The Lonely Savage

The entirety of human history is filled with the struggle for the rights of various groups in the societies in which they live. The fact that the slaves of America were treated unfairly in comparison to the population around them eventually led to the the Emancipation Proclamation (1862) and the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (1865), which ended slavery in the United States. The Suffragettes managed to change the status of the woman from being little more than an appendage of men into having the right to vote. New Zealand was the first country in the world to allow all women over the age of 21 to vote (1893). The African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968), beginning with the peaceful demonstration of Rosa Parks in 1955 saw to it that everybody became aware of racial segregation and the rights of the African-American population. We’ve now covered more or less every human right there through one interest group or another. Gay rights, the right to abortion, the rights of former convicts, the right to integrity and personal freedom, the right to chose when you want to die, the freedom of speech, the right to chose your religion or to abstain from religion, and many many more. Others take up the cause of those who cannot fight for themselves; championing the rights of animals, trees or other natural phenomena.

We are rapidly moving into a society entirely unlike anything we have ever seen. New paradigms will become commonplace within the near future and I believe we must begin to talk about the rights of various groups of individuals we will meet in the future.

The human mind is like a computer in many ways. We can think of our memories and knowledge taking up ‘storage space’ and our ability to comprehend the environment we live in to be done in MIPS (Million Instructions Per Second). According to many estimates; computers with both more storage space and more MIPS will be available at reasonable prices within the next ten to fifteen years. It has been assumed that when machines even slightly surpass human intellect, they could improve their own designs in ways that were unforeseen or unintended by their designers. This would allow them to recursively augment themselves or each other into having even greater intelligence or ability. The first such improvements would be small, but as the machines become more intelligent they would become better at becoming more intelligent, which could lead to an exponential and quite sudden growth in intelligence.

I’m not leading up to a Terminator-scenario where robots kill all humans here, but I am suggesting that we need to prepare ourselves for the idea of intelligent and sentient machines. What rights would they have in our society? Would we force them to have a nationality? Would they be subject to the same laws as humans or animals? Would forcibly terminating one be considered murder or will it be seen in the same way as shutting off a light switch? Does it have a gender? How about machine/human marriage? Can a machine be gay? Can it belong to a religion?

Within a few short years, robotic implants and cyborgism will be not only feasible but commonplace. Malfunctioning knees will be replaced by a flexible metal alloy that works better than the real thing. Nanobots swimming in the bloodstream, feeding on the sugars you eat, will repair tissue damage and thus slow down aging better than any vitamin or antioxidant treatment you can think of today. External processing units will be connected in series to your own brain for those times where you need some extra processing power to think of a solution to a particularly tricky problem. When do we stop talking about people? Is it when we’ve replaced more than 50% of our mass with robotic components? What if I replace one organ at a time until only my (human) brain remains? I would have uninterrupted consciousness of being ‘me’ all along, but I would be 99% robot. What rights apply to me?

Furthermore, when computers have better processing speeds and storage than the human brain, why not ‘upload’ the human mind to a computer? Assume I (and here I mean “my human body” when I say “I”) was very old and dying. Imagine further that I had the ability to have a computer scan every single neuron in my brain and create a computer software version of it. I would still be the same ‘person’ with the same memories and the same skills, but I wouldn’t have a biological representation to call myself. What rights would I have? Would I keep my gender? Would I keep ownership rights to things that I owned while still in my human body? Would I continue receiving my pension payments? Would I have legal rights to myself so that nobody can ‘copy’ parts of my memory or personality?

What if I, the human mind in the non-human body, later have the opportunity to move this computer software version of myself into a new human body? Assume my real-life granddaughter decided she wanted to give me a body again and had the express permission of her husband to do so? Imagine if my memories and knowledge could be copied into the fetus before birth, allowing me to be born into a young body already with a full life of memories? How old would I be? What would my legal birthdate be? What if the new body was a different gender than my original gender? Would I still be able to draw my pension? Could I vote?

Instead of transferring my mind from the computer to the human body, imagine instead that my loving wife can’t bear to be apart from me so she decides to leave her physical body and join me inside the computer mind. Instead of existing as two separate computer software versions of ourselves we decide to merge our programs into one. What would our name be? Our gender? Would we be considered a third, new, individual rather than a union of two? Would this new joint mind own the properties of both previous individuals? What if this joint software mind decided to assume a human body later on?

Even though this may read like science fiction to many of you, these are problems that we will face sooner or later. Shunning these questions and thinking that they are a problem for future generations may very well be a mistake. They’re happening now.