Give Me Liberty or Unplug Me

that's what we're talking about today, robot rights. The idea of this this is something that we we've seen a lot of science fiction, right, especially as a MOOV and that kind of uh type of science fiction, This idea of developing creatures that have some form of artificial or synthetic intelligence and therefore have some sort of sense of self.

And does that at that point mean that we as human beings should treat these machines as if they were living things, and intelligent living things for that right, rather than just tools. Yeah. Usually in science fiction it's used as a parallel to classism or racism or other issues. That's actually slavery, that's actually talking about humans. But we're working towards this incredible future or kind of incredible present

where we might actually have physical robots. Yeah, it's funny because the metaphor has sort of become a literal question. I mean, there's no question now that all humans should have the same rights in most civilized human place, at least we think so. But but so the robots that we've used to illustrate this problem before, and now we have to start wondering, like, um, do they have rights in the same way human doesn't. That seems on on one hand it's like kind of easy. It's like, no,

their machines. But I think we should think about this a little more carefully. Sure, And first of all, I mean, I guess it's it's good to point out the word robot comes from a check word, which essentially means slave. So when we're talking about robots that that does show them. I mean, when science fiction writers were writing these stories about robots, it really was a a kind of a way of talking about human rights and slavery and not just like, at what point do machines uh merit rights?

But also are which rights humans? Yeah? Are our rights universal? United Nations would say, yes, there are some universal rights that all humans are you should possess. They like, well, yeah, let's start with the concept of rights and um and talking about what gets them. So there are material entities that do get rights, for example humans, and then there are material entities that we're pretty sure don't get rights, like bananas, yeah, or or let's say rocks. Sure okay,

but but but in between their cute puppies. Yeah, where to cute puppies fall on the scale? Well, I think most people around us would say that the cute puppy has not as many rights as a human, but more rights than a rock. Yeah, there's a there's a hierarchy. I don't know if you got the memo or not, but I've got the whole list here. Cute puppies are just below cats, and that's only since the World Wide Web. For that, cute puppies were ruling the roost, but cats

have really taken over since the rise of the web. Okay, Well, we've just sort of used our intuitions to say what we think have rights, and that like some types of entities have more rights than others. Humans have more than animals, Animals have more than plants, Plants have more than Yeah, maybe you might plants. Plants might be in there somewhere

we don't know. Well, let's try to flush this out and say what is the actual rubric we're using, because if we if we hone in on that, that might help us decide whether or not an intelligent seeming robot should have right. So what what is it that makes a human have rights? Well, for one thing, there's this concept of life, right, just just the concept of life itself. Uh, And to define life is a little tricky. Even if you go with the scientific definition, it tends to be tricky.

For example, one definition here is the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter. Okay, well, all right, we've got that. So it's whatever whatever makes organic stuff different from inorganic that's life. To go further, it says including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual

change preceding death. Now, there are people who have argued that this does this is while a pretty good definition, is still really kind of fuzzy because there's some things out there that seem to at least adhere to some of this, but it's hard to define it as being alive. For example, a virus. That's difficult because it it has some of these properties, but other things make it seem like it's not really life as we define other types

of life. But then there are other things entirely that seemed to behave to these rules, but we would never call them alive. Like fire, fire it does it? Does it grow? Yes? If it has fuel, it will continue to grow. Does it reproduce, Yes, it can reproduce. Does it have a functional activity? Well, I guess you could call burning, uh, continual change perceeding death. Yes, that also can be the case. These are things that you know, if you were to just use that that line of reasoning,

you might say fire is alive. It seems to behave as if it were alive, But we do not define that as being alive. So just defining whether or not something is alive is already tricky. And we haven't even gotten too robots yet. Well, but so you know, and then and then you get into the psychology or the the ethics, the morality of what life is, and and that's when you start thinking about, well, it's something alive when it has consciousness or when it has self consciousness,

