Rethinking Autonomy — the Wandering Blob Experiment
By: Dany Majard
Tags: Autonomous Cars, Ethics, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Philosophy

With the ever growing advances in the field of AI, many public and private discussions on the subject are underlined by the archetype of an agent, or “cyborg” if anthropomorphised, autonomously making decisions for itself in the world. The image that comes to mind often is that of the Terminator, James Cameron’s 1984 movie. This is a very fertile ground for discussion as it threatens, consciously or not, the very understanding of who we are as humans. And the terminator was devilishly close to a human, able to communicate its intentions and therefore possessing a copious amount self-awareness. Today I’d like to make the case that though most definitions of autonomy revolve around the “self”, involving self-determination or self-law making for example, an intrinsic definition of autonomy may not exist. If this is true, autonomy is always relational and the design of AI agents must always take into account the environment.

I would like to take you on a thought experiment to understand better what we mean by autonomy. For those of you not familiar with the power and history of thought experiments, bookmark this article for later.

Imagine a rectangular blob as in the picture appearing somewhere on earth, hovering a few dozen meters above the earth’s surface. Despite the floating an the visible alien-like symbols, it immediately pulverizes anything coming within 5m of it. Delegations of scientists from all corners of the planet come to study it and the best they can say is that it seems to be moving at random. After a while they even agree on the specifics of that random movement. Though populations would be bewildered, few would consider it autonomous. At least not to a greater extent than a tornado or a plastic island in the pacific.

Now assume that one day, while hovering above Rome, the wandering blob’s symbols change, and some clever scientist decyphers the disappeared symbols — they were coordinates of the town. The world is then left with this question: Was this thing on a mission to get to Rome? All roads lead to Rome after all (i.e. Brownian motion on a sphere will visit an area of positive measure in a finite time, as sown here), so even without any notion of self, purpose or decision making capabilities, this randomly moving entity would have gotten there at some point. With communication with this entity being one directional (via the symbols), there is no way to probe the inner functioning of it, we cannot state anything about its self awareness, and cannot rule-out a major version of Locked-in Syndrome. Humanity would then ingenuously attempt communication with it, in order to access autonomy and decide for itself it is makes sense reasoning with it, or attempting to influence its behaviour. There is no sense arguing with a machine, is there? Until we can assess that our actions had an impact on the blob’s wandering, we’d stay in our belief that it has no autonomy.

But we could conceive of a very advanced being with a lifespan of a few billion years, that has decided that communication with earth’s sentient beings was vain, at least for a few more millions of years, and whose mastery of nature allowed it never to be hindered in its movement. This would definitely be autonomous if an intrinsic definition existed.

The reason I am crafting this thought experiment is to understand the value in defining autonomy intrinsically and what it means for the design we chose for the AI systems of tomorrow. With an entity whose phenomenology is inaccessible to humans, we are for all intents and purposes working with an operational definition of autonomy, which would have to include the states of both parties engaged in acting upon a common environment. This definition must highlight the necessary conditions for interacting agents to gauge each other’s autonomy and the impact of their respective actions on the sphere of possible.

What do you think? If we have ‘silicon-based’ entities that make legal, medical and economic decisions impacting your life, with no “human in the loop”, how would you assess their autonomy for yourself? and as a society?

Readings:

Autonomy in robots and other agents — Tim Smithers

Robot Rules — Jacob Turner