Saudi Arabia grants citizen rights to a robot

[Skybird]

Madness is epidemically haunting this world.

http://www.dw.com/en/saudi-arabia-grants-citizenship-to-robot-sophia/a-41150856


Social media users in the Kingdom were quick to point out that the robot could be entitled to more rights than the country's female subjects, who must have a male guardian, must wear a hijab, cannot mix with unrelated males, and are unfairly represented in the justice system. They were only recently granted permission to drive.


Twitter users commented on Sophia's lack of male guardian and her lack of hijab.


:dead:

[Skybird]

^ best commented by Stanslaw Lem, "Solaris":

“We’re not searching for anything except people. We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors.
(...)
We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all a sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don't want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us - that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence - then we don't like it anymore.
(...)
Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed."

[ikalugin]

Meanwhile, Russia is working on the AI rights legal framework.

[Skybird]

I consider human rights for animals or AIs when they all by themselves and without further explanation and programming by humans they form ideas about rights, and legal versus illegal, and just versus injust, and demand from humans such rights for themselves.

Until then, AI rights activists (as well as PETA, for that matter) have no valid argument. There is no point in talkign with a machine. You talk ABOUT a machine, maybe, but not with it.

Else autonomously driving cars one day will start suing human passangers for beign offensive, and web-connected refrigerators will sue their owners for exploiting their cooling engine without paying them an adequate fee.

The only legal framework needed is a law code regulating what owners of machines can do with them and who is responsible for the consequences of machine's actions. Usually that will be and must be the owner, of course.

Not the machine.

[ikalugin]

That is why there is a push for AI specific legislation, to preclude non sentient AIs from gaining rights.

[Skybird]

That is why there is a push for AI specific legislation, to preclude non sentient AIs from gaining rights.

If so, Russia acts clever there. Saudi Arabia however is about citizen rights for robots. Thats is something different.

[Jimbuna]

Will this include female robots and if so, will they enjoy equality with male robots? :hmmm:

[Skybird]

Will this include female robots and if so, will they enjoy equality with male robots? :hmmm:

Not to mention robots of any of the other 60 genders...