and where on the hierarchy did those qualities fall. Yeah, I'd like to talk a bit about consciousness because I'm skeptical about life as a as a definition. I'm sorry I didn't continue listening to their full thought. Well, I mean, obviously we don't really particularly seem to think bacteria have rights. I mean that seems they don't get a lot of voice in the polls. No, And so there seems to be a trend that for some reason, like a dog has more rights than bacteria and humans have more rights

than dogs. Um, so maybe it has something to do with the obvious thing that establishes this hierarchy, which is intelligence or which again is very difficult to define. Yeah. Um, but then again, we wouldn't want to create substrate to say like, if you're a smarter human, you should have more than a less intelligent human. That's clearly wrong, although I do want to see a Star Trek episode about

that if one does not already exist. Yeah, oh sure, yeah, that makes sense where the crew because it's a planet where people who are smarter have more rights than people who are less smart. I can totally see that. Okay, so there's there's a hierarchy established by something having to do with our minds. But it shouldn't just be like how smart you are, So maybe there's a hierarchy based

on whether or not you seem to have something called consciousness. Again, difficult to define, difficult to define, but it's we're going to have to try to deal with it. Okay. So what is consciousness? I think the best way to describe it is um the experience of being like something. Okay. So there's an experience of being you, and we only know we know that it exists because we each have it.

We have our individual experience of being right. So we know that there's at least one consciousness in the world, yes, which may only be ourselves. Yeah, we assume that all the other humans of consciousness. This is something that Touring was talking about, right Alan Touring when he was setting

up his his thought experiment, the Touring Test. So this is a concept where what Joe is talking about is that Joe knows that he possesses this thing called consciousness because there's a there's an experience of being me, right, But Joe is the only person who has had that experience. I, Jonathan have not had the experience of being Joe. So I've had the experience of being Jonathan. I know that Jonathan possesses consciousness because that's me. However, I don't know.

As an I cannot know because I cannot be Joe. I cannot know for certain that Joe possesses consciousness. And some philosophers have said this, this is straight up impossible. You can never experience anything outside of yourself yourself, right, So in that sense, Uh, what happens is I make

an assumption. I assume that because Joe is a human being and I too am a human being, and that Joe seems to possess the same sort of qualities that I possess, that among those quality is consciousness, and that Joe in fact possesses it, but I cannot know that for certain. It also helps that I can tell you

I have consciousness. Sure, that's no way to know for sure, but that seems to add to the idea like if you things that tests to be conscious are probably more more likely to be conscious, for you're hallucinating, but or

you're talking to a computer program. This brings us to touring, right, So what Touring said was that with the touring test, this idea that you would sit down at a terminal and you would have a conversation, and that conversation might be with another human being who is also on another terminal typing it out to you, or it might be

a computer program that's just generating responses. If you are unable to tell the difference reliably whether that's a human being or a computer program, you might as well say the computer program possesses consciousness. It seems to possess the same qualities you do. And while I would go ahead and say to Joe, Joe, I assume you have consciousness, But because you appear to do the same things I do, why would I not extend the same courtesy to a

piece of software that appears to do the same thing. Again, Touring is saying, it doesn't matter really if the program actually is conscious. It just matters that it appears to be conscious, because you can't tell the difference. Joe appears to be conscious, so I assume that that's one thing he possesses. Lauren appears to be also conscious right now because she had caffeine before we came in here. But

give it a few more minutes of her listening to me. Yeah, well, the two of us together are lulling her into a gentle dreamland. Okay, so uh, this idea of consciousness is relevant to the idea of robot rights because consciousness may very well formed the basis of who we decide gets rights. Um. I because I have consciousness, I have things that I want and things that I don't want. So I want freedom, I want safety, UM. I want bodily integrity. I don't

want to be worked to death, you know, stuff like that. Um. And so because I want these things, I assume other humans that uh, you know, have brains want these things also, and thus I wouldn't want it done to me. I assume they don't want it done to them, and thus humans deserve rights. Right. You can you can at least feel sympathy toward other human beings, if not empathy. If not empathy, uh Now, empathy is one of those things that we'll talk about, especially when it gets to robots,

