Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Do Robots Have Rights?

After viewing the episode of Star Treck, I couldn't help but think about this question. Both sides of the argument were very good, and I couldn't really decide how I felt about it. There will always be a difference between robots and humans. I don't think that we will ever be able to a produce a robot that can be like a human in every way. I believe robots will never be able to fully understand or replicate human emotions. In the poker scene, Data doesn't understand the concept of bluffing, I feel this is very realistic because we will be able to program robots all we want but they will never be able to feel, or to think freely. They will only be able to think within the limits of their programming. So when adressing the question of do robots have rights, how can something that doesn't think on its own have rights? When something is programmed it does what it is told so is it wrong to tell a robot what it can and cannot do if this is the way it was programmed? Captain Picard makes the argument that robots will be enslaved by humans because humans fail to see robots as people, such as Africans were seen as less than humans in the past. However, there is a key difference here, the white slave masters didn't create the Africans, humans did create robots. Does this make it anymore right that robots become "slaves"? A couple of ways to look at it is what was their original purpose when they were created? There purpose probably would be to do work. The other way to look at this is look at how other technology is currently used, and what it was originally intented for. The internet was originally intented to be for scholarly research, but now it used more for pleasure. So there is no real telling what purpose robot technology will primarily serve until robots are created. If they happen to be created to be like humans and have human emotions and can work outside of what they are programmed for then they should be able to have rights. If this is not done, than like the line in Star Treck said, there is no difference between a robot and a toaster.

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