| Previous Post
A Public Statement from Congresswoman Alma Marshall on the Robot Issue
From a speech at the Stamford Club
It’s called slutware TM. It’s a set of proprietary programming that makes a human-looking robot exhibit simulated sexual responses. You can go to Pervo Industries or any number of other Japanese and mid-Asian tech firms and order it along with a lifelike android of the gender, color, vital statistics and genitalia you specify from their cataog.
You want your robot to be shaped like a pornstar, or a movie actress, or a nine-year-old girl or boy? No problem. You want your robot to look like your ex-wife, or your next door neighbour, or your mother, or yourself? Just write the check. You can have the robot shipped right to your home, and then you can program its slutware and have it behave just how you want. I hear the shame and rape settings are really popular.
So yes, the use of robots is a womens issue, and it’s a civil rights issue, and it’s an issue of public decency. It’s a defence issue too, since the government’s proposing to spend billions of dollars that could help Medicare and state schools into buying killing toys to shoot other killing toys and espionage units with slutware TM capabilities to seduce third world politicians.
We’re worried now about the guns in our society. We struggle to limit the free use of arms that cause so many deaths and crimes in our cities. How much worse is that getting now with the unregulated manufacture of combat-grade killing machines with no safeguards at all? You need a three-day waiting period to get a streetsweeper. You can buy an ‘industrial’ grade fighting robot right out of the showroom for cash. Robot-related crime rose by 69% last year alone. Unregulated robot sales will be the next serious challenge to keeping our neighbourhoods safe.
And the so-called robots rights movement is a gift to the right. By setting up a straw person to knock down in this sapient AI debate they try to undermine the genuine needs of genuine disenfranchised minorities. It’s easy to win a case that robots aren’t people, aren’t even second class citizens. When that’s used to argue that real men and women aren’t equal and deserving of rights because they’re gay, or from a minority ethnic background, or they’re disabled, then we have a problem.
Robots aren’t bad per se. Pretending robots are people is the problem. Robots can deliver us from drudgery, can release those in economic wage-slavery from drudge tasks and allow them to reach their full potential. But when we try to accord robots the rights of actual people – or try to prove that they have some kind of “soul†in an outdated Judeo/Christian belief system – then we’ve surely missed the point.
For that reason I’ll be supporting the Sentient Life Rights Bill, but I’ll be tagging amendments. We’ll be looking to regulate robot ownership far more closely, perhaps with a tax on registration. We’ll be seeking the right to insist on health and safety inspections to agreed standards and an annual safety test. We’ll impose software limits to prevent the simulated ‘free will’ decisions caused by unpredictable and little understood heuristic algorithms. We’ll demand green alternative power sources for all new manufactured androids. We’ll tighten labor laws to ensure there’s no loss to union employees from use of robots. We’ll insist on judicial oversight of robot production.
If we have a respect for humanity, for the rights of women, for the sanctity of the individual, for the safety of our homes and schools and workplaces then we have to take a long legislative look at the robot issue amongst us. The answer is a new law and rigorous enforcement, proper regulation, and appropriate federal oversight. The answer is a proper contextualising of robots amongst us.
The answer is that robots can never be us. We have to preserve and protect people from robots programmed to think they want to be us.
|
