This session will explore the concept of sentience. At what point does a robot or AI become a sentient being? What role will they play in our societies? We’ll take a lighthearted and interactive approach to tackling some of these deep and important questions.

1. Suzanne Gildert
Robotic Rights

2. Is it too early to think about
robot rights?
Dr. Suzanne Gildert
Founder and CSO
Kindred Systems Inc.

3. The quest for the artificial scientist:
A physicist’s story

4. A subset of the AI
developed in the next
few decades will be
very human-like.
I believe these entities
should have the same
rights as humans.

5. Why do we need to build AI systems
that look, think and act like humans?

6. Empirical
answer
We love creating
things in our own
image.

7. Practical
answer
Our world is
designed for
humans.

8. Philosophical answer
AI must share our subjective
experience if we are to communicate
naturally with it

9. OK. I’ll tell you the
REAL REASON I’m into this.

10. Personal
answer
We can more easily
merge with AI if it inhabits
a similar body to ours

11. Science fiction?
Or closer than you think...

12. Examples of issues faced by
researchers TODAY

13. Testing pleasure and pain
systems: The rights of robots
used for experimentation

14. Protecting AI minds
from hacking, theft and
manipulation is critical

15. Right now we are
designing AI reward
functions, motivation
systems and goals.
What do we choose
to have them value?

16. AGIs will make
mistakes as part
of the learning
process.
We must expect
and accept this.

17. We are teaching AI to mimic us:
Who supplies the training data?

18. Deleting minds and memories
We must choose whether to delete
AI minds and memories
We must choose whether to delete
AI minds and memories

19. Merging, forking and
branching of minds and
memories are everyday
occurrences for AI
What does identity mean
for these entities?

20. What are the rights of
man-machine
merged entities and
human copies?

21. This is not 50 years away.
These ethical issues will begin to impact
more and more people - and AIs
themselves - within the next few years.

22. Thank you for listening
suzanne@kindred.ai