I somehow missed the news that Saudi Arabia granted a robot citizenship back in October, which apparently caused quite a stir. The Crux’s Lauren Sigfusson gathered up some opinions on the matter from the learned set. This one’s representative:
Kerstin Dautenhahn
Professor of artificial intelligence school of computer science at the University of Hertfordshire
Robots are machines, more similar to a car or toaster than to a human (or to any other biological beings). Humans and other living, sentient beings deserve rights, robots don’t, unless we can make them truly indistinguishable from us. Not only how they look, but also how they grow up in the world as social beings immersed in culture, perceive the world, feel, react, remember, learn and think. There is no indication in science that we will achieve such a state anytime soon—it may never happen due to the inherently different nature of what robots are (machines) and what we are (sentient, living, biological creatures).
We might give robots “rights” in the same sense as constructs such as companies have legal “rights”, but robots should not have the same rights as humans. They are machines, we program them.
I have a simple test. When the robots want some sort of set of rights, they can have them. I.e., self-direction is the key. Or self-programming.
