>I think in practice, it will depend on how AIs behave. If an AI forms relationships with humans which humans experience as emotionally significant, and in which it displays individuality and autonomy, humans will begin thinking of it as a real "person", and want to endow it with the rights of a person.
I can't help but feel that describes our relationship with animals we consider pets, albeit less so the individuality and autonomy part. On the other hand, if our pets ended up with human-level intelligence tomorrow, I am doubtful most humans would be rushing to confer full rights upon them.
> I can't help but feel that describes our relationship with animals we consider pets, albeit less so the individuality and autonomy part.
Many pets have a lot of individuality and autonomy. Cats and dogs have their own individual personalities and likes/dislikes, and they have their own desires which sometimes contradict those of their human owners (e.g. your dog's desire to chew your brand new expensive shoes, versus your desire for them not to be chewed)
> On the other hand, if our pets ended up with human-level intelligence tomorrow, I am doubtful most humans would be rushing to confer full rights upon them.
I disagree. I think for most people who reject strong versions of animal rights ("animals have fundamentally the same rights as humans do"), it is their lack of human-level intelligence which they use to justify to themselves that rejection. If an animal demonstrated genuine human-level intelligence, such that it was obvious to all and no one could deny it, I think the clear majority of people would be willing to extend human-level rights to that animal.
>If an animal demonstrated genuine human-level intelligence, such that it was obvious to all and no one could deny it, I think the clear majority of people would be willing to extend human-level rights to that animal.
You're probably right.
Then again, recent history hasn't bode well for whales, or the 50M or so human beings that other human beings keep enslaved in 2024.
Maybe AI just needs its own Short Circuit 2 story. I'm just having a hard time seeing that play out as opposed to Johnny Five ending up as a SaaS product.
> Then again, recent history hasn't bode well for whales,
That’s because the claim that whales possess human-level intelligence is controversial and unproven. You can’t have a conversation with a whale. While whale language has a certain complexity, we don’t know whether it is capable of conveying the kind of abstract conceptual ideas which human language can.
> or the 50M or so human beings that other human beings keep enslaved in 2024
Most enslavers, their disagreement is not with the idea that slaves are human or entitled to fundamental human rights, their disagreement is with the idea that fundamental human rights include a universal right not to be enslaved. And to be honest, the idea of such a universal human right is historically rather novel - in all four of Europe, Asia, Africa and the pre-Columban Americas, slavery has a history going back thousands of years, and it is only in the last couple of centuries that an (incomplete) consensus has emerged that it is universally wrong
You mean human-like, not human-level. Intelligence cannot be identified, much less ranked, without sufficient shared perceptional, cultural, etc. background. You can find two humans who are alien enough to each other that recognising shared intelligence would take a bit of effort; times a million that for a sufficiently non-human system like a whale, more still for an anthill, more still for an oak forest.
> I think the real crux of the matter would be the difference between rights versus stuff that costs people money.
A human child costs a lot more than a dog or cat does, and yet society grants the child vastly greater rights than the dog or cat. The difference is due to cognitive capacity - a smart five year old can give a lecture about how you are allegedly violating their rights (e.g. “making me go to bed on time violates my right to have fun”)-no dog or cat in the world can do that
I don't understand what that comparison is intended to prove.
Sure, a 5-year-old is more eloquent than a dog, but throughout history there have been lots of 5-year-olds that were still enslaved, along with adults that were even more eloquent and intelligent.
My point is that talk is cheap. It's one thing to agree that a sheepdog has freedom of speech, but there will be a lot more resistance if we start talking about reparations for years of sheep-herding labor.
We are having this conversation assuming a society which rejects slavery in principle. Given that rejection, I don't see how past history of enslaving people is relevant to questions of the future–unless one supposes that rejection is going to be reversed at some point, which seems unlikely.
I can't help but feel that describes our relationship with animals we consider pets, albeit less so the individuality and autonomy part. On the other hand, if our pets ended up with human-level intelligence tomorrow, I am doubtful most humans would be rushing to confer full rights upon them.