because empathy requires sort of a two way interaction. And so there's certain things that you can feel sympathy toward, but you cannot feel empathy toward because because their experience is intrinsically different than your own, or they're not experiencing anything, for example, something that's truly inanimate. There you can feel sympathy toward inanimate objects, but not necessarily empathy. But that's the question. Actually, we feel ad about, say, working a

human to death. We know that should not be done, right, but we shouldn't. But we don't feel bad about working a car engine to death, right, Um, because we assume that the car engine does not actually have an experience of being where it wants to survive and doesn't want to be, you know, work to death, and it wants to have freedom. I mean that that just seems silly to us. But it would be like crushing a piece of ice, Like you don't feel badly for the ice,

but who knows, maybe we should. Because there are actually a couple of ideas about where consciousness comes from. Do you ever think about what is the cause of consciousness? Yeah, there's actually tons of tons of interesting philosophical there's philosophical debate. Then you have the the the like you have neurologists who take a much more uh you know, physical approach

to consciousness. There's a lot of talk about it. Well okay, so, um, unless you could start on one hand by saying that some people, of course will probably take like a supernatural view and they'd say that that a soul is responsible for consciousness or something like that. Um, you know who. That may be true, but there's no way to show it. That's that's not scientific, not not meaning that it's wrong, but rather than there's no way to test for it, right, um,

So if if that's true, we just don't know. Um. But there are other options of ideas about how consciousness could come about in a physical universe physically. One idea is this idea of emergent is um, which is that consciousness is not present in say, individual neurons, but only arises as a phenomenon that is somehow more than the sum of the brains parts um. And in this case, it would be basically the idea that the more complex

brains become, the higher states of consciousness they achieve. Um. So that's one idea, it's an emergent property of complex brains. But there are questions that come from that, say like, um, okay, well you have this idea that something's building up towards consciousness, Well what is it building with? And when you ask that question you get to a really interesting philosophy, the idea of pan psychism. Have y all heard of this?

I have none. Pan Psychism is the proposal that the universe inherently has mind within it that all matter, even inanimate objects, may contain units of consciousness, so that there is such thing as the experience of being a rock

or a pile of sand. This sounds an awful lot to me, like like a phenomenon that I was reading about in psychological research called um phenomenal logical intersubjectivity, which basically, I mean is a necessarily long word that basically means that that because humans can only know for certain what it is to be human, that we use this base

of experience to evaluate and consider non human agents. Yeah, there's a similar thing in literary circles called the pathetic fallacy, not being pathetic, but rather that you are, in this case talking about emotion. You're talking about the imbuing emotion upon things that, as far as we know, are incapable of actually feeling emotion, but that it's similar but not the same thing. Well, but there you're starting with the

assumption that this is false. I mean, this is the proposal is that this may actually be true, And I don't think it's fair to dismiss this idea out of hand. There's actually an interesting philosopher named Galen Strawson UM and he's got the idea. He says basically, Um, if you accept that the nature of reality is physical and the consciousness is a feature of the physical world, you should accept the idea that units of consciousness are in his words,

literally physical like an electric charge. Well, that might be so, but I would think that that's also possible that it's a manifestation of very specific types of matter. In other words, types of matter like mural cells, that would be a manifestation of consciousness. But if you're talking about just you know, a collection of iron atoms, that might not be so.

While you may still physical basis, it's still an interesting I mean, you know, I can see the argument that the same way that we know that gravitons exist, but that we don't know what they are, what they do, that perhaps there's a conscious netron that um probably wouldn't be called that, but you know, but but it's some kind of quantum unit of of ideation. Um. Yeah. I think the issue with this is I think it's a really interesting idea, and it's because of the same problem,

the Turing problem we've talked about. It's just impossible to test, which means it's not scientific against philosophy, it's not scientific course, neither is it scientific to say that rocks don't have mind? Well, no, unless you are. What you would have to do is prove that rocks do have mind. That would be scientific, it's so, But you wouldn't be able to do that either, but I mean not using this approach. So so that's the See, this is one of the things where it's

an interesting thought experiment. It's it's the same problem I have with a lot of philosophy is that ultimately there's not a whole lot you can do practically with this sort of idea. Yeah, it's just like, well, that's an interesting idea. Moving on, What you could do is uh is sort of like tested against propositions that are brought up by other by actual induction, by forms of experimentation and stuff like that. Principles that we know to be

true in one way or another. Maybe we can test whether or not this idea is consistent with them or not. Um yeah, still it's difficult to tell. But anyway, that the point of this is ideas like this I think make it not so necessarily obvious that robots don't have an experience of being, even if you believe in in say the emergent theory of consciousness. Well, I don't know.

