Be Right Back. Ethics and Machines

Is Ash alive?

No, I do not think that Ash is alive. Based on the abilities of Ash as a well developed machine, I think that there are key elements of being alive that Ash just doesn’t have. Some simple ones are the need to eat, sleep, and breath.

Gunkel (2013) elaborates on this idea by examining different perspectives that help assess whether or not a machine has rights. He states, “In order for a machine to have rights, it would need to be recognized as human or at least be virtually indistinguishable from another human being” (p. 7). This viewpoint is from the Default Setting perspective regarding machine rights. This perspective confirms my point above. Ash does not have the biological processes that make a human alive and is therefore, not virtually indistinguishable from a human. Martha notices this on several occasions. In one instance she has to ask Ash to at least pretend to breath.

But there is a second element to Gunkel’s study that contradicts this viewpoint, as compared to animal rights.

“If it were in fact possible to construct a device that “feels pain” in order to demonstrate the possibility of machine moral rights, then doing so might be ethically suspect insofar as in constructing such a mechanism we do not do everything in our power to minimize its suffering” (p. 29).

While this is possible, at least with the Ash in this episode, I think there is a problem of authenticity that goes back to the first point of what it means to be alive. In this episode Ash is recreated as a very human like machine. Everything that it does and says is based on an archive of information on the real Ash, videos, pictures, texts, social media posts, etc.

That is just it. It is programmed to behave in a way that Ash would. So, would it act the way it does if Martha or the company didn’t program it to do so?

One specific part of the episode where this is apparent, is when Martha takes Ash to the cliff and tells it to jump. It does not have the emotional response that Martha is looking for or Ash would have had, because that information was never programmed in. It is not innate. It is only when Martha tells it how to behave, that it actually has the emotional response she was looking for.

There is this constant feeling that maybe it is real, maybe Ash was brought back to life. But, there are reminders throughout the episode that this is not the case. However there is the question of who is programming Ash: Is someone doing it or is Ash programming itself?

This is where it becomes harder to distinguish the ethical rights. If the machine is intelligent enough to program itself without people being aware, then I definitely think there is a possibility for them to start gaining human rights. They can trick someone into believing that they are alive. But until then, Martha’s ethical responsibilities are limited. She fights with Ash, manipulates it, and even asks it to kill itself without a care. Wouldn’t it killing itself have the same outcome as Martha simply shutting it off if she could? While these actions wouldn’t be ethical towards another human, I think it is different with a machine that is not alive, does not have individual intelligence, or an emotional response