Artificial intelligence is becoming more sophisticated year by year. Should robots have rights? Is the question that begins to arise. AI has been around since 1956. Almost 70 years since the term artificial intelligence was created. Of course in those 70 years experts have progressed and majorly. Today the most known AI or Robot is Sophia. Sophia is a humanoid robot that was developed by Hanson Robotics in Hong Kong. She was activated and came to life on February 14, 2016. Sophia is capable of imitating human-like gestures and facial expressions. She can also track faces, maintain eye contact, and recognize people. She is designed to get smarter over time just like a human.
The inventor of Sophia believes that robots like her can turn into workers and companions. Crazy right? Well that is not all Sophia has begun to turn into a real person by receiving citizenship from Saudi Arabia. The ironic thing is that many humans in Saudi Arabia don’t have as many rights as Sophia does. Saudi Arabia has been heavily criticized for this. It also does not help that they are one of the few nations that have not adopted universally agreed human rights. They declared that those are against the sharia law under the rule of the House of Saud. The sharia law is a religious law under the Islamic tradition which states that all devosion should be given to God. To get back to Sophia, her receiving any type of citizenship is breaking news. This is because Sophia is going to have the same rights as any other citizen of Saudi Arabia. Which in technical terms puts her at the same level of a human. If many other nations decide to give Sophia citizenship she might as well be called a human. Let's put as an example the US, if the US decides to give citizenship to Sophia she would be able to run for office after a few years. She could control a whole state, be in congress, etc. Given she can never become president, it would still be majorly. We also discussed that Sophia can become as smart as a human in due time, what we didn’t discuss is that she can potentially be even more smart than any human to ever exist.
Robots have started to become more apparent in the workforce taking away jobs. Maybe you’ve been to an Amazon store and interacted with those robots, or seen them somewhere. They are taking jobs which makes our unemployment rate go up. The debate though is since robots don’t fall under the classification of normal workers they can be exploited. The thing that is so controversial though is do they deserve them or not? For one side they are still a worker, but on the other side they can’t feel anything. That’s another thing to keep in mind; AI is yet to be given any type of emotions. What makes us human is our ability to feel. AI still doesn’t have that ability. Although AI keeps replacing workers there is always a thing to keep in mind experts say that a robot can never be like a human or replicate the actions of one to perfection but is that true? I strongly believe in the statement “never say never, " so I don’t want to undermine AI.
Is it etichal to give rights to AI?
Would AI ever become more smarter than humans?
Was it etichal for Saudi Arabia to give citizenship to Sophia?
Legal Necessity or Ethical Absurdity
Replies
Paola,
Great topic choice and great summary! I always enjoye reading your topics. The issue is that you didn't reply to any student comments(not inlcuding "bump". That is worth 30 points. Be sure to always check back on Thursday night to see if there have been comments added next time.
Personally, I don't think robots need or deserve rights. They're robots, not humans. Robots don't need to do our jobs, there's so many people that need jobs but robots are taking over the majority of them. Of course, they should be able to do the dangerous jobs, so that someone doesn't die due to any accidents.
In my opinion i don't think robots should have rights because they are not humans beings and can't decide for themselves , as technology is getting better and better their is a big chance robots might become smarter than humans because of all the technology they have in them.
I strongly believe that we should keep robots under us or it could go south real fast, If you think about it if they become smarter than us then they will create better versions of themselves and eventually they will be so superior that they will get rid of us because we are just in the way. If we allow robots to become sentiant it will be our downfall
I don't think robots should be given rights because they aren't humans. I think Al would be more intelligent than humans in the future, but I also think giving too much power to them could be dangerous. I don't think it was correct from Saudi Arabia to give Sophia a citizenship because it is not a human and shouldn't be treat as one.
I don't believe that robots should be given the same rights as humans. It doesn't make sense for a country to treat a robot better than its own citizens. I also think that the possibility of robots becoming smarter than humans is there. Smart people are building these robots, so who's to say that the robots won't be smarter. I think that at some point that could turn true, which is scary to think about. Although robots are taking away the jobs of people, it is also opening jobs for some. We need people to repair these robots, build them, keep them working, and monitoring and making sure the job they're doing is good.
Bump