Androids & Artificial Intelligence | Essay

In general, politicized science refers to science surrounded by controversy or public squabble. However, the science itself typically isn’t the root of the brewed disagreements. It’s the possible policies that could potentially surround it. Androids and other artificial intelligence, for example, “is the field of robotics that focuses on the development of intelligent machines that can process thoughts, understand human thinking and mimic it,” (Pecorino). Hence the goal of such processing is to further automate daily activities and menial jobs to simplify life for humans, like most technology. Consequently, the more intelligent and “thinking” these machines become, people have to begin to compromise their values and beliefs.

An android itself is essentially a robot made in the likeness of a human in order to better integrate into and better serve the public. Despite the simplification of life this technology is creating for humans, it has become politicized because further advancement in its functioning can lead to android civil rights, increasing unemployment for the public, and the lethality allowed to be coded into their programs.

With artificial intelligence and androids growing smarter with each model, they’re also being made to “think” and at least emulate emotions more to make interactions with the public more natural. But if they can have thoughts, should they not be able to have basic human rights? The recently released video game Detroit: Become Human caused a decent amount of discord because the game highlighted the possibility for androids and other artificially thinking machines have a possibility of believing that they too have emotions and may resort to deviancy to gain rights. Likewise, within the game, the humans had begun to despise the machines because they had taken many of the jobs. For example, the game had numerous android public transportation operators, caregivers, assistants, sex workers, and other jobs a human would have to go to school for and be trained to do.

Translating to real life, governments of the world already fail to give every human proper human rights, so if androids and other non-living beans were to be granted rights, but say women in other countries were not, it would become a large problem for feminist, who tend to be more liberal in partisanship. Correspondingly, the fluctuations in unemployment rates for new graduates and even longtime employees will worsen because employers will be more biased to choose a robotic employee that won’t need days off and have capabilities to perform at higher productivity levels as opposed to their human counterparts. Leading to more people losing their jobs to more efficient machinery and decreasing the chance of a new graduate getting hired.

Then, in conjunction with the growing thinking capabilities, androids and “thinking” machinery pose greater threats to the public if they are equipped with the knowledge and/ or power to kill. Similar to how self-driving vehicles have to make the decision if its best to kill/ injure the driver if it anticipates an oncoming accident to avoid killing a larger group of people.

Nonetheless, the technology itself is very helpful to human advancement. But I think the best way to communicate to the general public about what androids and artificial intelligence are is to show them everyday example and have more simplified explanations of how they work and share clear limits of what they can’t and aren’t allowed to do.

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Reference

Pecorino, P. A. (n.d.). Introduction to Philosophy. Retrieved February 25, 2019, from http://www.qcc.cuny.edu/SocialSciences/ppecorino/INTRO_TEXT/Chapter 6 Mind-Body/Androids.htm

Chapter 6 of the online textbook