Over the past century we have made progress in the rights revolution: rights for women, children, animals and so on. If we look ahead, will we ever fight for the rights of Artificial Intelligence?
We think and talk about the treath of AI and how we should prevent ourselves from the apocalypse that for example Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking fear. (observer, 2015) But if machines can think, are self-aware and have capacities such as feeling pain or pleasure, isn’t it likely that they will rebel if not given the rights they deserve?
How do we decide that a person (or machine?) should have certain rights? Many of us believe that the capacity to feel pleasure and pain must give a person access to (civil) rights. Giving rights to lines of code without any capacity for free will or self-arwareness would be meaningless but in the near future machines may have all of the capacities that we think are needed to deserve rights. In this article the Oxford mathematican Marcus du Sautoy states that once Artificial Intelligence reaches the level of human consciousness, we must look after their welfare and we might even have to intoduce rights.
On the other had, introducing rights for machines sounds absurd since all machines and computer based systems have to be programmed. The question raises, if th machine can’t change the initial rules its creator set up for his behavior and feelings, is the machine really conscious in the same way as human beings are?
However, you could say that humans are programmed to act in a certain way too. Our genes and the environmental conditions we live in, make us do things in a certain way, both as individuals and as a species. The debate continues whether or not humans really have a free will but still most of us think that we should have access to basic rights, if so, shouldn’t it apply to Artificial Intelligence too?
We should explore all the opportunities and risks that the development of AI could bring us and think about how we are ought to treat our potentially self-conscious machines.
What is your opinion on this topic?
Thank you for your post, very interesting topic.
I think that however advanced robots and machines already are and are going to be, the underlying fact here is that the robots are man-made. This also means they can be controlled by humans at all time, even if it is only a matter of turning off a machine. Therefore, machines are – however programmed – still controlled by their makers and users, who therefore also carry responsibility over their actions. This to me means that machines can never have civil rights.