Inside the Movement for Posthuman Rights-Cyborg Liberation Front

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling


Yeats's wish, expressed in his poem "Sailing to Byzantium," was a governing principle for those attending the World Transhumanist Association conference at Yale University in late June. International academics and activists, they met to lay the groundwork for a society that would admit as citizens and companions intelligent robots, cyborgs made from a free mixing of human and machine parts, and fully organic, genetically engineered people who aren't necessarily human at all. A good many of these 160 thinkers aspire to immortality and omniscience through uploading human consciousness into ever evolving machines.

The three-day gathering was hosted by an entity no less reputable than the Yale Interdisciplinary Bioethics Project's Working Research Group on Technology and Ethics; the World Transhumanist Association chairman and co-founder is Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom. Dismiss it as a Star Trek convention by another name, and you could miss out on the culmination of the Western experiment in rights and reason.

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0331/baard.php

When I saw "the Animatrix" I was so pissed that they had "liberals' defending the rights of robots. I was like "Bullshit!" I'd be the first one to start smashing them the moment they showed that kind of autonomy, such as to demand "rights"

Kiln People...it's sort of related to this.It raises some really interesting questions.

Personally I wouldn't smash them...I'd be more tempted to become one.Why do you believe,if they can show autonomy,that they should have no rights?

But I do think granting them rights would be a very dangerous step, and ultimately wrong. They are machines, tools to be used. If someone makes a machine that can autonomously do violence to humans, it should be destroyed, just as we would destroy a bomb. Anyone who'd argue otherwise has been watching too much STNG.

The point is that humanity is at a point where it can no longer contain its innovation. With the Singularity, AI will leapfrog Humanity in its species evolution, with no looking back. Personally, i think it will happen in the next 100 years. NanoTech is progressing unbelievably. With the arrival of a universal molecular assembler, that will enhance its progress. IBM can Move Atoms to say "I Love You". We're almost there.

but I'll argue otherwise anyways :)

The visceral reaction you feel is caused,I believe,in part by the very shows like STNG.

If a machine can think,and ultimately feel,why shouldn't it have rights? "Tools" don't think and feel (if they do I want to know what hardware store you shop at!).

Humans do violence to humans everyday.We don't destroy the bombs,we use them on other humans,yet I strongly doubt that anyone here would argue in favor of destroying humans.Why would a thinking and feeling machine be different?

The article though is actually about the merger of man and machine,not a pure machine anyways.And whether anyone likes it or not it WILL happen.The article mentions a "hybrot",a robot governed by nuerons from a rats brain that is capable of drawing.It's already coming on us.Artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence within this century.

from the article;
Inventor and author Ray Kurzweil argues we should clean our ethical house so our technologically derived descendants inherit compassionate values, but he predicts the transition to posthumanity will be smooth. "We already have neural implants for things like Parkinson's disease," he says. "By the time machines make a case for themselves in a convincing way and have all the subtle cues indicative of emotional reaction, there won't be a clear distinction between machine and human."

If that is the case would you still feel they should be destroyed?

Us. We. Here's where vanity finds its end. The humanity—the us, we—that strode out of Africa and braved the Pacific Ocean in outrigger canoes and the Arctic in longboats cannot and never will be able to make that final journey. We're too delicate and too dumb. But new forms of being might be able to stake out an interstellar future. They could view us as kin, carrying some essence of our ideals, a memory of Shakespeare secure in their vast webs of intelligence. Transhumanists are asking whether we'll embrace the kinds of life that come next as a necessary extension of ourselves or shun them as monstrosities.

Simply deciding against their existence—willing them into a shadowy corner of the imagination or legislating against them—won't work. Every law ever made has been broken, observes Kirby. "Detailed regulation is not possible and probably not desirable," asserts Kirby. "This is not defeatism or resignation. It is realism."