When you create an intensely complicated neural network through you know, of of a simulated robot brain, are you perhaps creating an emergent phenomenon of experience. Well, the other argument I would make about this is that, uh, the even if, even if you were to create some form of consciousness, let's assume that there is a basic unit of consciousness, that everything has some sort of element of this, you cannot then extend the assumption that that experiences anything remotely

like the human experience. No, not at all. So here's the when you start talking about rights, what we're basing that on as human rights, you can even assume that my experiences like yours, though we're back to the problem we started with, no trapped in your experience. If we're able to have a conversation, we can at least find ground where we seem to share some form of commonality. Right. So, now, if we're talking about a a an object, that apparently

that that may or may not possess this basic element. Again, since you cannot assume that that is at all remotely analogous to the human experience. When it comes to talking about rights. It's kind of a moot point anyway, because what we would consider rights for us might not at all be similar to whatever that conscious thing might really enjoy being set on fire or turned into glass. Maybe it thinks it's pretty, So that's a good point. We don't know even if there is such a thing as

the experience of being a robot. We can't know for sure what that robot would want. Yeah, but like we were just saying, we can't know for sure what anybody else would want. And they tell you, which guess we can think about most humans, they will in fact very vocally telling you. Right, if you're cutting off someone's foot and they say I really don't want you to do that, I usually take them for their word. I do it. Anyway. Then would we uh perhaps have some inkling of an

obligation to help a robot achieve its task efficiently? Does the robot want it? I don't know. See, here's the thing is that we first have to get to a point where we have a robot that is capable of what we would consider to be intelligent communication. That in itself does not necessarily mean the robot is intelligent, but it's capable of at least simulating it, and Toring would say that that is enough. The door that says that it's very pleased to open for you, and we'll be

thank you for coming through this door. Yeah, um yeah, it's it's do you have an obligation to help that door open and close as often as possible. You mostly have an obligation to slowly go mad as the door thanks you for walking through it over and over again, as Douglas Adams had written about extensively. Um, you know, so it's it's you know, first we get to a point where we have robots it somehow behave beyond simple uh machines that that that performed tasks. Here here we're

assuming a robot that very closely simulates human intelligence. Right now. Once you get to that point, then things really do get tricky. If the robot is able to simulate consciousness and intelligence, whether or not it possesses it is kind of beside the point, because, just like Touring was saying, we have to just start assuming that the thing has what it appears to possess. Right, Well, yeah, that's what

I sort of meant with the panpsychism thing. We don't know this is true but on the off chance that it is, should we give them right? So that's a good question, And in fact, there was a question asked in a game. It was a game that was associated with the movie AI So, the the Kubrick film that ended up being taken over by Spielberg. It was all about a little boy robot and it's um adventures and

self discovered terrible ter all adventures. Yeah so um so, Well I would have been even more terrible had Kubrick actually directed it. But it uh, Spielbrek has a little bit more of a soft space for I was gonna say schmaltzy, but soft space is good. Uh so, yeah, it's anyway. The idea in this game was that you were solving various mysteries, and there were lots of different elements of this game. It was an alternate reality game and a r G and which means a marketing thing

leading up to the film coming out. I believe in this case it was a marketing thing. Not all a r G s are market but this one in particular was, and it actually extended beyond the opening of the film. In fact, people were playing this game well after the film had opened. But the idea was that it was supposed to draw you into the universe created in this

