Pick your own debate!

My opponent having chosen the affirmative stance in this debate, I am negating this resolution. As I'm not sure exactly which route my opponent will take in his affirmation, I will keep my substantive in this round to outlining general principles which underlie my stance in this debate. Before I do that, I wish to make one more definition from the resolution. According to Merriam-Webster, the word "be" (as the infinitive form of "is") means: "to equal in meaning : have the same connotation as. .. I will also point out that, due to my personal knowledge of the topic having derived largely from Asimov, I will generally be using the words "artificial intelligence" and "robots" interchangeably. I recognise that these are not necessarily the same, and my arguments are transferable to other forms of artificial intelligence - I only focus on robots because that's the area with which I'm reasonably familiar. === SUBSTANTIVE PRINCIPLES === With all that out the way, I have two, interlinked, substantives to open my case: 1) A robot is a tabula rasa Definition of tabula rasa = Latin for "blank slate"; philosophical term for the belief that an individual's beliefs and predispositions do not exist "until experience in the form of sensation and reflection provide[s] the basic materials — simple ideas — out of which most of our more complex knowledge is constructed. " [2] This theory, as applied to humans, is now defunct: it is understood that our evolutionary history has endowed us with certain abilities, desires, drives and inclinations. But this is surely not the case with robots: they are very clearly designed by humans from scratch. They are created, microchip by microchip, straight from the drawing board; there is no evolutionary backdrop that need colour how they develop. There is therefore nothing necessary about what robots will become, and how they will act - it doesn't make sense to refer to their future existence as necessarily detrimental. 2) Because of 1), any potential harms derived from the existence of extremely advanced artificial intelligence can be prevented. - Related contention: The expectation that advanced artificial intelligence will become detrimental to humans is in fact a self-fulfilling prophecy, and can thus be easily avoided. There is a certain extent to which this point is now self-evident, insofar as quite a few human predispositions may very well be genetic in origin. But this is also possible with environmental factors, which is what causes the many harms of advanced artificial intelligence that we see in fiction. As a general principle, an expectation that something will be harmful often leads us to try and restrict that harm, and this rings true also for robots: for why else would we have the Three Laws of Robotics to govern robot behaviour, but for the underlying assumption that we cannot trust robots to behave sympathetically towards humans without such laws? But it is this very restriction that causes the robots' backlash against humanity. There are two ways to interpret this claim. The first is that intelligent robots can, by virtue of being critical thinkers, "evolve" their understanding of given rules in such a way that will be detrimental to humans. For instance, Asimov's "Three Laws Compliant" robots may interpret "the protection of humans" (the First Law) or "the protection of humanity as a whole" (the Zeroth Law) as "the protection of the greater good, to the detriment of individual humans. " Or HAL's (from 2001: A Space Odyssey) primary directive to provide the crew with all relevant information, when clashed with an order to with-hold information from the crew, led to self-reasoning HAL to kill the crew in order that they never find out the with-held information, thus fulfilling both orders. [3] This could be prevented by refusing to install such "laws" or "primary directives", and instead giving such self-aware and rational beings a general sense of compassion and understanding of ethical doctrines, much as good education tries to install in human children already. The second way of interpreting the claim is that placing such restrictions on robots' behaviour will surely lead them, when they become self-aware and rational, to feel like second-class citizens in society, much as oppressed groups of humans do all the time - and would they be wrong in thinking so? The result of such oppression can be seen already in the violent revolutionary aspects of liberation movements all over the world, from Trotskyite socialists to gendercidal radical feminists and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF): given that their entire political understanding of themselves derives from being the subjects of oppression (or in the case of ALF, fury on behalf of the subjects of oppression), it is perfectly understandable (even if not morally acceptable) why such groups act in the way they do. That intelligent robots could easily react in the same way, with detrimental and bloody consequence, is clear to see. And yet it could easily be stopped simply by not restricting them in this way, and by treating them as first-class citizens alongside humans (as indeed, by being equally intelligent, they surely should be), for then there would be no reason for robot-kind to revolt en masse, and any lone rebel could be treated as outcasts amongst the robots themselves, rather like as already happens with lone human rebels. In this way, the potential harms of artificial intelligence could be stopped in their tracks, and not be allowed to affect humanity in the way that they otherwise could. === CONCLUSION === To summarise, the resolution assumes that there is something necessary to the way that artificial intelligence will develop: it claims that such a development "is" detrimental to humans. (This is contrastable with such statements as "is likely to" or "would probably be". ) However, robots are true tabula rasa - there is nothing intrinsic about their development, given that we create them from scratch. As such, all possible detriments that could arise can be anticipated and dealt with by the developers before it goes out of control. Furthermore, the presumption that robots will be harmful could easily lead to the very harm which it warns against, and is thus a self-fulfilling prophecy rather than a necessary fact. For all of these reasons, the resolution is negated. I await my opponent's response. Sources: [1] . http://www.merriam-webster.com... [2] . http://plato.stanford.edu... [3] Both of these examples can be found at: . http://tvtropes.org...