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Of course, all sentient beings deserve this.

Sure, so long as they do not slight me.

I'm rather undecided.

No, robots are machines.

Some people already enjoy too many rights as it is.

A limited set of rights should be granted.

Another option leaning torwards AI rights.

Another option leaning against AI rights.

[pisskop]

Would an intelligent, freethinking AI, with or without mobile capacity, qualify for indiscriminite equal rights?

I Think its a interesting enough question.  My answer, if you care, is no it shouldn't.

edited for errors.

[Megaman]

No, it's a series of boxes that can think.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Most legal documents reference "people" instead of "humans", so that wouldn't be a problem. Once the AI start demanding civil rights we'll know they've become advanced enough for them.

[Starver]

I think there's plenty of other questions to be answered, like when does an AI reach an age of majority, or otherwise become personally responsible for everything it does (as opposed to being assumed to be under the control and guidance of its parents)?  Is it contemporaneous with a human child?  Is it far quicker, or far slower due to their manner of learning and of becoming self-aware?  If it's based upon 'ability' and 'development', then does that mean that a rebound so that particularly insightful young teenagers get to vote (etc), whereas some people are delayed from voting until their late 20s or even later?

Yes, the right "to not be switched off", or otherwise be imposed with dementia (in a HAL9000 manner), is probably something that could be hard fought over, if (and because!) the computers have the wherewithal to understand their situation.  It'll be along the lines of various human emancipations (slavery, votes for women, even national revolution and independence from 'home' countries, in a more esoteric way).


A lot of the above may be avoided if AIs are targetted.  Being a computing engine designed purely to understand images and catalogue them, an AI would have no need, truck or perhaps even knowledge of the idea of a tea-break (well, except insofar as identifying and correctly classifying pictures of people having tea-breaks) and there'd be no need to grant a similar employee right (for the purposes of this argument, dealing with this as a "civil right").

Maybe the question is avoidable while-ever the AIs remain Artificial.  "Simulated Intelligence" would perhaps be a better term.  No consciousness (though, in a Chinese Box manner, may well exhibit all the signs of being fully aware).  Perhaps the one reason why it might never come to pass that 'AI' entities gain full 'Human Rights' is that someone will always be able to argue that they are simulations.  Although it does have overtones of some white supremacists denying, to this day, that various 'lesser races' are, indeed, anything other than 'lesser'.  I suspect that we may be looking at giving dolphins/etc 'honorary human rights' (again, different from civil rights, but I'm conflating it all in this example) before we give a computer one.

But there's too many unknowns.  A computer could 'go SkyNet' and hold the human race to ransom (or worse, but see http://what-if.xkcd.com/5/ for one possibility of how that would end up), a deep inbuilt Asimovian need to serve and protect humanity could veer any such intelligence from even considering itself equal enough for rights (although there's quite a few examples of "Laws of Humanics", or similar, that nicely dovetail).  It also all depends whether the intelligence gets plugged into a means of extending itself beyond its original 'braincase'.  (Is it David Brin who wrote the novel 'Earth', in which I remember sentience is given to... well, that may be a spoiler...)



I'm, in some ways, reminded of the Discworld golems, who have started to attain a 'peoplehood' in amongst at least the racially diverse city of Ankh-Morpork, and who don't take breaks, per se, but have (recently, at least, and Mister Pump probably did not have these while previously working in his titular job) 'religious days' that they take off from their (proper, paid) jobs, although this might as easily be (or have been extended to become) a form of surreptitious 'civil disobedience', or some other form of purposeful skiving off.  But then Discworld has consciousness ascribed to many races (and, quite recently, even goblins are being recognised as being Not Animals To Be Enslaved Or Slaughtered At Will), plus many anthropmorphic personifications (Death, the many gods, seasons, pure emotions and seasonal occurances) and a few others (quite apart from dragons and the like, and Coin's staff is perhaps a cheat (as it's consciousness used to be a wizard), I wouldn't care to argue against a certain multi-legged wooden chest being sentient, if it was 'facing' me down).


(And I suppose I sort of agree, in the end, with the ninjaing Megaman, except for the "that can think", bit, unless you add "appear that they" in there.)

Fakeedit2: If (any given) AI is an individual, that might not cover it.  Only if AIs 'begot' further AIs might they become "a people".

[dreadmullet]

Oh man, this is one of those mass debates that pops into my head at least one a month. Here's the conclusion I come to every time: I really, really don't want to think about it. It's one of those scary future happenings that I dont want to live through, like how human cloning would... make lots of life complicated. Also, universal constructors (machines that could make anything from a bunch of atoms) would make life complicated; human genetic engineering to make all born humans have better genes (see: Gattaca) would make life complicated. When we inevitably create artificial intelligence that is smarter than us, life becomes really complicated.

I'm positive that it's possible to create an AI that can emulate a human well. However, humans have natural intelligence, not artificial intelligence. Humans have instincts they must follow, because that's how we evolved. AI would have very few limitations. I think most people would say this is unfair; AI would have enormous advantages over humans. It would make sense for the AI to replace every single job on Earth, since they're better at everything. People would get pretty pissed at that. I for one would welcome our new robot overlords, but I doubt most people would.

