Bulletin No. 1, 2021

24 CHINESE UNIVERSITY BULLETIN NO.1, 2021 AI: LAW AND ETHICS Prof. Alexandre Erler Department of Philosophy Prof. Eliza Mik Faculty of Law ‘I ’ve met Sophia. She’s amazing,’ said Prof. Eliza Mik , quickly realizing how she, too, could not avoid anthropomorphizing the robot, which was famously made a Saudi Arabian citizen in 2017. ‘But she’s just a piece of rubber.’ To learn, to grow, to catch up with us—such is the rhetoric we like to use to talk about machines. Indeed, it looks like they are becoming one of us with their constantly increasing capabilities to process the world and respond to it in ways that have real impact on our lives, thanks to AI. The reasonable next step, it seems, would be to subject them to the same ethics that govern us. But while it may be an interesting philosophical question, said the technology law specialist at the Faculty of Law, it is really a moot point on a pragmatic, legal level. ‘It’s completely misconceived.’ THERE IS INDEED ROOM FOR DEBATE as to whether machines can be a person in ethical terms. Depending on the conditions one imposes on moral personhood, according to Prof. Alexandre Erler of the Department of Philosophy, it can be argued that a machine with AI is a moral agent. ‘There’s the more demanding notion that to be a moral agent, you need to have characteristics like having a mind and such mental states as desires, beliefs and intentions. The extreme would be adding things like consciousness to the list,’ says the scholar of the ethics of new technologies. If these are the conditions for being a moral agent, he continued, then no existing machine will qualify. However, there is a less demanding school of thought. ‘The idea is that as long as the machine has a certain flexibility within a pre-programmed framework and the Made by the Hong Kong- based Hanson Robotics, Sophia has been criticized as a hype by prominent AI researchers like Yann LeCunn