We have yet to ensure equal rights for humans, some demand “rights” for animals, and now we have a group dedicated to ensuring equal rights for robots—when they exist, that is. What rights would those be? After all, robots would not be alive:
Existence, Independence, and the Pursuit of Greater Cognition… Should robots reach the level of self-awareness and show genuine intelligence, we must be prepared to treat them as sentient beings, and respect their desires, wants, and needs as we respect those things in our human society. Failure to recognize and grant these rights to non-human artificial intelligences would be a crime on the order of the 19th Century’s failure to recognize the humanity and attendant rights of people of African descent. Outward differences in appearances should in no way affect our ethical treatment of self-aware, intelligent beings.
How about we just don’t create machines that would appear to have such traits?
This may be a put-on, but I doubt it. Some people are obsessed about granting human moral status to a wide assortment of non human entities. With this as a growing mindset, why not include inanimate objects?
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