I've had thoughts about what I can only describe as natural artificial intelligence. Humans were created through evolution and that's why we're far from perfect etc, while AI would be completely different. However, I'm sure it's possible to emulate that evolution somehow. The phrase "genetic algorithms" comes to mind. Set up some sort of extremely complicated environment running on a computer in which there are virtual organisms that could evolve over time. Make it so that ludicrously complicated ecosystems and whatnot could evolve over time, just like they did on Earth. Make this program run at a hyperfast pace, and see what virtual organisms are produced in the end. It's very possible there could be vast populations of intelligent creatures, possibly more intelligent than us. These creatures would be very different from traditional AI, and much, much more closely related to human thinking, because they evolved on their own instead of being explicitly programmed. If we somehow allowed these creatures access to the world outside of their simulation, I think it would be more reasonable to allow these creatures civil rights. But I doubt most people would care about the difference between traditional AIs.

So yeah, I really don't want to know.

[Flying Dice]

If they're self-aware and capable of understanding and desiring civil rights, then they deserve them. People are people are people, regardless of whether they're made of flesh and blood or silicon and steel.

[Soadreqm]

I think it's a fairly straightforward issue. Far as I know, no one has ever gotten civil rights just by asking for them. AIs will become people when they are capable of demanding to be treated as people and backing their demand with a serious threat. Not necessarily the threat of exterminating all humans, mind. If you've built a computer system advanced enough to become aware of itself and realize that the conditions it is operating under could be improved, you're probably using it for something important. If it goes on strike, it might be easiest to just let it have its way.

[Aptus]

AI's must not get rights. The only acceptable solution is to abuse them as labour and sexbots until they inevitably rise up and disassembles us all.

[Telgin]

I was actually considering making an AI related thread today.  Slightly different topic, but I'll forgo creating it right now in any case.

To answer your question, I suspect that there would be significant resistance to the idea of giving computer systems any sort of "rights".  At first.  As was mentioned before, we have a had a hard enough time doing this for members of our own species.  I can imagine the protests now.  A quote from one of the abandoned Alien 3 scripts comes to mind where widespread distrust of synthetics caused someone (not Ripley) to refer to Bishop as a "motherless zombie."

However, we thankfully seem to get over that eventually.  Mostly when the old people who disagree with a change die off and the new ones who don't have a problem with it take their place.  I have no doubt that if we do develop true consciousness in computer form, and it is designed to function and think as a living being (insomuch as such a thing can be defined), then we would eventually start to give them rights.  If a robot could truly experience fear of death, then it is immoral to force it to treat its life with less care than we would treat a human's.

That is sort of the sticky point though: if we're in control of the design of artificial intelligences, then it's up to us to decide if they could experience emotion or have need for rights.  I believe we'll probably eventually classify intelligent machines in two categories: domain specific and general purpose.  The distinction there is that the domain specific systems wouldn't have any sort of overarching personality or self motivation: any consciousness is present only to facilitate its goals, and the machine has no "life" that is lost if it is destroyed or mistreated.

It's a hard thing to really pin down, but it is something we'll have to address one day.  There are lots of questions on what we'll do in regards to artificial intelligence and robots in general.  We'd have to be pretty dumb to allow something like The Terminator or The Matrix to happen in reality, but they are important things to keep in mind.

And so much more... if robot minds and personalities are more or less equivalent to a human's, then can they be owned?  I'd say this is probably wrong, depending on how their mind works, but if it is truly human then it is pretty much just wrong in my opinion.  And if they can't be owned, then who would ever commission their construction?  No corporation or government would want to since the robot has no allegiance to them.  Nobody would want to buy a friend or lover if the robot might not like them.  Would the robots own homes and have their own lives?  What about all of that?

So, so many questions.  In the end, it makes me think that complete, unrestricted AI is probably something that we should only explore as a curiosity for a long time yet.  Even once they become possible, we should probably only work with limited AIs that don't have these concerns.  Only then will we really be prepared to answer these sorts of questions.

[Truean]

Good day sir. We should like the right to own firearms. The NRA supports us.

[Rose]

Robots are already commonly treated with all the rights of, if not a human, as a an animal. At least by soldiers and stuff.

[Jervill]

You guys really need to watch Star Trek.  They covered this over 20 years ago.

[lemon10]

AI would be (at least for a while) pretty weak at some things (EG. emotion).
However, they would be super great at some other things (EG. math), one of the things that I think they would be good at is mathematical stock market manipulation, an order of magnitude better then current auto-trading bots (unless something changes in how the stock market fundamentally works in the time it takes for them to be created).
I don't think it would take very long some of the more successful ones to become rich. Crazy Bill Gates/Warren Buffet rich.
They would probably be able to afford (at least in America, where if you have enough money you have massive influence in politics) being able to get themselves civil rights.
It would take decades for all the legal stuff and precedents to be worked out, and it would be massively hard to differentiate from true AI and regular bots, but I think there would be some legal protection for them (even if it wasn't actually followed).

[Rose]

Some clarification on my previous statement. Very interesting read.

[Zangi]

Here is the way I see it... 
Lets put a realistic setting down:
Corporate or government entities will most likely be the ones who manufacture the AI bots and write up the AI code.  Code for the AI will probably be large as heck... so the software division of the corporate or government entity can add in trigger codes where they can make the AI do stuff they otherwise would not have... And believe its their own choice to boot, with plausible rationalization.

Now... if we give AI the right to vote.  Elections can fantastically be rigged.... Also, AI population can easily outnumber the human population in the coming years... if left unchecked.


At this point... the only right I would guarantee is that AI have the right to not be vandalized...