If he's right, we can't afford to renounce a role in a new intelligence's emergence or cede the chance to imprint it with cultural values. One day, that first cybernetic, genetically spliced, or wholly artificially created being will step into the town square of democracy. What then of the seminal words of our society: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

"Men," or even "human beings," won't be adequate labels anymore. Life will have been radically redefined, along with the fundamental events of birth and death that bracket it. Equality will be moot, and enforcing it could reasonably be seen as unjust to beings with categorically different or greater abilities. Blake's words ring here: "One Law for the Lion & the Ox is Oppression."

I never want any of these apocalyptic fantasies to come true. They are scary and dehumanizing. I guess the nutcases who want to see this stuff come to pass can't be reasoned with. Just remember by the year 2000 we were supposed to have flying cars.

To imagine a thinking, feeling machine scares me no more than imagining any other thinking, feeling non-human. My allegience is to Intelligence, in whatever form it takes--human, machine, dolphin, or extraterrestrial.

Tucker

"Enhance" humanity with robotic parts instead of flesh and bone???? They aren't talking about people who need robotics for a medical condition, they are talking about changing us into human/robot hybrids, genetic tampering, and other insanities. I can't support such crazy ideas.

If putting a chip in my brain would safely enhance my memory or give me abilities I don't have--mechanized telepathy?--I might go for it. I guess the basic issue is I see "personhood" as a matter of intelligence and feeling, rather than a matter of what your parts are made of or what your DNA contains. In that way, I guess I'm more like the dualists, who viewed matter and mind as separate entities, or like people who believe we are spirits temporarily encased in flesh.

Flesh, metal--no difference, really, if the spirit in it's the same.

Tucker

I believe these cyborgs would be even less human then most people today behave. I believe the human soul (literally and metaphorically) would diminish. Which is way I believe such future atrocities should be stopped. Maybe we can't do anyhing about it, but I sure as hell won't just accept it as destiny.

Why would that in any way diminish the human soul? I don't see any rational reason to believe that a person with some kind of machine augmentation would be any less of a person than one with a prosthesis or with glasses.

I worry more about what will happen once either a thinking/feeling artificial being is developed or a human manages to go mostly-machine and other people, seeing a legal loophole, decide that being falls into the category of "exploitable nonhuman."

Tucker

People who see technology as some sort of savior, saving them from death. We are all going to die and be forgotten, that much is certain. Experimenting on ourselves isn't going to change that fact.

Personally, I don't mind dying; I have a belief system that assures me I don't lose very much by dying. (In my belief system, death's an inconvenience, not an ending.)

But I would welcome thinking and feeling AI programs or robots to the world of Personhood because I value the experiences and opinions of others different from myself. To have beings around that could speak from the point of view of someone who is not only non-human, but not even organic, would add to the diversity and richness of life.

Tucker

I don't think intelligent war machines are what supporters of these types of research want, but that is exactly what is going to happen.

But if the basis for full personhood and citizenship were established before the military could design the machines, at least the designers could be tried for "false imprisonment of artificial persons" when word leaked out or the machines got free.

Tucker

when that first machine is created that will be able to think and feel, I wonder if it's first thought will be a question: will my dying predecessors grant me the rights they enjoy... or will I have to take them by force?

It is another to mimick emotionl responses with programming.

Would you be comfortable being the arbiter? What if you made a mistake, and condemned a being with true emotion to death, or to a hellish existence? Personally, I'd err on the side of caution--if it passes the Turing Test, I'll assume it's genuinely feeling.

Tucker

A mess which isn't needed with the problems we need to take care of first. Worring about robot rights and what makes something alive isn't something I want to do.

Leave it to the ones who want to take it as an issue. For me, the prospect of *any* thinking, feeling creature being excluded from "pershonhood" based on physical criteria is a hot button, and I cannot help but jump in the fray when it comes up.

Tucker

it's nice to see people who aren't guided by fear.

"Butlerian Jihad"

It's easy to squish innovation, you just need some willing tyrants, or a firmly entrenched aristocracy. :evilfrown:

(/devil'sadvocate)