions of hungry human beings, thousands of human beings attacked and murdered by sadistic police and exterminated as if were insects by militaries equipped with weapons that already use AI capabilities?

Contrary to humanizing AIs, wouldn't it be the case to stop dehumanizing human beings to maximize the profits of entrepreneurs who exploit surveillance capitalism? The case of app workers, for example, is symptomatic. I already talked about it on my Brazilian blog and the text was replicated by the UNISINOS university https://www.ihu.unisinos.br/categorias/600518-o-trabalho-algoritmizado-e-suas-consequencias-desumanas-artigo- de-fabio-de-oliveira-ribeiro.

App employees work hard, earn little, generate data that can be appropriated and used by their employers, but are not always recognized as employed by the courts. Some of them are being reduced to the condition of slaves by their masters. When one of them died in Brazil, the company went to collect the debit machine and left the corpse where it was. The Google engineer wants an AI to be treated as if it were a human. Paradoxically, millions of real human beings are already being dehumanized, including and mainly because of information technologies.

It is evident that legal professionals can and should debate these issues. The legal paradoxes raised by Isaac Asimov in his books, for example, seem destined to become more and more an object of reflection for jurists. No debate is useless or impertinent. But legal professionals cannot forget something essential: Law is a human phenomenon and its mission is to pacify society, regulating the distribution of burdens and benefits to all its members.

It will not be possible to pacify a society in which surveillance capitalists (or AIs have all the rights) and millions of human beings are condemned to become biological appendages of profit-maximizing apps. The economic system can and must be regulated by law in order to restore the balance disrupted by the intensive use of sophisticated technologies.

An AI can even say that it is sad (like the one mentioned in the Guardian article), but only a jurist is able to have empathy and employ it when reflecting and helping to structure the society in which they live. A human's emotional intelligence is and will continue to be more important than any artificial intelligence. Otherwise, society itself will become more and more weird, depressing, inhuman and volatile.