Hmmm.
Not bad, but it's rather simplistic about consciousness.
It's also rather simplistic about the relationship between being a rights-holder and sentience.
The idea that rights are created rather than discovered is likely to be contentious in at least some cases; not every rights-theorist is going to agree that all rights are created. (At best, the vid muddies the distinction between legal rights, which a decent state might confer, and moral rights, which a decent state would respect.) For that reason, talk about "deserving" rights is otiose. There are arguably some rights that one has irrespective of whether or not one deserves them. Indeed, the very idea that one might deserve something at all seems to ride on having a particular moral status.
The claim that claims about freedom is linked to the way our brains detect what is fair is mind-bendingly wrong, not least because "fair" is left undefined; but even without that, it's really not correct. Ditto the bit about preferring justice over injustice. By what standard are we measuring it, and what has preference got to do with anything?
The analogy between programming a robot to feel pain and evolution doing it is poor. (What would it mean to program sensibility anyway?)
The claim that our human identity is based on exceptionalism is vague. What does a human identity mean? If someone didn't think themselves exceptional, would they thereby be less human? (Hint: no.)
Descartes is mishandled - and one might look to Peter Carruthers for a more recent restatement of Cartesian thought on this stuff. It's wrong, but at least interestingly wrong.
The bit about slavery and the putative benefits to the slave is wrong, and relates back to the quasi-Benthamite conflation of rights and suffering. It's not hard to come up with an account of slavery in which the slaves are better off - scroll down this, for example - but they might still have been wronged. And it's not always the case that one is wronged by being made to suffer. Bluntly, much more work is needed here, because suffering and wrongs are not the same thing.
Noone sane thinks that looking after farm animals justifies killing them. It is required thereby; the justification for killing them, if there is one, comes from an appeal to our preferences. So that's arse-about-tit.
The vid is correct to say that the possibility of AI raises all kinds of questions about rights and duties. This is nothing new, though: they're questions that philosophers and jurisprudentialists have been trying to deal with for years.
(Disclaimer: I may have missed a few details here; I've been trying to type in real-time.)
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Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Thu 23 Feb 2017, 15:08,
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I always find myself going back to that Asimov quote:
"There is no right to deny freedom to any object with a mind advanced enough to grasp the concept and desire the state."
That being said the next question that follows is whether or not it's ethical to engineer a mind that actually prefers to be treated in a manner that a human would call slavery.
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jonbob loves you, Thu 23 Feb 2017, 18:16,
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