Richard Sutton says machines aren\u2019t persons yet, but will be someday.<\/p>\n
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What makes a person a person? If a corporation can legally be one, can a machine be one, too? Those were among the questions posed to four experts who tried to land on an answer during the last day of Upper Bound<\/a>.<\/p>\n The news: AI pioneer Richard Sutton, University of Alberta philosophy and digital humanities professor Geoffrey Rockwell, AI ethicist Katrina Ingram, and AI researcher Zhijing Jin gathered on the last day of Alberta\u2019s Upper Bound AI conference to debate whether AI could achieve personhood. The debate touched on humanity\u2019s moral responsibility to any potential sentient machines, the legal status of AI, regulatory frameworks for citizenship for machines, human-AI coexistence, and when a machine might qualify as a person.<\/p>\n From the source: \u201cThere will come a time when [machines] are persons. That time is not now,\u201d Sutton said. However, he added that right now is a profound time in this debate because people feel the need to ask the question. \u201cA very important part of machines being people is the public getting used to it and being able to treat these people as true people.\u201d<\/p>\n Following the thread: The debate comes at a moment where rapid strides in AI have prompted global conversations over when artificial general intelligence<\/a> could, or will, be achieved. Some have even speculated that we have already reached a point where some AI models have sentience, though that claim has been disputed.\u00a0<\/p>\n It also comes as Canada grapples with what culpability exists for AI models and their parent companies in the aftermath of the Tumbler Ridge, BC<\/a> mass shooting, where lawsuits allege OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT model helped influence a young person to carry out the shooting.\u00a0<\/p>\n Final thought: After four days of Upper Bound programming on the future of AI, much of which centred on the economic opportunity the technology holds, one of the most salient portions of the debate dealt with what machine personhood might mean for those economic forecasts. Ingram argued\u00a0 that ownership would have to \u201cgo out the window\u201d if humanity were to avoid issues like digital slavery.<\/p>\n