The ACLU’s Future Clients: ROBOTS!
Posted on December 19, 2006
American Cyborg Liberties Union? This has got to be a joke right? With as many “rights” as the ACLU has invented over the last few decades, is this really out of the realm of possibility?
From Scrappleface…errrr, I mean the Financial Times: UK report says robots will have rights
The next time you beat your keyboard in frustration, think of a day where it may be able to sue you for assault. Within 50 years we might even find ourselves standing next to the next generation of vacuum cleaners in the voting booth.
Far from being extracts from the extreme end of science fiction, the idea that we may one day give sentient machines the kind of rights traditionally reserved for humans is raised in a British government-commissioned report which claims to be an extensive look into the future.
Visions of the status of robots around 2056 have emerged from one of 270 forward-looking papers sponsored by Sir David King, the UK government’s chief scientist. The paper covering robots’ rights was written by a UK partnership of Outsights, the management consultancy, and Ipsos Mori, the opinion research organisation.
“If we make conscious robots they would want to have rights and they probably should,†said Henrik Christensen, director of the Centre of Robotics and Intelligent Machines at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Yes, the government’s “chief scientist.” I’m sure he’d call conservative Christians crazy. Robot rights…how ’bout monkey rights? (This was from the GOVERNING coalition in Spain folks, don’t laugh too hard.)
Update: Cylons are lining up at Nadine Strossen’s door to demand a new ACLU department defending cyberlygamous marriage equality right now!
Blue Crab Boulevard wonders about kicking robot dogs. We may have to get a People for the Ethical Treatment of Robot Animals too. PETRA.
Wake Up America: Forget the freaking rights, ROBOTS SHOULD NOT BE MADE TO HAVE A CONSCIOUS.
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5 Responses to “The ACLU’s Future Clients: ROBOTS!”
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Syndicate Me
Well, it would only be logical if they were to actually have self awareness that they would demand rights. We should stop short of giving them self concioussness if that is even possible and just make them all soldiers to fight our wars for us.
You oppressive warmonger…you want to create cyborgpeople just to exploit them in order to feed the Neo-Con Halliburton-Industrial War Machine Complex.
I think this whole thing is madness — as if we understand the human consciousness to model it. Without that understanding, there’s no “consciousness” to give, unless you think the AI used in RPGs is “consciousness”.
“Prepare for the dawn of the American Cyborg Liberties Union.”
–Suitably Flip
Classic!
Robots with self-awareness, at least as humans have, will never happen. Scientists still struggle to figure out our complexity so modeling it at this point seems fruitless.