"Peter C. McCluskey" <pcm@rahul.net> writes:
> An AI would probably have rights comparable to those of a human, which
> would provide a strong deterrent to further investment by a company whose
> software was close to whatever threshold would give it rights.
If the rights start to obtain only when the AI reaches
human-level intelligence, then I don't think that this would be a
significant deterrent; for the benefits of creating a an AI that is
human-equivalent or slightly above human are so great that they would
be worth almost any amount of legal complications.
However, might it be possible to limit the AI in such a way that it
doesn have consciousness or count as a person (and hence doesn't have
rights) while retaining most of the benefits? If the AI were
domain-specific, and only did exactly what it was told, and did not
have any ability for self-reflection or long-term planning, would
that save us from having to give it person-status?
_____________________________________________________
Nick Bostrom
Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method
London School of Economics
n.bostrom@lse.ac.uk
http://www.hedweb.com/nickb
Received on Fri Apr 24 01:01:06 1998
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