Some serious moral dialogue about robots recently. Eric Schwitzgebel put forward the idea that we might have special duties in respect of robots, on the model of the duties a parent owes to children, an idea embodied in a story he wrote with Scott Bakker. He followed up with two arguments for robot rights; first, the claim that there is no relevant difference between humans and AIs, second, a Bostromic argument that we could all be sims, and if we are, then again, we’re not different from AIs.

Scott has followed up with a characteristically subtle and bleak case for the idea that we’ll be unable to cope with the whole issue anyway. Our cognitive capacities, designed for shallow information environments, are not even up to understanding ourselves properly; the advent of a whole host of new styles of cognition will radically overwhelm them. It might well be that the revelation of how threadbare our own cognition really is will be a kind of poison pill for philosophy (a well-deserved one on this account, I suppose).

I think it’s a slight mistake to suppose that morality confers a special grade of duty in respect of children. It’s more that parents want to favour their children, and our moral codes are constructed to accommodate that. It’s true society allocates responsibility for children to their parents, but that’s essentially a pragmatic matter rather than a directly moral one. In wartime Britain the state was happy to make random strangers responsible for evacuees, while those who put the interests of society above their own offspring, like Brutus (the original one, not the Caesar stabber) have sometimes been celebrated for it.

What I want to do though, is take up the challenge of showing why robots are indeed relevantly different to human beings, and not moral agents. I’m addressing only one kind of robot, the kind whose mind is provided by the running of a program on a digital computer (I know, John Searle would be turning in his grave if he wasn’t still alive, but bear with me). I will offer two related points, and the first is that such robots suffer grave problems over identity. They don’t really have personal identity, and without that they can’t be moral agents.

Suppose Crimbot 1 has done a bad thing; we power him down, download his current state, wipe the memory in his original head, and upload him into a fresh robot body of identical design.

“Oops, I confess!” he says. Do we hold him responsible; do we punish him? Surely the transfer to a new body makes no difference? It must be the program state that carries the responsibility; we surely wouldn’t punish the body that committed the crime. It’s now running the Saintbot program, which never did anything wrong.

But then neither did the copy of Crimbot 1 software which is now running in a different body – because it’s a copy, not the original. We could upload as many copies of that as we wanted; would they all deserve punishment for something only one robot actually did?

Maybe we would fall back on the idea that for moral responsibility it has to be the same copy in the same body? By downloading and wiping we destroyed the person who was guilty and merely created an innocent copy? Crimbot 1 in the new body smirks at that idea.

Suppose we had uploaded the copy back into the same body? Crimbot 1 is now identical, program and body, the same as if we had merely switched him off for a minute. Does the brief interval when his data registers had different values make such a moral difference? What if he downloaded himself to an internal store, so that those values were always kept within the original body? What if he does that routinely every three seconds? Does that mean he is no longer responsible for anything, (unless we catch him really quickly) while a version that doesn’t do the regular transfer of values can be punished?

We could have Crimbot 2 and Crimbot 3; 2 downloads himself to internal data storage every second and the immediately uploads himself again. 3 merely pauses every second for the length of time that operation takes. Their behaviour is identical, the reasons for it are identical; how can we say that 2 is innocent while 3 is guilty?

But then, as the second point, surely none of them is guilty of anything? Whatever may be true of human beings, we know for sure that Crimbot 1 had no choice over what to do; his behaviour was absolutely determined by the program. If we copy him into another body, and set him uip wioth the same circumstances, he’ll do the same things. We might as well punish him in advance; all copies of the Crimbot program deserve punishment because the only thing that prevented them from committing the crime would be circumstances.

Now, we might accept all that and suggest that the same problems apply to human beings. If you downloaded and uploaded us, you could create the same issues; if we knew enough about ourselves our behaviour would be fully predictable too!

The difference is that in Crimbot the distinction between program and body is clear because he is an artefact, and he has been designed to work in certain ways. We were not designed, and we do not come in the form of a neat layer of software which can be peeled off the hardware. The human brain is unbelievably detailed, and no part of it is irrelevant. The position of a single molecule in a neuron, or even in the supporting astrocytes, may make the difference between firing and not firing, and one neuron firing can be decisive in our behaviour. Whereas Crimbot’s behaviour comes from a limited set of carefully designed functional properties, ours comes from the minute specifics of who we are. Crimbot embodies an abstraction, he’s actually designed to conform as closely as possible to design and program specs; we’re unresolvably particular and specific.

Couldn’t that, or something like that, be the relevant difference?