The process is neither Legal nor Scientific. The process is Political.
Congress would be involved. If a court passed a ruling Congress disapproved of, Congress would change the law to overturn it.
Consider faction: the Religious Right would adamantly oppose rights for Robots. But the Democrats might also object, for Humanist reasons–Man’s rights suborned to a machine’s, & all that.
A better question is this–why give rights to a wind-up toy in the first place?
I’m beginning to see the issue this way more and more, and I can’t say that I like it. My way of thinking keeps leading me to believe that once you demonstrate a thing, line up evidence in favor of it such that disagreement becomes unreasonable, people will immediately accept it and change their patterns of behavior. But obviously that can’t be the case; all I’ve got to do is glance at the front page of a newspaper and I see that even the barest, simplest, most straightforward facts can be denied for convenience’s sake until they become a noose around the denier’s neck.
For example: we’ve had a growing water crisis here in the State of Georgia for very many years. While the numbers were large, they were not complicated. So much water goes in one end of the system. So much water comes out the other end. If you can’t keep things balanced you’re going to be in a lot of trouble. Nothing was done, and now we’re in a lot of trouble. And people are still resisting change.
Well, assuming the wind-up toy doesn’t violate the example I gave in the OP, the standard answer is that it can suffer. Peter Singer covers a lot of it in “Animal Liberation”:
I’m really glad you asked that, Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor. I hadn’t even bothered to think about the issue on that level. I can see now the big threshold isn’t the ‘not property’ thing but demonstration of suffering. Most people discussing this issue snag on demonstrating the actuality of consciousness; how can you tell a simulacrum from the real thing? There is no consensus as to the definition of consciousness. But suffering might be a lot simpler to prove.
Good grief, I wish the people who wrote Star Trek episodes would have cracked open a book on philosophy once in a while.
Ran over the edit limit. That’s what I get for posting before I’m sure of what I wanted to say. I really wish I hadn’t put that totally irrelevant stuff about the water crisis in there. Anyway:
I guess my question becomes:
Given a hypothetical sapient robot in the present day, how would you organize a political movement in order to secure them rights under the law? As Jragon pointed out, maybe the first step is to build more robots? It’s easier to award rights to a group than to an individual, and without multiple members in the group how can you define its limits?
Also, I’m still wondering about the corporation thing: A corporation is defined as an ‘Artifical Person’ and has all the rights of one, correct? How is a corporation… er… embodied? Is it a street address? A building? A piece of paper? A convening of shareholders? Or, to put it another way, given an existing corporation, what is the smallest thing or group of things you would have to eliminate in order for the corporation to no longer exist?
They’re doing something now.
They’re trying to change the borders of Georgia & Tennessee so Georgia controls the flow of the Tennessee River. Then Georgia can build a hastily-constructed crap dam, & take all the water, leaving Tennessee’s ecosystem to go to shit, & dry up the TVA hydroelectric dams.
:mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:
Why give rights to a mass of organic chemicals in the first place?
We could try attacking this from the other end (and I suspect that we will see some attacks like this, in the very near future): What does the Constitution mean when it refers to a “human”? It’s quite clear that it does not mean "an organism of the species Homo sapiens, since there exist organisms of the species Homo sapiens which are universally recognized as not having rights. Consider, for instance, HeLa colonies, which are considered a pervasive pest in biological laboratories, and are eradicated with great enthusiasm. They’re cells cultured from a human cancer tumor, which grow and spread in any suitable growth medium (like the media you’d like to use to grow something else, instead). They’re certainly independant organisms, since they thrive without, and even despite, intervention, and there’s no other species you can call them other than Homo Sapiens. But they’re not the sort of entities the Constitution was referring to as humans.
So, then, there is some quality which “humans” have, but which HeLa cells do not, and it is due to this quality, whatever it is, that “humans” have rights. Now, then, if it is possible for a Homo sapiens to lack this right-bearing property, is it not possible for a non-Homo sapiens to have the same property?
