Robot rights make sense to prepare for a time when there is rough intellectual parity between humans and robots and the possibility of an adversarial relationship arises. I think it's unlikely, but still important, given the impact such a relationship would have. Giving robots human rights now would be like giving an ant human rights, but it makes sense to give rights in accordance with some measure of intelligence I think.
Europe's robots to become 'electronic persons' under draft plan
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Re: Europe's robots to become 'electronic persons' under draft plan
#12I can't tell what this is supposed to mean. Taxing employers for using robots as if they were human employees might be a good idea. But giving robots 'rights and obligations' as if they were human is totally insane.
I can see a case for obligations much more than I can see one for rights.
Well, someday we might inevitably need to discuss robot rights, but that'd be somewhere past the point where we can declare a robot a sentient being. ;)
Re: Europe's robots to become 'electronic persons' under draft plan
#13I misread that as "daft plan", and actually, it's still accurate.
Re: Europe's robots to become 'electronic persons' under draft plan
#14It appears the main motivation here is to maintain the same level of taxation on a business that switches from human to robot workers for a significant part of the labour undertaken.
At which point you might as well just buy out the business and establish proper collective ownership over a "business" that now consists of a few people operating a lot of robots.
Re: Europe's robots to become 'electronic persons' under draft plan
#15If I'm a factory worker that gets replaced by a robot, I want a cut. :) But I can't think of how to structure the law so that the company has to lease the robot through the employee they are replacing.
Perhaps every robot must be tied to a person, and each person can only own one robot (or some limited amount). Then if a company wants to build up a robot workforce they would have to lease from robot owner/operators.
I imagine a model like owner/operator truck drivers working for large shipping companies. They are paid by how far they drive, but are responsible for their own truck's maintenance. A robot owner/operator would get paid based on how much their robot worked, but would have to keep it in working order and ensure it meets the requirements for the job. The company would save a lot of HR costs if it leased a robot workforce.
Re: Europe's robots to become 'electronic persons' under draft plan
#16How do they even define a robot? Is an asea automatic welder a robot? A pick-and-place unit?
I'd be more than happy to postpone this question until the robots ask to be recognized as persons, until then the robots that I see are more like powertools able to do repetitive jobs with a high repeat accuracy. They are not 'persons' in any way that I recognize (but that may change, we are simply too far away from that to spend time on this right now).
Re: Europe's robots to become 'electronic persons' under draft plan
#17Re: Europe's robots to become 'electronic persons' under draft plan
#18I misread that as "daft plan", and actually, it's still accurate.
Most likely a typo in the title.
Re: Europe's robots to become 'electronic persons' under draft plan
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can see a case for obligations much more than I can see one for rights.
Well, someday we might inevitably need to discuss robot rights, but that'd be somewhere past the point where we can declare a robot a sentient being. ;)
Why is being 'sentient' (a vague term) a requirement for something to have rights?
Re: Europe's robots to become 'electronic persons' under draft plan
#20Here is the actual draft:
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//...
It's just a report to the European Parliament, and as far as I can tell was never discussed, voted on, nor did it go anywhere. However it did generate 10+ pages of Google search results for articles of the "what are those crazy Europeans up to now" kind. It's another curved banana story (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6481969.stm).