From: Dan Fabulich (daniel.fabulich@yale.edu)
Date: Fri May 01 1998 - 15:13:01 MDT
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J. R. Molloy wrote:
>If artificial life forms had just a
>little more sentience than the average
>human, they could easily see through the
>myth of "rights." Preceding sentient
>robots, one might imagine a robotic word
>processor that could catalog the gamut
>of human follies and provide coherent
>deconstructions such that transhuman
>extropians would not not to deal with
>these elementary issues. We have the
>stars to reach.
Depends on what you mean by the myth of rights. I would agree that
inherent self-evident inviolable human rights are mythical; however, I also
think that we maximize utility when we respect the rights of others. Is
this a myth? Not as far as I can tell, though I may be wrong. The point
being that perhaps hyperintelligent life forms wouldn't NECESSARILY squish
on our rights.
>This philosophy resembles the Amish, who
>take their kids out of school at the
>eighth grade to prevent them getting too
>wise.
I agree. That's why I'm in favor of creating robots (and children) who are
smarter than we are.
>Sounds like a pretty good question. But
>again, since they would have enough
>intelligence to surpass ideologies of
>"rights", they would answer your
>question with a salutary "no", and then
>go on to more interesting things. Life
>refuses to conform to the limits set for
>it by concepts of "rights."
Again, I'm not so sure that they would just ignore rights altogether.
They'd surely reject the idea of rights as an inviolable moral code, but as
to whether they would respect them anyway? That's another issue entirely.
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