Artificial intelligence has always been something that humans have talked about. From books, movies, and video games, advanced artificial intelligence has always been a plot device for a good story. But these stories are slowly about to become a reality when advanced artificial intelligence is growing the way it is. Unfortunately, humanity still isn’t ready to face an artificial being that is about intelligent as ourselves.
How can the human race treat artificial intelligence that is intellectually as smart as us when we barely treat one another with the same level of respect? When asked the question of whether or not a robot should have rights often times the answer is that robots should be given the same rights as animals. Even worse some people say that they should follow Asimov’s three laws of robotics: that they must obey a human, cannot harm a human, and cannot harm themselves.
Asimov’s laws were not meant to be used as a starting point for rights. In fact, the three laws of robotics work better as a plot device in a story than it does in reality. Stories that do use Asimov’s laws of robotics are often in a dystopian-like setting. Megaman X is one of the more popular series that uses Asimov’s laws as a plot device. It showcases how horrible life as a robot is through the eyes of a pacifist robot that is forced to slaughter other robots that go against the three laws.
So often in fiction we see how robots can be abused even with rights but still we contemplate giving them even less than basic rights. Even still there are people that think that robots should have no rights because they are only a ‘machine’ even after knowing that these artificial beings have the same intelligence as us. There is no doubt that robots with artificial intelligence will need as many rights as a human does but to give them these rights will be a hard battle to win.
At that point we should ask ourselves: Should we really make artificial bodies as intelligent as us? If we know that we cannot grant these artificial bodies the same rights as a human, then what good is it to create advance artificial intelligence? It is the responsibility of the creator to protect the creation, and when that is not guaranteed then we are better off never creating it in the first place.