But if a computer were morally and philosophically better than a human, wouldn’t it treat us better than we would treat it?

Not necessarily. If we stick to Asimov’s three laws, there’s so many loopholes, and even more movies about those loopholes. iRobot is a recent example.

A very likely outcome, though, has nothing to do with them harming us like so many think. They would simply win by longevity. We use way more resources than a robot would, it would be so very easy for them to outlast us. Let us die out naturally from lack of any or all of the things we need to survive that a computer, a robot, simply does not need.

So if robots could hypothetically be more emotionally and morally intelligent than humans, does that mean they would actually have emotions and morals, or just act as if they do? Is there even a difference?

Oh there’s a huge difference! We can code robots to feel emotion easy-peasy. You can program a robot pretty easily to look for certain cues and as a response it emulates an emotion. You could probably manage to get some pity emotion out of Siri. Actually Siri is a great example of this. We’ve been able to do that for ages.

The holy grail, the greatest breakthrough that we haven’t quite touched yet, is a robot that can organically come up with a response to outside stimuli that we didn’t program. That the robot learned. That the robot felt was necessary to create on its own.

A perfect example of this is the Chinese Room. It’s a thought experiment that begins with this hypothetical premise: suppose that artificial intelligence research has succeeded in constructing a computer that behaves as if it understands Chinese. It takes Chinese characters as input and, by following the instructions of a computer program, produces other Chinese characters, which it presents as output. Suppose that this computer performs its task so convincingly that it comfortably passes the Turing test: it convinces a human Chinese speaker that the program is itself a live Chinese speaker. To all of the questions that the person asks, it makes appropriate responses, such that any Chinese speaker would be convinced that they are talking to another Chinese-speaking human being. The question we want to answer is this: does the machine literally “understand” Chinese? Or is it merely simulating the ability to understand Chinese?

In the movie Ex Machina (another great movie to watch!) The main character is trying to explain this premise to an AI. He uses the example that a colorblind person can know everything there is about color. The wavelengths of specific colors, every quantitative thing about color. Ever. But they’ll never see color. They could tell you red was the color of apples and the sunset and that it was the longest wavelength of the visible colors, but they’d never see red. They’d never experience red.

So how can we tell if the robot is actually experiencing red or just spewing out information about the color red?

That’s the tricky part. There’s tests. Self awareness tests that give us a feel how .. human a robot is.

But for the most part? We can’t.