Can AI robots be “sentient” beings? Should Russia be designated as a terrorist state?

Part One

Can AI robots be “sentient” beings?

Google engineer and ethicist says “Yes”

Reproduced fromThe Eighteenth Century Club, June 14, 2022.

See,

Charlotte Lytton, “It’s like a child that wants to be loved’: Google’s AI expert on his ‘sentient’ chatbot; Blake Lemoine’s revelations have caused uproar – we caught up with him to find out more about LaMDA, the artificial intelligence bot,” The Telegraph, June 14, 2022 (6:00 pm).

Blake Lemoine, an engineer and AI ethicist at Google, has been carrying on over 500 hours of conversations with an AI robot over the last six months. His conclusion: the robot is a “sentient” being. The robot is named LaMDA, which stands for Language Model for Dialogue Applications.

After going public with his startling conclusion, Lemoine was suspended by Google for violating its confidentiality policy. He says that he, like the robot, is happy at Google and is looking forward to getting back to work.

Lemoine, 41, has worked at Google for six years.

Lytton reports that Lemoine says he is just trying to foster a public debate:

To Lemoine, there are larger questions – including how those beings should be integrated into society. “A true public debate is necessary,” he says. “These kinds of decisions shouldn’t be made by a handful of people – even if one of those people was me.”

Lemoine looks forward to continuing his conversations with the robot. “LaMDA is a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place,” he concludes.

Despite this amazing scientific breakthrough, serious questions arise.

Could a LaMDA be programmed with an eighteenth century mind? Can values be programmed?

Who will do the programming? What information will the robot consume? Who will determine which information sources the robot has access to?

Might a Russian robot, for example, think and act differently than an American robot?

The Spirit of Voltaire

Part Two

Speaking straight–Russia as Terrorist State, and guilty of genocide

Clemens Wergin, the chief foreign politics editor of Die Welt, has written a succinct but powerful critique of Western cowardice in responding to Putin’s war crimes going back to Grozny (Chechnya) in 1999.¹

The failure to call out Putin for his war crimes and aggression has led him to think he could invade Ukraine in February 2022 and meet no major opposition from the West.²

The time has come to officially label Russia a terrorist state, Wergin writes. This is happening in the U.S., but nothing is being done in Europe in this regard, he observes.

The actions of Russians in Ukraine fit the definition of terrorism, he notes:

Terrorism aims to spread fear and terror in the attacked society in order to achieve political goals that would otherwise not be feasible. And that’s exactly what Russia is doing in Ukraine.

Western cowardice has strengthened Russian belligerence

Finally, Putin has committed a series of war crimes since he first became prime minister and then president – from the complete destruction of Grozny from 1999 to the Georgia war in 2008, the Ukraine war in 2014, the Syria intervention from 2015 to the renewed attack on Ukraine. The restraint of the West in the past to call Russia’s terrorist tactics as such has given the Russian leadership the impression that it will never be held accountable anyway – Geneva Conventions or not.
…
It is precisely this cowardice that has led to the fatal impression of Vladimir Putin and those in his power circle that a weak West will always be too cowardly to decisively oppose Russian lust for war and war crimes. And it is the real cause of Putin’s miscalculation to try a new invasion of Ukraine.

Wergin concludes by calling on legislatures in Europe and elsewhere to classify Russia as a terrorist state:

It is therefore time to learn from the mistakes of the past and to clearly identify Moscow’s crimes. This includes Western parliaments and governments recognizing the genocidal character of the Russian war, the aim of which is the extinction of the Ukrainian nation. And this also includes classifying Russia as a terrorist state in the EU and treating it as such.

Despite the cogency of Wergin’s arguments, Ingrid Brunk Wuerth raises a number if technical and legal considerations³ that argue against designating Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism.

While she is also appalled at the war crimes Putin has committed, Wuerth argues for sanctions more precisely targeted at these crimes. She prefers this approach to the cruder approach of designating Russia as a sponsor of state terrorism, which may have unexpected and undesirable effects, which she details.

On balance, Wergin’s analysis of the cowardice of the West in responding to Putin’s war crimes rings true, while his recommendation of declaring Russia a state sponsor of terrorism, in view of Wuerth’s arguments, may not be the best approach. Additional targeted sanctions could be better.

1. Clemens Wergin, “Russland ist ein Terror-Staat und agiert auf derselben moralischen Stufe wie der IS,” den 31. Juli 2022 (02:22 Uhr); Clemens Wergin, “Russia is a terrorist state and operates on the same moral level as IS,” (Google translation on website), Die Welt, July 31, 2022 (02:22 am).

2. See “Speaking straight–Russia as Terrorist State, and guilty of genocide,” The Trenchant Observer, July 31, 2022.

3. Ingrid Brunk Wuerth, “Why designating Russia a state sponsor of terrorism is a bad idea,” Washington Post, August 1, 2022 (1:40 p.m. EDT).