

Do Humanlike Machines Deserve Human Rights? - Shamiq
http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-02/st_essay

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noonespecial
Hmmm, tell you what. After you're done giving human rights to all of the
_humans_ come on back and we'll start talking about the machines.

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sdurkin
This is the same question as animal rights. Of course neither robots or
animals are human or sentient. But doesn't killing them have a scarring effect
on us? And is that enough to outweigh the efficiency benefits of treating them
as objects?

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DaniFong
The word you're likely looking for is 'sapient.' According to the wikipedia,
'Sentience is the ability to feel or perceive subjectively.'

I think there's a pretty clear case for the ability of animals to feel
emotions, and feel pain. Whether they're a human like intelligence is another
matter.

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sdurkin
I don't mean to get bogged down in a grammatical argument, but I really did
intend to set a lower standard than sapience. What I mean is the second
definition given by the OED for sentience, "self-awareness."

For example, I could make a robot that made all the expressions of pain when
injured. Would such a robot be sentient? I doubt it. Perhaps I'm blinded by
speciesist prejudices, but I still draw a bright clear line between humans,
which are both sentient and sapient, and everything else.

There's definitely no cause for sapience in animals, but I doubt if there's
even a case for sentience outside of some higher primates.

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DaniFong
Do other _humans_ even pass your test? How can you be sure that they are not
producing behavior simply _consistent_ with sentience, rather than actually
being indicative. Animals too have behavior consistent with subjective
emotional experience. What separates theirs from ours, except our prejudice?

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sdurkin
I can tell humans are sapient through high level communication of complex
thoughts that could only come from a sentient being. I know humans are
sentient because sentience is a precondition to sapience.

