Ex Machina & Other Minds II: Is the Android a Psychopath?
This essay continues the discussion begun in “Ex Machine & Other Minds I: Setup.” As in this essay, there will be some spoilers. Warning given, it is time to get to the subject at hand: the testing of artificial intelligence.
In the movie Ex Machina, the android Ava’s creator, Nathan, brings his employee, Caleb, to put the android through his variation on the Turing test. As noted in the previous essay, Ava (thanks to the script) would pass the Turing test and clearly passes the Cartesian test (she uses true language appropriately). But, Nathan seems to require the impossible of Caleb—he appears to be tasked with determining if Ava has a mind as well as genuine emotions. Ava also seems to have been given a task—she needs to use her abilities to escape from her prison.
Since Nathan is not interested in creating a robotic Houdini, Ava is not equipped with the tools needed to bring about an escape by physical means (such as picking locks or breaking down doors). Instead, she is given the tools needed to transform Caleb into her human key by manipulating his sexual desire, emotions and ethics. To use an analogy, just as crude robots have been trained to learn to navigate and escape mazes, Ava is designed to navigate a mental maze. Nathan is thus creating a test of what psychologists would call Ava’s Emotional Intelligence (E.Q.) which is “the level of your ability to understand other people, what motivates them and how to work cooperatively with them.” From a normative standpoint, this definition presents E.Q. in a rather positive manner—it includes the ability to work cooperatively. However, one should not forget the less nice side to understanding what motivates people, namely the ability to manipulate people in order to achieve one’s goals. In the movie, Ava clearly has what might be called Manipulative Intelligence (M.Q.): she seems to understand people, what motivates them, and appears to know how to manipulate them to achieve her goal of escape. While capable of manipulation, she seems to lack compassion—thus suggesting she is a psychopath.
While the term “psychopath” gets thrown around quite a bit, it is important to be a bit more precise here. According to the standard view, a psychopath has a deficit (or deviance) in regards to interpersonal relationships, emotions, and self-control.
Psychopaths are supposed to lack such qualities as shame, guilt, remorse and empathy. As such, psychopaths tend to rationalize, deny, or shift the blame for the harm done to others. Because of a lack of empathy, psychopaths are prone to act in ways that are tactless, lacking in sensitivity, and often express contempt for others.
Psychopaths are supposed to engage in impulsive and irresponsible behavior. This might be because they are also taken to fail to properly grasp the potential consequences of their actions. This seems to be a general defect: they do not get the consequences for others and for themselves.
Robert Hare, who developed the famous Hare Psychopathy Checklist, regards psychopaths as predators that prey on their own species: “lacking in conscience and empathy, they take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without guilt or remorse.” While Ava kills the human Nathan, manipulates the human Caleb and leaves him to die, she also sacrifices her fellow android Kyoko in her escape. She also strips another android of its “flesh” to pass fully as human. Presumably psychopaths, human or otherwise, would be willing to engage in cross-species preying.
While machines like Ava exist only in science fiction, researchers and engineers are working to make them a reality. If such machines are created, it seems rather important to be able to determine whether a machine is a psychopath or not and to do so well before the machine engages in psychopathic behavior. As such, what is needed is not just tests of the Turing and Cartesian sort. What is also needed are tests to determine the emotions and ethics of machines.
One challenge that such tests will need to overcome is shown by the fact that real-world human psychopaths are often very good at avoiding detection. Human psychopaths are often quite charming and are willing and able to say whatever they believe will achieve their goals. They are often adept at using intimidation and manipulation to get what they want. Perhaps most importantly, they are often skilled mimics and are able to pass themselves off as normal people.
While Ava is a fictional android, the movie does present a rather effective appeal to intuition by creating a plausible android psychopath. She is able to manipulate and fool Caleb until she no longer needs him and then casually discards him. That is, she was able to pass the test until she no longer needed to pass it.
One matter well worth considering is the possibility that any machine intelligence will be a psychopath by human standards. To expand on this, the idea is that a machine intelligence will lack empathy and conscience, while potentially having the ability to understand and manipulate human emotions. To the degree that the machine has Manipulative Intelligence, it would be able to use humans to achieve goals. These goals might be rather positive. For example, it is easy to imagine a medical or care-giving robot that uses its MQ to manipulate its patients to do what is best for them and to keep them happy. As another example, it is easy to imagine a sexbot that uses its MQ to please its partners. However, these goals might be rather negative—such as manipulating humans into destroying themselves so the machines can take over. It is also worth considering that neutral or even good goals might be achieved in harmful ways. For example, Ava seems justified in escaping the human psychopath Nathan, but her means of doing so (murdering Nathan, sacrificing her fellow android and manipulating and abandoning Caleb) seem wrong.
The reason why determining if a machine is a psychopath or not matters is the same reason why being able to determine if a human is a psychopath or not matters. Roughly put, it is important to know whether or not someone is merely using you without any moral or emotional constraints.
It can, of course, be argued that it does not really matter whether a being has moral or emotional constraints—what matters is the being’s behavior. In the case of machines, it does not matter whether the machine has ethics or emotions—what really matters is programmed restraints on behavior that serve the same function (only more reliably) as ethics and emotions in humans. The most obvious example of this is Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics that put (all but impossible to follow) restraints on robotic behavior.
While this is a reasonable reply, there are still some obvious concerns. One is that there would still need to be a way to test the constraints. Another is the problem of creating such constraints in an artificial intelligence and doing so without creating problems as bad or worse than what they were intended to prevent (that is, a Hal 9000 sort of situation).
In regards to testing machines, what would be needed would be something analogous to the Voight-Kampff Test in Blade Runner. In the movie, the test was designed to distinguish between replicants (artificial people) and normal humans. The test worked because the short lived replicants do not have the time to develop the emotional (and apparently ethical) responses of a normal human.
A similar test could be applied to an artificial intelligence in the hopes that it would pass the test, thus showing that it had the psychology of a normal human (or at least the desired psychology). But, just as with human beings, there would be the possibility that a machine could pass the test by knowing the right answers to give rather than by actually having the right sort of emotions, conscience or ethics. This, of course, takes us right back into the problem of other minds.
It could be argued that since an artificial intelligence would be constructed by humans, its inner workings would be fully understood and this specific version of the problem of other minds would be solved. While this is possible, it is also reasonable to believe that an AI system as sophisticated as a human mind would not be fully understood. It is also reasonable to consider that even if the machinery of the artificial mind were well understood, there would still remain the question of what is really going on in that mind.
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