particular movie, and you did lots of different stuff. But one of the things that happened was that players in the game were assumed to be in this future world that AI took place in. So you were playing yourself, you were being you, but you were assumed to be in the future. And they actually held a referendum, and the referendum they were voting on whether or not robots should receive human rights because they had in the film. If you have not seen it, you see that there

are robots that are gaining a sense of self awareness. Um, some have more of a sense of self awareness than others, depending on how advanced the individual roboting question is right. So they've essentially reached the point now where robots are capable of experiencing life on some level. Whether or not it's completely analogous to a human is beyond our ability to say. But they are having an experience. That's that becomes clear in the movie. So the question is should

we extend rights to robots? And they held a vote among the players. I was one of the players who voted no. But the reason I voted no was not because I thought that these rights had to be withheld from a robot force. It was actually more of a uh. It was more of a to start a conversation about how I thought your responsible to create such an intelligence

in the first place. If what you were intending the robot to do was uh, to work for you as a tool of some sort, like you should not give a tool these sort of things because the tool has a very specific purpose. Now, I know, we like to talk about how all people have a purpose in life. There's a purpose, but in general we think of that as something that we get to discover for ourselves. We get yeah, like we we get to make choices, We

get to choose what we want. And in an ideal circumstances obviously there are people who live in different ones that have very limited, if any choices. But ideally you have all the different options open to you, and you make the choices that are right for you, and you find your purpose however you wanted to find that. But if you are something that was created for a very specific task, if you're a tool, then really you have

your purpose preordained for you. You did not get to make those choices, and so to give something like that intelligence, an agency and consciousness, to me, is incredibly cruel because it means that either you are forcing it to do something that it may not want to do, or that you're just assuming that somehow that's going to make it do the thing that it was supposed to do better.

It's it's not an ideal situation. So that's why I voted against it in the game, knowing that in the game it didn't ultimately matter one way or the other. The conclusion was going to be that the robots were going to rise up against us anyway, uh spoiler alert.

But but the you know, it was it was important to me to have that conversation that in my mind, it was an unethical approach that unless you had the full intent that we want to create another species, another kind of life, a synthetic kind of life, that uh, from the outset, that was our goal, then that's okay. Make sure they have the rights, because I think that that's important. If you're giving them that ability to think and to have self awareness and that's their purpose for

whatever reason, give them the rights they deserve them. But if you are talking about just trying to make a really good toaster, don't give it the intelligence in the first place. Of course, I guess we have no idea if the toaster has intelligence, but probably not. I'm going with no, it certainly does have not intelligence consciousness I think. I think it's certainly has a sense of vindictiveness based upon how my my, my toast might come out one

day versus another difference. Maybe I should stop plugging it into that atomic generator I've got in the back. I don't know. Yeah. One of the follow ups to the whole panpsychism discussion we had is, of course, like, if that is true, then obviously it would apply to robots, but it would also apply to rocks and toasters. It would apply to them, it would apply to the raw materials of the robot. Yeah. Um, so that's an interesting

thing in itself. But I have another thing I'd like to raise, which is that I think whether or not we believe that robots actually do have intrinsic rights, like whether they themselves need and deserve them, we might end up giving them rights anyway for our own needs. Right. I see exactly what you're saying, Joe. I mean it maybe that it's not It doesn't even necessarily mean that we feel that the robots are truly intelligent or truly conscious.

We may even still openly questioned that and yet give them rights because we tend to identify with stuff. We tend to imbuse stuff with characteristics that it may or may not inherently possess, and then if we don't act according to those those feelings that we have, we start

feeling like that's wrong. It's a anthropomorphism, yeah, which is you know, in in psychology they talk about it being a way, you know, that that humans are emotionally uncomfortable with things that are not like us, and that anthropomorphism allows us to um to reduce that discomfort. Yeah, that's that's attributing human qualities to non human things, whether whether

it's uh inanimate or animate. So for example, like you know, The Simpsons has this great little moment in one of the early episodes where everyone's looking at I think it's like a little dog, and the dog sneezes, and one that caress thinks it's people. You know, that's kind of kind of what we're talking about. Anthropomorphism is what you know, you might look at your your pet and just assume that your pet is feeling a certain way, but we really can't know that it's actually having any sort of

