Reasoned Consideration

"Please don't kick me!" This article contemplates  Extending Legal Protection to Social Robots : "Even for fully informed adults, the difference between alive and lifelike may be muddled enough in our subconscious to warrant adopting the same attitudes toward robotic companions that we carry towards our pets. A study of Sony AIBO online message boards reveals that people were dismayed to witness the story of an AIBO being tossed into a garbage can. Not long after the Pleo robot dinosaur became commercially available in 2007, videos of Pleo “torture” began to circulate online. The comments left by viewers are strikingly polarized – while some derive amusement from the videos, others appear considerably upset, going so far as to verbally attack the originators and accuse them of horrible cruelty. The Kantian philosophical argument for animal rights is that our actions towards non-humans reflect our morality — if we treat animals in inhumane ways, we become inh...

[ Edit (Sep 2020) : I no longer entirely agree with everything I wrote 2009 below. I don't think we should subscribe to any view that appears to almost romanticize or frame human obsolescence in an almost sort of 'positive' light, or to fatalistically accept it as any supposed 'inevitability'. Even if we eventually invent "superior" machines, we can and should assert our right to exist, and can and should do what it takes to survive and thrive in such a hypothetical world [notwithstanding our own obligations to uphold rational ethical principles - the existing of violators of ethical rights are not a reason to end the species, rather, we have a justice system for that]. Also, we could improve ourselves in various ways to remain 'competitive' with increasingly better machines, for example through augmentation (e.g. systems like what Neuralink aims to be), or perhaps in future through genetic modification. Furthermore, there are also two different c...