Abstract
It is suggested that some limitations of current designs for medical AI systems (be they autonomous or advisory) stem from the failure of those designs to address issues of artificial (or machine) consciousness. Consciousness would appear to play a key role in the expertise, particularly the moral expertise, of human medical agents, including, for example, autonomous weighting of options in (e.g.,) diagnosis; planning treatment; use of imaginative creativity to generate courses of action; sensorimotor flexibility and sensitivity; empathetic and morally appropriate responsiveness; and so on. Thus, it is argued, a plausible design constraint for a successful ethical machine medical or care agent is for it to at least model, if not reproduce, relevant aspects of consciousness and associated abilities. In order to provide theoretical grounding for such an enterprise we examine some key philosophical issues that concern the machine modelling of consciousness and ethics, and we show how questions relating to the first research goal are relevant to medical machine ethics. We believe that this will overcome a blanket skepticism concerning the relevance of understanding consciousness, to the design and construction of artificial ethical agents for medical or care contexts. It is thus argued that it would be prudent for designers of MME agents to reflect on issues to do with consciousness and medical (moral) expertise; to become more aware of relevant research in the field of machine consciousness; and to incorporate insights gained from these efforts into their designs.
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Notes
- 1.
We use the term “Machine” Ethics/Consciousness here rather than “Artificial” following many (but not all) in the respective fields. There is a lot of fuzziness about what counts as a “machine” here, but the de facto emphasis in this discussion is on computational systems.
- 2.
For the moment we are eliding over the distinction between artificially modeling some target area, one the one hand, and reproducing, or replicating that target area. This distinction is usually marked in the area of AI, by the phraseology “Strong AI”/“Weak AI”. A similar division between Strong and Weak MC has been suggested (refs); and between Strong and Weak ME. We will discuss the Strong/Weak antithesis later on in the paper.
- 3.
The “non-relationally individuated” qualifier is meant to block certain trivializations of the notion of causal indistinguishability. For example, suppose, per impossible, that b and b′ have the same effect, that of light L coming on. Further suppose that they both have no other effects on any other objects. Intuitively, b and b′ are causally indistinguishable. However b, but not b′, has the (relationally individuated) effect of light L coming on as a result of b. This would render b and b′ (and all other pairs of behaviors) causally distinguishable, making any notion defined in terms of it (such as functional ethical equivalence) vacuous. Adding the restriction prevents this.
- 4.
Or perhaps not, strictly speaking: plausibly, only a proper subset of our (and Bloggs’) behavior is ethically evaluable.
- 5.
The terms “moral agent/patient” are used more frequently than “moral producer/consumer” in the literature, but there are pitfalls to such a usage. First, when one talks about an “artificial agent”, or indeed of a “moral agent”, one is often using the term “agent” in a wider sense than when one is using “agent” to distinguish between moral agency and patiency. For example, there is a very real question of whether an artificial agent—in a wide sense of “agent”—could be a genuine moral patient (moral consumer) (see [46, 48]). Second, as suggested above, the term “moral patient” is particularly awkward in a medical context, as in the present discussion. Medical patients may invariably be moral patients (or moral consumers) as well, but the class of moral patients (consumers) whose interests may be affected by a particular medical intervention may be larger than the actual patient receiving that intervention (e.g., there may be family members whose interests would be severely affected if the intervention went wrong, and so on).
- 6.
A similar point can be made concerning moral consumerhood. Many see corporations as possessing rights, as entities toward which we can have obligations; for an example, one only need look at the recent (2010) US Supreme Court ruling in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which held that the first amendment in the Bill of Rights applies to corporations. If corporations have rights, then they can be wronged. And being something which can be wronged is, plausibly, sufficient for moral consumerhood, e.g., “An entity has moral status if and only if it or its interests morally matter to some degree for the entity's own sake, such that it can be wronged” [26]. Again, that corporations currently comprise conscious beings does not in itself undermine the general point; further, it is not prima facie absurd to suppose that a corporation could persist, and retain its rights, even if the number of humans constituting it shrank to zero. There is also the much-discussed issue of potentialism. Presumably we retain our full moral status even when we are unconscious; this (and the moral consumerhood of, say, fetuses) is usually explained in terms of a potential for being conscious, rather than consciousness itself. Perhaps, then, some artificial agents might be properly seen as moral consumers, as long as they could be understood in some way to be potentially, even if not actually, conscious.
- 7.
It is also unclear what (non-nefarious) motives one could have for creating “genuine” moral consumerhood in an artificial agent, unless one takes the view that it is a requirement for, e.g., moral producerhood.
- 8.
It could be argued, in a related way, that an artificial agent which was unable to experience pain or affective suffering could not be a subject of moral praise or blame, since the latter requires a capability of experiencing the positive or negative sanctions, whatever they might be, that attaches to any such praise or blame.
- 9.
Normally the strong/weak distinction is thought of as primarily applying to intelligence. In fact, one can see the context of Searle's original use of the distinction, the Chinese room argument, as applying most directly to consciousness, and only indirectly to intelligence, via the assumption that genuine intelligence requires understanding accessible from a first-person perspective.
- 10.
Chrisley there talks of Artificial Consciousness (AC) rather than Machine Consciousness.
- 11.
Here we are generalizing Searle's strong-weak distinction in another way: his distinction dealt specifically with the technology of digital computer programs, whereas we are open to considering any computational/robotic technology.
- 12.
Some might be unimpressed by a shift of focus from sufficient to necessary conditions. Necessary conditions, it might be thought, are ubiquitous to the point of being non-explanatory. Compare a similar move in chemistry: “I don't know what the sufficient conditions for a sample X being water are”, a scientist might have said in the time before the structure of water was known, “but I do know a lot of the necessary conditions: X must be a substance, must be located in space-time, must be composed of atoms, must either be an element or a compound, must be capable of being a liquid at room temperature…” and so on. While true, all of these conditions, even taken together, fall short of explaining what water is, unlike the sufficient condition “X is H2O”. Two things can be said to quell this worry. First, the example is rather anachronistic. From our current, H2O-informed perspective it is easy to underestimate the explanatory and heuristic value of the necessary conditions just cited. Second, the necessary conditions can be ordered, from the most widely applicable, to the very-narrow-but-still-not-narrow-enough-to guarantee-waterhood, such as “has, at sea level, a boiling point of 100 °C and a freezing point of 0 °C”, which may be very useful in the determination of sufficient conditions. The suggestion, then, is that synthetic investigation of the “narrow” end of the corresponding hierarchy of necessary conditions for consciousness can play an important role in explaining consciousness.
- 13.
“Well” is a relative term that we are intentionally leaving unspecified to allow us to cover a broader range of claims. But as an example, one (strong) gloss on it would be: “at a level sufficient to allow replacement, or at least significant supplementation, of human medical personnel”.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Robert Clowes, Mark Coeckelbergh, Madeline Drake, David Gunkel, Jenny Prince-Chrisley, Wendell Wallach, and Blay Whitby. We would also like to thank members of the audience of the following institutions/meetings for their helpful comments: University of Sussex (COGS, E-intentionality); Twente (SBT); AISB meetings on Machine Consciousness (Universities of Hertfordshire, Bristol, and York) and on Machine Ethics (Birmingham and Goldsmiths Universities). Thanks also to the EU Cognition network for their support.
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Torrance, S., Chrisley, R. (2015). Modelling Consciousness-Dependent Expertise in Machine Medical Moral Agents. In: van Rysewyk, S., Pontier, M. (eds) Machine Medical Ethics. Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering, vol 74. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08108-3_18
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