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Thread: Do Robots and AI Deserve Rights?

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    Administrator fuego's Avatar
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    Do Robots and AI Deserve Rights?

    Seriously? Robots or AI will never have 'real life' or a soul. But I understand many don't understand that component, and thing AI will eventually be like a real person. It never will. It will always be a machine. They will never have a real 'personality'. But this article shows the ridiculousness of how some think.
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    When it comes to robot-human relations, the conversation typically centers on the welfare of the sentient. Science fiction paints us as petrified by our own creations; fears of a bot planet have influenced everything from Asimov's "Laws of Robotics" to HAL 9000's homicidal impulses to Skynet's global genocide.

    These human-centric anxieties are understandable. However, as our assorted bots and bits gain skills and personalities, should they be afforded some form of protection from us? It's a question people are starting to seriously ponder.

    Last month, the European Parliament's legal affairs committee issued a report on the use and creation of robots and artificial intelligence (AI). It recommended creating a form of "electronic personhood" that would afford rights and responsibilities to the most advanced forms of AI.

    Many surely bristle at the concept of "rights" being awarded to software. While AI is increasingly capable of performing specific tasks, it's not complex enough to have an opinion on how it is treated. It's completely reasonable to ask if robo-rights is even a debate worth having right now. Indeed, humanity has far more immediate concerns on its plate (the humans of the European parliament in particular), but the era of personhood-worthy bots isn't as far off into the crazy super future as you might think.

    While the human-like AI long promised by science fiction has thus far failed to materialize, researchers around the globe are hard at work turning it into reality. I don't expect to see anything resembling Star Trek's Data or Rosie from The Jetsons in the immediate future, but I wouldn't be surprised to meet them in my lifetime: History has shown time and again that technology—particularly information technology—doesn't just improve incrementally, it rockets forward exponentially. Consider some of modern AI's very impressive feats and try to imagine what it will be able to accomplish in 10, 20, or 30 years.

    I can't say for sure what robots or AI of the future will be able to do. But I can say that if robot ethics doesn't rise to the level of a serious concern for society, then—at the very least—robot etiquette should...

    ...Recently, I interviewed Dr. Kate Darling, a robot ethicist from MIT's Media Lab as part of our streaming interview series and podcast, The Convo (video above). While Darling isn't quite on board with electronic personhood (at least not yet), she is interested in how humans interact with their technology and believes our choices are ultimately a reflection of us.

    "The one thing that does separate robots from other machines is that we tend to treat them like their alive," explains Darling. "I think that there's a Kantian philosophical argument to be made. So Kant's argument for animal rights was always about us and not about the animals. Kant didn't give a shit about animals. He thought 'if we're cruel to animals, that makes us cruel humans.' And I think that applies to robots that are designed in a lifelike way and we treat like living things. We need to ask what does it do to us to be cruel to these things and from a very practical standpoint—and we don't know the answer to this—but it might literally turn us into crueler humans if we get used to certain behaviors with these lifelike robots."

    While science fiction has gotten a lot wrong in its predictions of what the robo-future would look like, it does provide a laboratory of the imagination. Would you rather live in, say, a Westworld universe filled with humans who feel free to rape and maim the park's mechanical inhabitants, or on the deck of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where advanced robots are treated as equals? The humans of one world seem a lot more welcoming than the other, don't they?

    So, when it comes to the question of how we interact with our creations, maybe we should be less concerned with determining their personhood than we are with defining our humanity.

    http://www.pcmag.com/article/351719/...deserve-rights

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    Super Moderator Quest's Avatar
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    Sigh.....it is hard to believe there is any hope...that lunacy has not gained full control of the whole world...so glad I know GOD...

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