Robots Will Never be People and Should Never Have Rights

Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Wesley J. Smith

Transhumanists and other futurists insist that the future will bring us robots who have become “conscious” beings, and that when they do, “sentient” machines should receive what we now call human rights. This is all fanciful, of course. Robots of the kind envisioned would only be computers with very sophisticated software. In that sense, they would be no more entitled to rights–and would be no more capable of being harmed, as distinguished from damaged–than the toaster.

A major component of this discussion is the desire to deconstruct human exceptionalism, and thus, it warrants our notice. Take, for example, this opinion from Peter Singer and a Polish researcher named Agata Sagan published in The Guardian. the rest image