Should bots have rights?
Why do humans have them in the first place?
Human rights are basic rights that belong to all of us simply because we are human. They embody key values in our society such as fairness, dignity, equality and respect. They are an important means of protection for us all, especially those who may face abuse, neglect and isolation.
But why is the society fair? why is fairness a good quality? why should two humans be given equal opportunity? what is the meaning of equal opportunity? there are so many questions to be answered before we can move forward, so we’ll try to understand the basis for all of these and then move forward to our point of discussion.
Initially humans were hunter gatherers and they didn’t really think of other humans as allies, and maybe that’s why early humans were cannibals.
That is until, agriculture was discovered, and humans found it better to stay together and people distributed tasks among themselves and all the resources too, this might have been the reason why we have society in place today, to incentivise collaboration.
Society has been established with only one purpose in mind, that is to avoid people descending into chaos and trying to end each other. Now to make this happen, society has to be incredibly inclusive and for that to happen there has to be a certain amount of trust among all member parties, so that more individuals subscribe to the idea of it. One of the ways to achieve this is provide equal resources to everyone, but as we later found out, this does not incentivise innovation, since there’s no premium for working harder than everyone else. The society we’re now working towards is one that aims to provide equal opportunity, so that each individual can have a fair chance to build a life they want.
Now that we have discussed the basis of all the questions above, we can now include AI into the picture.
AI, at the heart of it, is a collection of code and metal, even if gets smarter than humans (which it eventually will) it can never feel something for real, it will always be synthetic representation of what humans have been able to discover about themselves, and while we might be able to make significant strides in understanding the human mind, we will never be able to decipher it whole.
Now, the argument in favour of giving AI rights is that humanity has obligations toward our ecosystem and social system. Robots will be part of both systems. We are morally obliged to protect them, design them to protect themselves against misuse, and to be morally harmonised with humanity. There is a whole stack of rights they should be given, here are two: The right to be protected by our legal and ethical system, and the right to be designed to be trustworthy; that is, technologically fit-for-purpose and cognitively and socially compatible (safe, ethically and legally aware, etc.).
Although this seems acceptable since many of these rights seem to be in favour of protecting humans from any anti social robots but with recent advancement in biotechnology we will soon see humans becoming cyborgs — a portmanteau of cybernetic and organism — is a being with both organic and biomechatronic body parts.
Now that will give rise to a new debate, (or actually a pretty old one) what does it mean to be human? what fraction of biotechnology would a human be allowed to integrate into their body and still be classified as a human, what rights will cyborgs have, will they have similar rights as humans, are there going to be tiers of rights? would robots have the power of consent? If such a system were to exist, we would need all such participating combinations of organisms to agree to the legitimateness of it.
All in all, this is a very complex topic, it is also very nuanced and will vary with culture, although introduction of such rights will also lead to a rise in violations of those rights and put the already understaffed courts and judges under further stress, would the robots have access to the same courts as humans, would the robots creators have any say in such proceedings, it will all be very interesting to see.