emotion that's similar to ours. We do think they have emotions, but whether or not they mapped towards the kind of emotions that we have, that's a huge leap. Oh sure. And and this, this theory is is not anything new. I mean, this supposedly goes back to ancient Greece where, um, where a philosopher was using it to describe the similarity

between religious believers and their gods. You know that that, um, that he was noticing that that the Greeks considered their gods to look basically like them, and that the African consider their gods to look basically like them, and so on and so forth. Um. And but in you know, now, in the present, neuroscience, research has shown that that similar brain regions are involved in thinking about the behavior of

of humans and also non human objects. Yeah, and from what I've read, I think we are particularly susceptible to having feelings about robots. Actually read this was just published the other day in the Tripoli Spectrum. Hey, that's my joke, the okay, So it was a report on a thesis by a University of Washington student Julie Carpenter UM, and the thesis was entitled to quiet Professional and Investigation of US military Explosive Ordinance disposal personnel interactions with everyday field

robots UM. I want to read a little selection from that article. What Carpenter found is that troops relationships with robots continue to evolve a the technology changes. Soldiers told her that attachment to the robots didn't affect their performance, yet I acknowledge they felt a range of emotions such as frustration, anger, and even sadness when their field robot

was destroyed. That makes Carpenter wonder whether outcomes on the battlefield could potentially be compromised by human robot attachment or the feeling of self extension into the robot described by some operators. So there's this this perception that there could be a problem because what you're supposed to use this robot for is to get killed for your right. You know, it goes where where there would be danger to human life, and to preserve human life, you send your robot in.

But the problem is feeling bad about the robot dying. Then yeah, that's kind of a problem. And I can very much imagine the same kind of reaction happening as we incorporate more robotics into our day to day lives. You know, people name their room buzz the name. Oh yeah, of course they have. I'm like, yeah, they do have feelings about their room bas. And I highly suspect I don't have any scientific literature on this, but I highly suspect that people get way sadder when their room bas

break down than when their toaster breaks. Oh, when your toaster breaks, it's kind of annoying. I think this has to do partially and and this is again I don't I don't have any numbers on it, but I feel like it's probably because robots um move autonomously, and autonomous movement is one of those things that we generally apply to living stuff. So um, you know, for for for the same reason that that a child might be more upset about a toy that moves around breaking than it

would be about otherwise stationary. It all depends on the the emotional attachment. I'm still bitter about my blankie. Um. Well, there was an interesting art project I was just trying to research and see if I could find. Uh. I think it was Mark Owens who did this project. Mark Owens created something called the Avatar machine, and I wrote an article about it many years ago. Now that that doesn't really apply to this conversation, but I want to

say it was Owens that also created an interesting experience. Uh. He was really interested. He was kind of thinking about people's relationships with inanimate objects and technology, and how we can form at least a one way emotional bond with something that itself does not appear to have any kind

of emotion or feeling. And I want to say it was Owens who had created this interesting experiment where he had a lamp and had this kind of a membrane stretched over the lap, so the light was showing through the membrane, and then gave people scalpels where they would be able to cut through the membrane to let light show through. That was their task, right, Their task was to get light to shift. And the membrane looked like skin,

It was very similar to skin. And the idea was that you see how people reacted to the thought of having to cause damage to this thing in order to let light through, and because it looks so much like skin, there were people who were very hesitant to cut like they were afraid of I guess of hurting it in a way or just that the thought of having to cause damage to let light through was something that gave them a sense of hesitation. So that alone, we're talking

about just the lamp here. That's there's no animate part of this other than the fact that the like can come on or imagine it can have convincing conversations with you. Right. So yeah, part and and and all three of us have have talked about UM off off off the mic, about UM having problems playing video games when the computerized avatars and the game's look too much like a real

human person. Like, the more realistic they get, the more uncomfortable we are with causing pain to them, right And though you know you're not actually hurting any living thing, right right, like like like harvesting the little Sisters and uh in BioShock. Yeah, I couldn't do it. I couldn't. I wanted to see what it looked like when you did it, but I couldn't make myself do it. I had to look it up on YouTube. Yeah, I didn't

do it either. And we have this decision as well as that in video games, if you have a game where you are given the choice to do something, whether it's you know, the moral choice however you want to find that, or the evil choice, I always go the good guy route. I have trouble playing as a villain, unless it's such a cartoonish villain. I'm just saying that

