Oddly enough I can't help but feel a bit sorry for the robot getting kicked back and forth there. I know you want to demonstrate how stable it is, but damn guys, no need to be so cruel!
the autonomous robot, 5 feet long and modeled on a stick-
insect, strutted out for a live-fire test and worked
beautifully, he says. Every time it found a mine, blew it
up and lost a limb, it picked itself up and readjusted to
move forward on its remaining legs, continuing to clear a
path through the minefield.
Finally it was down to one leg. Still, it pulled itself
forward. Tilden was ecstatic. The machine was working
splendidly.
The human in command of the exercise, however -- an Army
colonel -- blew a fuse.
[...]
This test, he charged, was inhumane."A society that runs on robot slaves who are, nevertheless, intelligent by virtue of having a human neural connectome for a brain, is a slave society: deeply unhealthy if not totally diseased. "
When things are this cost effective( no one dying in action) they are adopted very fast.
All that said, I think it's fairly clear that Spot is just a dumb machine. Some of its descendants might be more, but we haven't gotten close to the "robot slave" point.
It's our human choice whether we race to the bottom (cost reduction) or race to the top (agency). If we're going to play god, should we seek to build slaves or agents with some degree of freedom? Or require devices to have realtime human-agency guidance?
I don't think it's a choice between "race to the bottom" or "race to the top". Someone needs to do dangerous, nasty, repetitive jobs if we want to maintain a standard of living that many people have become used to. Creatures with the sort of agency you're describing are, in my opinion, unsuited to those tasks, for several reasons, including moral and economic reasons. The robots we are increasingly using to do those jobs are much better suited, and there isn't (again, in my opinion) a moral objection that solely applies to such machines.
That said, our policies are woefully out of date in the face of such increasing automation. Our current system inflates employment and even a meager standard of living. We are going to need to revise our polices, both in the more developed nations and in those that have, as you so tastefully put it, "different labor standards". I don't know how to do this. There are many proposals; a popular one is the basic income guarantee. I'm not educated or intelligent enough to really understand the implications of such a policy, but I can agree that the just and humane treatment of all creatures with the agency you're talking about is among the best guiding principles that I can think of.
The two issues raised above (whether it is moral to use a machine for automation, and the fair treatment of creatures with agency) is separate from the point related to the development of human-manufactured creatures with agency. We don't know how to do it yet, but we are slowly working towards it. Assuming that we eventually do figure it out, that will be a victory as long as we treat our new children like we would treat our homo sapiens children. The research and development of such creatures with agency and those for industrial automation are not mutually exclusive, and serve different purposes.
To try to put it a different way: something is going to need to harvest fruit. It's a shit job. I would rather have Spot do it than a person of any variety, human or otherwise.
Should we allow some of our creations to have access to their design docs and source code? How about private communication with each other?
There's also a property/control rights question: should the manufacturer and/or regulator of the autonomous device always have a remote override, or should the purchaser/owner of the device have exclusive control over software policy? Analogies can be made with DRM and autos.
Some relevant quotes from Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040:
"They exist as substitutes for the lower castes, the indentured labour, for all manners in which humans formerly oppressed their own. Slaves."
"Why do I exist? Was my purpose to replace humans, whose inability to coexist in peace is their evolutionary flaw? Or was my destiny to serve as the progenitor of a subservient race? I do not know. I did not ask to be born."
"A being is a being. A machine is a machine. Most humans would believe these two states to be exclusive, separate orders of existence. And yet, they are not. The key is neotiny, the retention of characteristics from an earlier stage of development. A human fetus follows the path paved by its ancestors, evolving in the womb from unicellular, to amphibian, to mammal, to man. There were those who believed that humanity was the end of the progression, the end product of natural evolution. They were wrong."
[0] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2851663/Are-b...
Someone shot and it shot both of the deer's front legs right off, but it amazingly it hopped into the woods using only its rear legs.
They tracked it for a while, and spotted it again.
Then another shot, and one of the rear legs flew off.
It fell over, but still it kept pushing its way along with its remaining leg.
They kept tracking it.
Finally, they caught sight of it again, and shot its last leg right off.
Unfortunately, the deer still got away.
They couldn't track it anymore, and lost its trail.
I just saw him coming down a hill the other day.
I call him Snowball.
These videos from Boston Dynamics highlights how little it takes for people to have strong emotions toward inanimate objects. This will be interesting to explore, though I'm not happy about more advertisers doing things like that stupid IKEA lamp ad which hijacked audience's feeling of compassion.
You could study different human reactions. For example, are soldiers more likely to trust their robot companions if they look closer to an animal? or maybe they will trust it more if it doesn't? Putting on an animal costume generates more, or does it generate less fear/terror on the enemy?, etc etc.
And then this will in turn prompt, I'm guessing, the ability to conduct psychological studies about human response to animal cruelty for example, without actually harming an animal, as seen in this thread by a lot of people reporting being angry when the robot was kicked by the staff.
Imagine a robot that behaves like a dog (a lot more than Aibo does), and you program it with "pain" responses, sound, etc. You could maybe even use that (just speculating here of course) as a metric for sociopathy/lack of empathy problems.
Or in other words: there is no reason to expect that AI will have irrational feelings similar to human feelings.
It's a pretty remarkable robot.
It almost seems like an underestimated aspect of human nature, the value or role of atrophy of knowledge, lack of focus, and distraction from importance in our process of bumbling from one fuck-up to the next in the most convoluted path possible towards improved living circumstances.