Roboethics

George Dvorsky asks what sort of rights artificial brains should have:

The breakthroughs are starting to come in. Just last week, European scientists produced the first ultra-high resolution 3D scan of the entire human brain. They captured the brain’s physical detail at the astonishingly low resolution of 20-microns.

Given all this, it’ll only be a matter of time before scientists take all this newfound insight and start to build brains inside of computers. At first, these emulations will be simple. But eventually, they’ll exhibit capacities that are akin to the real thing — including subjective awareness.

In other words, consciousness.

Or sentience. Or qualia. Or whatever else you want to call it. But whichever words we choose to use, we’ll need to be aware of one incredibly important thing: These minds will live and have experiences inside of computers. And that’s no small thing — because if we’re going to be making minds, we sure as hell need to do it responsibly.

He goes on to list “rights be afforded to fully conscious human and human-like emulations.” Robin Hanson pushes back, arguing that Dvorsky’s proposals for are too context-specific and would limit future emulations’ freedom of choice. More Dish on robots and morality here and here.