Chinese President Xi Jinping called for individual countries to have broad authority to regulate the Internet at home, outlining a digital future in which governments could set online standards and challenge the free flow of information and content across borders.
Why is the leadership of the PRC so terrified of the free flow of information, of free speech?
Oh, wait.
Toni Massaro, Regents’ Professor, Milton O. Riepe Chair in Constitutional Law, and Dean Emerita at the University of Arizona College of Law, and Helen Norton, Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School, discuss whether Artificial Intelligences might ever gain free speech rights. After all, as Citizens United affirmed, lots of non-human entities have at least some aspects of a right to free speech.
Indeed, it is a question that warrants consideration: do only humans have full free speech rights, or do AIs, also; do sentient beings of any stripe have full free speech rights; and if the answer to either of the latter two is “Yes,” then what’s the threshold of intelligence beyond which such rights must be acknowledged (or granted: is our endowment of inalienable rights imbued by God in humans only, or in other beings, too?), and how do we measure that threshold?
Massaro and Norton, in their paper Siri-ously? Free Speech Rights and Artificial Intelligence look into the question (absent any religious aspect) as it relates specifically to AIs. It’s a paper well worth the read, if only for the thought experiment aspect that is the authors’ purpose.
I’m interested in a particular part of their argument, though, as summarized by The Wall Street Journal Law Blog [emphasis in the original].
The idea becomes less preposterous, according to the scholars, when one focuses not on who or what is doing the speaking, but on who is doing the listening.
Such an approach, emphasizing “expression’s value to listeners” or the “listeners’ enlightenment,” yields “many similarities…between much computer speech and human speech that we already protect,” the professors say.
Listening is a hugely important aspect of our freedom of speech, no doubt. The right of the listener to choose for himself the speech to which he will listen or not listen—the right to assess for himself the value of the speech—is absolutely critical; without it there is no freedom of speech.
But.
The right to choose which speech to which to listen or not can only be derivative of the right to speak freely. After all, if the speech can be blocked in any way, or censored in any form, there can be nothing to which to listen, and so no choice of listening can exist. Within that, the value of the listened-to speech, and of the ignored speech, is in the mind of the speaker first and in the ear of the listener/ignorer second. There is no third. Government’s view, including court’s view, of that value never enters into it.
The authors dilute IMNSHO their argument to a large degree by basing a significant fraction of their argument on the value to a listener of that derivative aspect.
Universities are struggling to balance the free exchange of ideas with students’ growing desire to be shielded from offensive views, a philosophical divide at the heart of recent protests that have roiled campuses around the country.
That’s the opening paragraph of Dan Frosch’s and Tamara Audi’s Friday piece in The Wall Street Journal. There’s no struggle here, though, except in the minds of school administrators and professors too timorous, too disrespectful of free speech to be fit to hold their positions.
While the tension between political correctness and open discourse has riven colleges for decades, a hunger strike and protests over racial incidents that forced out the University of Missouri’s president on Monday have supercharged the debate.
This is a coarse misunderstanding, and not only by Frosch and Audi, but by the precious little snowflakes at each of those universities and colleges. There is no such tension at all. What is politically incorrect is the attempt to control discourse in order to protect the self-proclaimed too-fragile from the vicissitudes of life.
Freedom of speech begins, of necessity, with protecting the most offensive, the most uncomfortable of speech. As soon as governments begin banning the most offensive or uncomfortable speech, the definition of “offensive” and of “uncomfortable” begins to be elevated. In very short order, indeed, today’s ordinary, inoffensive, comfortable (and comforting) speech becomes offensive and uncomfortable. Especially to the men in government who now are making the definitions.
Here’s an excerpt from a 6th Circuit en banc ruling on a free speech/free exercise case from Dearborn, MI [cites omitted]:
Diversity, in viewpoints and among cultures, is not always easy. An inability or a general unwillingness to understand new or differing points of view may breed fear, distrust, and even loathing. But it “is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.” Robust discourse, including the exchanging of ideas, may lead to a better understanding (or even an appreciation) of the people whose views we once feared simply because they appeared foreign to our own exposure. But even when communication fails to bridge the gap in understanding, or when understanding fails to heal the divide between us, the First Amendment demands that we tolerate the viewpoints of others with whom we may disagree. If the Constitution were to allow for the suppression of minority or disfavored views, the democratic process would become imperiled through the corrosion of our individual freedom. Because “[t]he right to speak freely and to promote diversity of ideas…is…one of the chief distinctions that sets us apart from totalitarian regimes,” dissent is an essential ingredient of our political process.
…
The civil-rights era cases tell us that police cannot punish a peaceful speaker as an easy alternative to dealing with a lawless crowd that is offended by what the speaker has to say … The Supreme Court … has repeatedly affirmed the principle that “constitutional rights may not be denied simply because of hostility to their assertion or exercise.
It would do these children a great service to learn to read (a form of free speech…), and then to add this sort of thing to their literature lists. It would do the administrators and professors a great service to steel themselves to reading and understanding our Constitution. Their disdain for such responsibility is microaggression of monstrous proportion against these children.
To quote, sort of, another man, life is hard. It’s harder if you’re precious and fragile. Or if you’re in a position of responsibility that exceeds your courage.
On Tuesday afternoon an Israeli academic was shouted down by two dozen protesters as he tried to begin a lecture before about 100 students and faculty at the University of Minnesota. The speaker was Moshe Halbertal, a professor at NYU Law School and a professor of Jewish thought and philosophy at Hebrew University.
Dr Halbertal had been invited by the university to give the lecture, and after the disruption, he was able to proceed.
The gang of protestors bragged about it.
Today, this apologist for Zionist war crimes spoke only sporadically, as his lies were interrupted again and again by protesters who refused to listen to his anti-Palestinian hate speech.
And not only that. This gang did their best to deny everyone else their right to listen to the speech. The right of those others to determine for themselves what they will listen to is strictly in the hands of this gang. Free speech, according to these, is limited to the freedom to speak or to hear only that which these personally approve.
The silence of the rest of the Left—not even the Star Tribune, a newspaper local to the region, spent any column inches on the thing—is clear: the Left as a whole agrees with this view that only speech of which the Left approves may be freely spoken.
Recall the brouhaha over CNBC’s butchery of the last Republican Presidential primary debate. In the aftermath, the Republican National Committee removed NBC (the parent of CNBC) from moderating the February ’16 debate (currently still scheduled with the National Review as moderator along with a now-unspecified partner). In tit-for-tat response, NBC pulled Telemundo (another of NBC’s properties) from co-moderating that February debate.
Jeb Bush’s representatives sought to reinstate Telemundo, NBC’s Spanish-language network, as a partner for that debate, but the proposal was vetoed by Donald Trump’s campaign, which threatened to boycott the event.
I have a couple of questions: does the Republican Party really want the Hispanic vote, or not? Which Republican candidates want the Hispanic vote?
Is Donald Trump (never mind all his racist remarks about Hispanics) really going to be given veto power over the other candidates’ campaigns and debates? If so, do we really want such lily-livered men or women for President?