Page 198 - BEATS Secondary School

Do robots deserve human rights

- Shashwat Joglekar, MYP 2

Do robots deserve human rights? To answer this question, we will
need to dive into consciousness. We don’t know the definition
of consciousness but we know a lot about it since we experience
it. So we need to make sure the being is conscious. How do you
make a robot experience consciousness?

We have something that robots with consciousness haven’t been
programmed to feel yet - pain. Pain is a key player when it comes
to rights because we developed rights so that we don’t experience
pain. Alright so looks like we will need to add another thing to the
program. The ability to feel pain. So those are the two pointers
to make this scenario possible. A robot programming for this
scenario will be a robot that can experience consciousness and
pain.

So do robots deserve rights in this scenario? Well, yes they do but
they probably won’t. Since robots are artificial they will probably
not get rights. They will have to do a robot’s right movement or
else humanity is easily cruel enough to not give robot rights. Even
women didn’t have rights until the movement called Women’s
Rights Movement even though they are natural, not artificial. So
probably robot won’t have rights for a long time even though they
deserve it. The cruelty of humanity will continue until robots initiate
a rights movement.