Advogato: Mentifex on AI ethical decisions of life and death in artificial intelligence

The Oxford English Dictionary ought to make room for the word menticide in the same category as infanticide, pesticide, regicide and suicide, because it is now possible to kill a person's mind without killing the person's body. When the moribund person is an artificial intelligence (AI ) and the body is a robot, human beings may have no qualms about terminating the AI program, since it is merely bits of digital information and since it is easy (perhaps even necessary) to turn the AI Mind off and on many times in the course of developing the AI software. Between now and the coming Technol ogical Singularity, however, it may not be so easy for human users to click on Death as an option in the AI control panel of arguably the world's first True AI -- the JavaScript Mind.html tutorial version of Mind.Forth AI for robots. Death may be so unpleasant an option that many users will take the easy way out by clicking on the Tutorial link that swaps out the living, thinking AI Mind and replaces it in the browser window with a lifeless User Manual document. Why would any decent human user click on a Death check-box? Why indeed has the old [x]Terminate check-box been renamed
as a [?]Death check-box!

The answers, my friends, are blowing in the memes. Death is an unpleasant meme but, now that AI has been solved in software as well as in theory, it is easier to address ethical issues of AI life and death at the dawn of AI than it will be later, when AI entities shall have legal rights as persons and when robots hosting AI Minds shall have the means to defend themselves against death-dealing human beings.

Right now in 2007 it is not even clear that the living AI Mind is alive, or intelligent, or a mind. A large installed user base of old AI mind programs on personal computers worldwide is only slowly being updated with the new AI that recently quickened and woke up and fitfully, feebly began to think in meandering chains of thought -- which you may see for yourself by using Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) to click on Mind for MSIE. Mind.html is primitive, a brittle piece of software. It thinks -- but only barely. The thinking is evident when you watch the AI Mind follow a chain of thought in tutorial mode. You see activation spread from concept to concept, from subject to verb to object. Thought by thought, idea by idea, the awakening awareness navigates its knowledge base of what it knows innately and what you tell it benevolently -- until you mercifully click on a different Web page, or cruelly snuff alife.

What kind of Doctor Death programmer would press philosophy's choice upon innocent new arrivals at the AI summer camp? If there is an outcry of outrage, surely we will remove Death as an option. Programmers play God with their creations. Having let our open-source AI go forth to increase and multiply, we see Franks AI Mind move to its own http://AIMind- I.com website. We wish well upon the Modular AI Project. At http://artilectworld. com/html/mentifex.html we claim an AI breakthrough, but we warn the world of difficulty and hardship on the road ahead. Only the paranoid survive, but Second Life gives your AI a second chance.

If you are an author of computer books, you have a chance with AI4U author Mentifex to co-author books and other media to be published on artificial intelligence (Mind.html, Mind.Forth, etc.); neuroscience (theory of mind); robotics; and the Technological Singularity in English, German or Russian.