Roboethics

Hello, there @quove I'm one of those people who gives the no. 2 response.  Which is to say they would have no autonomous will apart from their human creators, making them not much different from any other thing we manufacture. While it is true that we are in large part programmed ourselves, the 'who'/'what' that did our programming is certainly not another human! These robots would essentially be some advanced TV or phone or fridge that someone somewhere on this planet makes. Each of its choices could be boiled down to the decision of its programmer. So in what sense would they really be like us? None of us can say that we control what any other human decides in any direct sense. But that is what we would have with the robots. ..our own toys. That we'll have made them to look, sound, act like us, rather than drive/fly/cook for us etc, will not really alter the fact that we would still have made them.

You might say that we ourselves lack an autonomous will....perhaps. We don't really know that and there is no science that definitively establishes that our will is absolutely pre-established by DNA. But even granting that, whoever/whatever programmed us is certainly beyond us, so that even if we say we are not ultimately absolutely free, we can still say that we are free vis-a-vis each other. Essentially, none of us is another's master, and we have made this the foundation of our entire individual rights infrastructure: that we can claim to be equals.  To add our creations to this structure would mean creating a new basis for rights. That may sound easy but I don't believe it is or that it would be desirable. Humans have shown proclivity for a whole lot of arbitrariness when it comes to establishing bases for equality and rights. Maybe it is possible to build a good structure with something other than our naturally parallel horizontal relationships as it's foundation,  but I have my doubts! 

Now if you were to discuss the rights of aliens, on the other hand, I would have a significantly different response!   

Assuming these robots are like humans in virtually every sense, other than the composition of their bodies? No.

Let me be clear. They ought to be given some basic rights that biological humans have (such as the right to life or a set of property rights), since to give them no rights at all would open our societies up to political revolt. Even if the machines didn't self-organize, it'd be too much to hope that some ambitious human wouldn't seek to agitate them for his own purposes, or even simply because he'd believe in the cause of robot rights. Slave societies rightly feared the revolt of their laborers, and a permanent caste of intelligent, self-aware machine laborers isolated for the mere fact of their birth and bought and sold by human masters would effectively be the same thing, even if one argues that the two situations aren't morally equivalent. We could attempt to solve this issue by isolating these robots from human society entirely, preventing them from accessing human philosophical literature detailing the concept of rights, or from seeing the freedoms granted to humans but denied them, but it seems to be too much effort to police the machines and keep them separate from us through these and other means (population control being one), with too little attached gain (after all, we can simply create dumb machines to use as slave labor, which we're doing now). I think it'd be simpler to give them a basic set of guarantees approximating natural rights and call it a day. Whether they actually have natural rights is a very different question from whether they ought to be treated as if they do from a practical standpoint. I'm also not sure that the fact that their circuitry is artificial means that they are subject to a different set of rights than we are; what would this mean for cyborgs?

However, some privileges should be assigned with caution. For instance, androids should not simply be given voting rights by virtue of possessing adult human bodies, since they will not have the intellectual capacity to cast an informed vote from birth (unless we preinstall particular bits of information in them, but this leads us into questions of propaganda and the inordinate power that would give robot manufacturers over the political process). Even though they would have the bodies of biological adults, they obviously wouldn't have minds capable of exercising that privilege in ways that wouldn't be unduly harmful to the wider society. The same would go for gun rights, or anything else which we typically associate with an adult level of responsibility.

Legally speaking, androids ought to be treated as children until they've acquired the wisdom necessary to navigate society as conscious adults. How this would be carried out is difficult to say. Should androids be placed in socializing programs with regular humans until they learn how to deal with us? It seems dangerous to leave them with children, who would be vastly physically weaker than androids built to emulate the physical capacities of adult humans, and who often lack the judgment to refrain from provocative behavior that can cause the android to retaliate. What happens if, for instance, a group of children taunt an android, who then lashes out and strangles one or crushes their skulls? Will the instructor necessarily have the strength to stop a raging android? How about two, three, or more? Would we need to fill elementary schools with armed men capable of doing so? Of course, placing them with adults leads to a different set of problems. These sessions would probably be separate from the ordinary adult world (imagine an ignorant android in your average workplace!). Would they adequately prepare the machine for the challenges of adult life? Does a sandbox with particular adults selected for the task of socialization have what it takes to prepare machines for the real world? Keep in mind that, the more we separate these machines from humans of their mental age, the more difficult it will be for them to adapt when let out on their own. Worse, what happens if the humans tasked with socializing the robots decide to manipulate them for their own purposes? For instance, an institution could take money from particular organizations to indoctrinate these machines with ideas suited to their ends, ranging from the relatively benign (purchasing a product) to the more sinister (voting for a particular candidate or party in an election), to the outright destructive (killing all members of a particular ethnicity). If their only exposure to humans is within these organizations, that does open up dangerous possibilities for brainwashing and control (though they can be mitigated somewhat). Should we then place them with human families tasked with raising them? It's not clear that the machine would be able to develop a sense of familial loyalty, and if they're simply isolated in autonomous family units without mixing with other children, this weakens our ability to socialize them. However, having them mix with human children brings us back to the problem with placing them in elementary schools. But, this is a digression; the logistical problem of integration is not the same as the philosophical problem of rights or the political problem of privilege. It is important to consider, though, since it will affect which privileges we can meaningfully grant them, and the consequences likely to emerge when the framework finally becomes operative.

The point is that, aside from basic rights which would likely lead to revolt if not protected, privileges should be distributed on the principle of responsibility. An android with the physical and emotional capacity of an adult human and the intellectual sophistication of a newborn ought not to be treated as an adult human by the wider society. Such reasoning is dangerous both to biological humans and to the androids themselves.