I personally can't. I personally can't play that way except when it's a game where that's really your If it's not a choice, if that's just the way the game works, then I end up being able to play through it without too much trouble. But if it's one of those things where you choose one or the other, I hate having to choose things that uh that don't seem to

benefit the people that I like in the game. The people being like the characters in the game that I like, they have no actual experience, and you're causing harm to no one. Right exactly I could choose. I could choose to waste an entire village in a in an RPG, if I had a character who was strong enough to be able to take on all the guards that would immediately be set upon me. But I have problems with

I like like sky Rim is another example. I play Skyrim and I'll walk into uh An Inn, for example, They're none of those characters are at all alive, but they all have their own little personalities, even though they may be used by the same voice actors that I've heard a billion times in other towns. I can't bring myself to just go into wholesale slaughter mode and start

wiping out characters. In fact, I don't know if this happened originally with Skyrim, but recently I've been playing it again, and I would get letters from the first town I went in when a villager would be killed by some other event that happened while I was not in the village, and they had given me an inheritance they had willed and inheritance to me, and I received gold because they had died. I would be upset about this, like no, no,

poor Ozrick is dead or whatever, you know. And yeah, So I think the conclusion of this is that robot rights may be coming, whether robots deserve them or not, or need them, or or even if they're able to at all think in a way that we consider well analogous to human thing. Yeah, in my opinion, that would be the rubric for whether or not they actually deserve them. If there is an experience of being a robot. Obviously

the robot needs some kind of protection. We don't know whether or not there will be, but I think robots will be cute enough and anthropomorphic enough if they're going to be moving around having conversations with this resembling life in any way, even as much as like a bomb disposal robot, right, right, And and and especially because you know, there's there's theories and marketing that tell us that that when we can highly anthropomorphize something, that people will be

more likely to buy it. So yeah, I very much suspect that we're going to have strong feelings about protecting the interests of our robots, whether or not the robots actually care. It will be interesting to see the first case brought against someone for robot abuse. Yeah, I mean that then, you that will really the way it's decided in the courts will be interesting because it may or may not align with the way that the general population feels.

And it's a good question to um, Okay, so imagine we do grant some kind of rights to robots, just voluntarily, say, even though they don't need them, is it actually immoral to be gratuitously cruel to a robot if the robot

can't feel it, that's a good question. I mean, is there a moral to be just yeah, oh there there There are certainly non Western theories I mean, or I mean, you know, I guess, I guess, non mainstream Western theories that say that, yes, that causing damage to even even non non alive beings is detrimental to your own personal So if I were to draw a picture of a stick figure and then rip it up into tiny little pieces,

according to that philosophy, that would be bad. Well, you know, just just the concept of trying to to reach freedom from suffering, which is the basic tenant of of Buddhism for example. That and that you know, introducing negativity of any kind into your life is going to negatively effect. It just reminded me of Hitchcock who said that he he invied Disney because Disney could just actors and throw

them away whenever they were giving them trouble. So that's great. Yeah, one of those one of those little little nuggets that I just absolutely love. Well, this is you know, so I agree. I think that robots are are are probably going to end up once they reach a certain level of sophistication end up being given rights by humans. Uh, simply because emotionally for us, that's something that will meet our needs if if not the robots, um except for ferbies,

because screw those guys. So yeah, I guess that wraps up our discussion about robot rights. Guys, if you want to join this conversation, you want to tell me, hey, no, furbies deserved rights too, You're wrong, but you're welcome to try, go to f W thinking dot com. That's where you can find the blogs, the videos, the podcasts, the articles that we right that are some that that associate with the different topics we're tackling. Be part of that conversation.

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