Moral aspects about an Artificial Brain

Is it immoral to create an Artificial Brain ? I struggled a couple of years with this question especially in relation to the threatening part for mankind. This topic is covered separately in the article ‘How threatening for mankind is an Artificial Brain ?’.

Like with most inventions it is possible to use an A.B. for the good or the bad. One of the goals of the main document is to show the pitfalls ! If somebody wishes to ignore these warnings, trouble will be the result and the full responsibility resides with those ignoring the flags !

It is impossible to cover all moral aspects here but I tried to cover a few important ones briefly.

Is there an alternative ?

The current way of overpopulating earth can and will lead in the future to the necessity to conquer and cultivate other planets. These hostile environments will contain without doubt an extremely toxic atmosphere for us humans or have unbearable temperatures. A number of lightweight robots, immune to this (but pretty much capable and trained of what we are able of) can remain there for a longer period, for instance the time required to build base-camps, biospheres and cultivate the environment. Primary advanced research can be done locally in order to detect unknown and threatening bacteria's and viruses.

Since these "robots" are perfectly capable of taking smart decisions themselves, it is not required to steer them from earth and a possible delay in the signal caused by the distance will not play a crucial factor. A daily report to earth and possible instructions from earth if required should do the job ! No physiological problems due to a long stay in space, a typical human (organic) problem ...

The moral dilemma here is if we are willing to take the chance that earth will keep on being so gentile to us in the future ! If we keep on exhausting and abusing the earth the way we do now, lots of people could die within one or a few life spans ! Playtime is over and all of us should become aware that the time to think further has arrived ...

Peacekeeping

The long period (more than 60 years) of relative peace (almost) worldwide is unique and indirectly originates in free market principles, democracy and a balance between superpowers. To keep this situation, it might become bitter necessity in the future to have "robots" or equal. The concept of peace is in everybody's interest (except those in the war industry) and is very fragile in nature. The extreme high amount of available potential soldiers of some upcoming super-powers can be and is considered by some existing super-powers as threatening and A.I. or A.B. could play an important role in keeping the balance between these diverse super-powers ...

In order to avoid the abuse of an Artificial Brain (implemented in robots) by individual nations, the license agreement for an A.B. should contain clauses that A.B.'s used for military purposes are only allowed after approval by a special ethical committee and only for certain specific groups of joined forces like the U.N. or the NATO.

Religion and an Artificial Brain

In contrast with cloning or genetically manipulation, an Artificial (digital) Brain is not some way of ‘improving’ the (organic) human specie as such and therefore no religion should have a problem with this aspect !

For most religions, the human specie is directly or indirectly created by a higher power and thanks its intelligence to this. The human specie is often lifted up as superior and creating an Artificial Brain with pretty much the same characteristics might be considered as the ultimate prove of this intelligent design ! Of course an A.B. would remain without soul, which evidently might be considered as a godly power, and human will never be able to imitate ! Therefore an A.B. would always remain inferior, which is once again prove that the human specie is the superior specie.

If an A.B. driven specie would be applied in fields benefiting the human specie such as humanitarian actions in conflict area like Darfoer, earthquakes or hostile places like nuclear plants, space trips, humans could benefit enormously from this.

If applied for the above-mentioned reasons, an A.B. should not be in conflict with religious points of view.

Social impact

If we look at the interracial interaction it is quite predictable that "a new specie" will not be accepted at once. As I explain in the paper (The artificial Brain), new things cause fear and people will be skeptical and sometimes with reason. This "rejection" is rather a problem to be handled at the level of the Artificial Brain itself since it will suffer from this and solutions are available to overcome this !