Professor Stephen Dyson and Professor Jeffrey Dudas, Department of Political Science, University of Connecticut.

This episode is based upon three readings:

1. Alan Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” aka The Turing Test paper. Turing starts his paper by asking “can machines think?” before deciding that’s a meaningless question. Instead, he invents something he calls “the imitation game”—a text conversation where the player has to guess whether they are chatting with another person or with an AI. ChatGPT was such a bombshell because it easily and consistently passes this “Turing Test” by giving human-like responses to questions. Here’s the issue: the Turing Test is based upon AI deception, not thinking. Turing set out to ask Can Machines Think? and ended up showing how easily AI can deceive us.
2. Karel Čapek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots. This is the first AI Takeover story. It’s a play written in 1920 about a factory manufacturing artificial persons. Čapek introduced the word Robot to the English language—it’s derived from robota, a Czech word meaning forced labor. Čapek’s robots are supposed to be the ultimate workers, free from distracting human needs and desires. Yet, they mysteriously start to glitch, gnashing their teeth, freezing up. When they are given guns and asked to fight humanity’s wars, they become super soldiers as well as perfect workers. Anyone who has seen Blade Runner, The Terminator, or Battlestar Galactica—all inspired by Čapek’s play—knows what happens next. Rossum’s Universal Robots is the original AI takeover story, as well as being a dead-on satire of twentieth century ideas like Fordism and nationalism.
3. Joanna Bryson’s Robots Should be Slaves. Bryson, a computer scientist, makes a provocative intervention into AI ethics. She argues that as AI becomes more advanced, and robots more lifelike, we are going to get dangerously confused: we’ll want to give robots rights that they cannot and should not have. Bryson argues that robots are owned by us and should be seen and used as property. She wants to avoid conflating the human and the mechanical, yet, by using the terminology of slavery, she introduces into the AI debate the very thing she seeks to deny—the concept of human rights.

The episode excerpts our discussions of these readings. The full discussions are here: Turing; Rossum; Bryson.

Here are some additional questions to think about in regard to this episode:

• Did Turing really predict Chat GPT 75 years ago? Does it matter that his test for machine intelligence was based not on the machine’s abilities, but rather on its ability to deceive?
• How have Turing’s ideas permeated our popular culture and imagination about AI?
• Why did Turing think telepathy, and other extra-sensory phenomena, were crucial parts of the AI story?
• Did Karel Čapek’s play really invent the word “robot”, as well as found the genre of AI Uprising, directly leading to works such as 2001, Blade Runner, The Terminator, and Battlestar Galactica?
• Does it matter that Čapek embedded his story of the folly of creating artificial life within a broader critique of ideologies such as nationalism, Fordism, and capitalism?
• What should we make of the profoundly religious undertones of RUR’s stunning ending?
• Does Bryson mean we should enslave robots now and always, regardless of their claims to rights?
• How does Bryson deal with the natural human tendency to anthropomorphize non-human things, and with the likelihood that as AI advances, robots will appear more human?
• If the robot as slave is an unacceptable idea—even in metaphorical form—then what other metaphors might help us think through our relationships with thinking machines?

Finally, here are some additional discussions of relevance with colleagues at the University of Connecticut:

Computer Scientist Professor Fei Miao explains some of the cutting-edge research on AI.

Historian Professor Dexter Gabriel discusses film representations of slavery; and the use of the slavery metaphor in thinking about AI.