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THE RISE OF SMART

MACHINES PUTS

SPOTLIGHT ON

‘ROBOT RIGHTS’

But artificial intelligence is progressing the capacity to suffer emotionally, or in the process of developing with
swiftly. In the not-too-distant future we to feel pain? Would shutting it off be respect to nonhuman animals.”
may begin to feel that our machines tantamount to murder? Of course, deciding which machines
have something akin to thoughts and deserve moral consideration will be
YOU PROBABLY feelings, even though they’re made ROBOTS VS. APES tricky, because we often project human
WOULDN’T HAVE of metal and plastic rather than flesh thoughts and feelings onto inanimate
ANY QUALMS ABOUT and blood. When that happens, how An obvious comparison is to the entities and so end up sympathizing
SWITCHING OFF we treat our machines will matter; animal rights movement. Animal rights with entities that have no thoughts or
APPLE’S VIRTUAL philosophers and scholars are already advocates have been pushing for a feelings at all.
ASSISTANT, SIRI OR imagining a time when robots and reassessment of the legal status of Consider Spot, a doglike robot
certain animals, especially the great
intelligent machines may deserve and
AMAZON’S ALEXA be accorded some sort of rights. apes. Organizations like the Coral developed by Boston Dynamics. Earlier
OR MICROSOFT’S Springs, Florida-based Nonhuman this year, the Waltham, Massachusetts-
CORTANA. SUCH These wouldn’t necessarily be human Rights Project believe that chimpanzees, based company released a video
ENTITIES EMULATE A rights. But “if you’ve got a computer gorillas, and orangutans deserve to be showing employees kicking the four-
HUMAN ASSISTANT or a robot that’s autonomous and treated as autonomous persons, rather legged machine. The idea was to show
than mere property.
off Spot’s remarkable balance. But
self-aware, I think it would be very
BUT PLAINLY AREN’T hard to say it’s not a person,” says some people saw it as akin to animal
HUMAN. WE SENSE Kristin Andrews, a philosopher at York Steven Wise, who leads the cruelty. People for the Ethical Treatment
THAT BENEATH THE University in Toronto, Canada. organization’s legal team, says that the of Animals (PETA), for example, issued a
SOPHISTICATED Which raises a host of difficult same logic applies to any autonomous statement describing Spot’s treatment
SOFTWARE, THERE’S questions. How should we treat entity, living or not. If one day we have as “inappropriate.”
“NOBODY HOME.” a robot that has some degree of sentient robots, he says, “we should
consciousness? What if we’re have the same sort of moral and legal Kate Darling, a researcher at the
convinced that an AI program has responsibilities toward them that we’re MIT Media Lab in Cambridge,