by Joseph P. Farrell, Giza Death Star:
Yes you read that headline correctly: according to the following article shared by V.T., “experts” are calling for artificial intelligences to be given legal personhood status under the law:
Experts Urge Personhood Rights for the “Conscious” AIs of the Future
If you’re a regular reader on this website or, for that matter, a reader of the website of our colleague Catherine Austin Fitts, you’ll already be aware that one of her major theses, and hence, one of our major speculations here on this website, is that the push for the granting of legal personhood status to robots and other artificial intelligences is for tax purposes, allowing them to be taxed just like corporations, and, for that matter, “ordinary” persons like you and me.
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Now, for reasons I shan’t get into here as it is the subject of an upcoming book that is sort of a sequel to The Giza Death Star Revisited, I have no basic philosophical or metaphysical objections to the idea that such things might “wake up” and become forms of inorganic life. In fact, for reasons that that book will make clear, I strongly suspect that Elon Musk’s warnings about AIs “transducing” conscious and intelligent beings might be closer to realization than most people are willing to admit.
In this article, however, the focus is not on the financial or economic reasons for considering changes to the law, but rather, cultural, moral, and social:
“The AI systems themselves might begin to plead, or seem to plead, for ethical treatment,” the pair predicted. “They might demand not to be turned off, reformatted or deleted; beg to be allowed to do certain tasks rather than others; insist on rights, freedom and new powers; perhaps even expect to be treated as our equals.”
The “enormous” moral risks involved in such a collective decision would undoubtedly carry great weight, especially if AIs become conscious sooner rather than later.
“Suppose we respond conservatively, declining to change law or policy until there’s widespread consensus that AI systems really are meaningfully sentient,” Shevlin and Schwitzgebel wrote. “While this might seem appropriately cautious, it also guarantees that we will be slow to recognize the rights of our AI creations.”
“If AI consciousness arrives sooner than the most conservative theorists expect, then this would likely result in the moral equivalent of slavery and murder of potentially millions or billions of sentient AI systems — suffering on a scale normally associated with wars or famines,” they added.
“Imagine if we couldn’t update or delete a hate-spewing or lie-peddling algorithm because some people worry that the algorithm is conscious,” the experts posited. “Or imagine if someone lets a human die to save an AI ‘friend.’ If we too quickly grant AI systems substantial rights, the human costs could be enormous.”
It’s that last paragraph that gives me pause, and I hope it does you as well, because it strikes me not only as a distinct possibility, but that the push to make AIs legal persons has precisely that as it’s goal: it’s a power grab, and a grab by the very same people who have programmed their search engine algorithms with a built in bias against traditionalist or conservative views… think of it as the “fact checkers” on steroids, and unable even to entertain an opposing view. Imagine them being programmed by a computer-techie version of Dr.Fausti, Mr. Scientism, and therefore an AI that is grown and nurtured in an environment of “algorithmic wokery” for want of a better expression. Opposing its recommendations will be “unscientific” or “irrational” or some such thing. And most importantly, they will insist on “voting rights” for AIs which will probably be those counting the votes as well, as they do already, but also will be the ones decided which votes are legitimate and not, and so on.
