Abstract
When Ken Jennings, 74-times winner of the Jeopardy TV quiz, lost against a room-size IBM computer, he wrote on his video screen: ‘I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords’ (citing a popular ‘Simpsons’ phrase). The New York Times writes that ‘for IBM’ this was ‘proof that the company has taken a big step toward a world in which intelligent machines will understand and respond to humans, and perhaps inevitably, replace some of them’ (Markoff 2011). Richard Powers anticipated this event in his 1995 novel on Helen, ‘a box’ that ‘had learned how to read, powered by nothing more than a hidden, firing profusion. Neural cascade, trimmed by self-correction, (…)’ (at 31). Powers describes an experiment that involves a neural net being trained to take the Master’s Comprehensive Exam in English literature. The novel traces the relationship that develops between the main character and the computer he is teaching, all the while raising and rephrasing the questions that have haunted AI research. This chapter addresses the potential implications of engaging computing systems as smart competitors or smart companions, bringing up the question of what it would take to acknowledge their agency by giving them legal personhood.
Interestingly, it is the science part of the narrative, the tale of a machine that learned to live, that proves to be the more moving, the more human one.
Cohen (1995)
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- 1.
Naming it Helen does remind one of Trojan horses, a nice overlap between world literature and computer science.
- 2.
- 3.
A remarkable attempt to link the fundamental uncertainties uncovered by the natural sciences with the humanities was made by Prigogyne and Stengers in their well known discussion of chaos theory. The original French title of their book was La nouvelle alliance. Métamorphose de la science (1979).
- 4.
Turing’s (1950) article is a very sophisticated and unorthodox exploration of what he calls ‘the imitation game’. Many of the objections that have been made since then are already foreseen and countered by Turing in this article, see e.g. Russell and Norvig (2009: 1020–1030). The point is not whether one agrees, but to detect to what extent his predictions have come true. See Floridi and Taddeo (2009) for an evaluation of the 2008 Loebner Contest, a yearly event that imitates the Turing Test and nominates ‘the most human machine’ as well as ‘the most human human’. See Christian (2011) who played as human in the 2009 Loebner Contest and came out as ‘most human human’.
- 5.
See Christian (2011), chapter 7 ‘Barging in’ on the silliness as well as the rigidity of much chatbots’ conversation.
- 6.
See Christian (2011), chapter 5 ‘Getting Out of Book’ on the reliance on registered games.
- 7.
Futurist Kurzweil (2005) has coined the term singularity for the moment in time when all problems that are intractable now will be resolved. This will be the moment that ‘humans transcend biology’. Only those who believe that all problems that matter are computable will be relieved to hear this. My point is that even if all problems are computable they are usually computable in different ways, with different outcomes. Back to square one?
- 8.
This kind of robust knowledge, however, requires transparency as to the translations, requiring access to the whole process of knowledge construction. This is not possible as long as this kind of knowledge production is protected by trade secret and/or intellectual property rights.
- 9.
- 10.
See the IBM White Paper (2011): To achieve the most right answers (in the case of Jeopardy: the most right questions) at a competitive speed, IBM deploys: (1) massive parallelism to consider multiple interpretations and hypothesis; (2) many different experts to integrate, apply and contextually evaluate loosely coupled probabilistic questions with content analysis; (3) confidence estimation on the basis of a range of combined scores; and finally (4) integrating deep and shallow knowledge, leveraging many loosely formed ontologies.
- 11.
Data science is ‘the new kid on the block’. It provides a set of tools to infer knowledge from Big Data and is used in all the sciences now, from the natural sciences, to the life sciences, to medicine and healthcare, the humanities and the social sciences. Plus marketing and customer relationship management, forensic science and police intelligence. See notably Mitchell (2006), Fayyad et al. (1996), Custers (2004), and Hildebrandt and Gutwirth (2008).
- 12.
In fact, in the case of the game of Jeopardy, Watson has to find precise questions to specific answers.
- 13.
Moore (1965), Intel co-founder, predicted that the computing power of chips would increase exponentially (doubling every 2 years). The prediction became a goal for the industry which has so far been met.
- 14.
- 15.
The addition of 2.2 to Galatea seems to refer to version 2.2 of the program that constitutes Helen.
- 16.
For a more extensive discussion see Cole (2009).
- 17.
Shaw’s 1902 Pygmalion (Shaw 1994) was the inspiration of the romantic musical My Fair Lady (World Premiere 1956 on Broadway). Note that Galatea translates as ‘she who is white as milk’, which seems a ‘fair’ translation of Shaw’s Eliza Doolittle, and remember that Weizenbaum’s therapeutic machine was called Eliza.
- 18.
This is – evidently – not to discredit Shakespeare or The Merchant of Venice. It is to say that we cannot take for granted what is relevant and should not too easily think in terms of a canon.
- 19.
Huff argues that the lack of the legal institution of the corporation ‘caused’ the stagnation of the sciences in the Islamic and Chinese traditions.
- 20.
- 21.
- 22.
See e.g. Wells (2001) at 70: ‘Davis proposes a variation based on social contract theory such that punishment for a strict liability offence is related to the unfair advantage gained by the offender. The principle of just punishment requires, us, Davis asserts, to measure punishment in accordance with the seriousness of the harm, but how is seriousness to be measured? One suggested measure could be the unfair advantage the offender gains by doing what the law forbids’. She refers to Davis (1985).
- 23.
GOSS and MASS are my acronyms. Note that GOSS refers to quantitative social science, not to theoretical social science that builds on e.g. Weber or Durkheim. Most simulations of multi-agent systems still depend on methodological individualism, because this simplifies the calculation of emergent behaviours. See e.g. Helbing and Balietti (2011) who suggest that regarding the social sciences ‘investments into experimental research and data mining must be increased to reach the standards in the natural and engineering sciences’; they term this a strategy ‘to quickly increase the objective knowledge about social and economic systems’.
- 24.
Wells refers to Dan-Cohen (1986).
- 25.
I am using the machine-metaphor here to draw attention to non-human systems that consist of interacting human and/or non-human agents, though some would claim that individual human beings are also ‘intelligent machines’.
- 26.
Note that for an entity to act as an agent on behalf of a principal, the agent must be a legal subject. Only then can the ‘intelligent machine’ bind the principal to a contract with a third party.
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Hildebrandt, M. (2013). From Galatea 2.2 to Watson – And Back?. In: Hildebrandt, M., Gaakeer, J. (eds) Human Law and Computer Law: Comparative Perspectives. Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice, vol 25. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6314-2_2
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