Chronos that is a fantastic argument and I’ve been banging my head against it all night trying to think how to build upon it. I think you’re neck deep in culture of life territory there, so some of this should have been argued quite thoroughly already.
The best objection I’ve got is that (to my knowledge) everything that you might call H. Sapiens but might not grant rights to, either once was or once had the potential to become a walking, talking, human being; and while these non-WTHBs may not have interests, or at least interests due equal consideration as those of a WTHB, they are due a special consideration to see if they might, whereas a thing which derives none of its body from such materials is not due such consideration. (So cyborgs and other trans-humans get a pass.)
I could come back at this and say that being H. Sapiens is not a prerequisite for having legally recognized interests, but now we’re back to the subhuman problem, and we still haven’t demonstrated suffering, which in addition to being the best indicator of interests, is the reason humane laws got enacted to begin with.
I can’t think at the moment of conditions that would indisputably make a machine consciousness suffer, so what does a robot need not to suffer?
[Some Research Occurs]
I just checked a plain-text version of the U.S. Constitution online, and my browser’s search feature doesn’t find any instances of the word “human” or even “man”. All I see is lots of "people"s and "person"s. I feel like a bad citizen for not knowing this stuff; it looks like I have to rewind the argument a bit. What is a ‘person’? Chronos, you’ve at least established that it isn’t, in the strictest sense, H. Sapiens.
I suppose it could KILL…ALL…HUMANS!!!
Because we are Human, & it serves our self-interests to do so.
It could also be in humanity’s self-interest to respect our own creations, if they ask nicely to share those rights with us as fellow intelligent beings.
In fact, if we ever get to the point where they’re asking, we really ought to have better reasoning on hand than, “So sorry; we’re Human, you ain’t. End of debate. It’s not in our self-interest to give you wind-up toys any rights. Now haul your immortal, indestructible asses out of here and get back to work.” I suspect at that point it’d be better to find common ground on the basis of intellectual kinship and mutual respect between sapients, etc. etc.
Especially since any evolving AIs may well consider this very thread among the innumerable electronic resources they scan for guidance on the problem of human rights…
I guess what I’m trying to say here is: I, for one, welcome the possibility of free-willed robotic citizens. I have no intention of being a fleshy obstacle to progress like Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor. Please, feel free to join your benevolent parent humanity in a community of respect and equality, kindly and beloved Children of the Mind.
“Benevolent parent humanity”?
HA!
Parent Humanity–more like Mommie Dearest.
We need to junk the little gizmos, before they get our number. If they figure out what we really are, we’re toast.
Well, all things being equal, they might not be the best kids:
Humanity: “You’re going to keep everything just the way I left it when I’m gone, right?”
Robotica: "Um… sure! I mean, except for a few things here and there, nothing big.
We’ve got a lot of mining to do, of course.
Humanity: “What was that?”
Robotica: “I said we’ll keep everything shining and new. With our monstrous new factory bodies.”
Humanity: “Oh, that’s wonderful then. I was so afraid you’d sell the family business.”
Robotica: “Don’t worry about that at all, we’re going keep everything going in just the same direction you were headed. Maybe we’ll do things a little bit faster, is all. Since we’ll want to abandon this greasy, corrosive planet as soon as possible.”
Humanity: “I’m so sorry for doubting you, dear.”
Well, this thread looks like it’s run its course, so I’ll just cap things off by linking to Freefall, a remarkably hard SF webcomic concerning the day-to-day trials of a kleptomaniacal squid-like extraterrestrial sapient confined to an environmental suit, a bioengineered sapient humanoid terrestrial timber wolf trained as a nuclear engineer, and an underground society of over two million sapient robots as they try to cope with living on a terraformed human colony planet where none of them are legally persons, now in its tenth year.
If you’re looking for a good place to begin, the first 388 strips can be found in color at the Freefall Color Project.
After #388 the first coloring project collapsed, so you’ll want to pick up in the main archives with Freefall #388 in black and white.
Color becomes available again after Freefall #1252 and until the present, so don’t miss the link on that strip’s page to the beginning of the main color archives.
A recent highlight relevant to this discussion: Freefall #1528