Will Advanced Robots Be Entitled To Civil Rights?

This is an excerpt from my book “Pardon the Disruption. The Future You Never Saw Coming.” When discussing robotic rights, most people will instantly dismiss the whole concept as ludicrous. One way to look at this problem is to come at it from the other direction. Bob, our Mr. Everyone, was born and lived his life for 60 years as an ordinary person. When he starts to break down due to the aging process, he accesses every technological advancement available to keep himself alive. Let’s see what happens to Bob, when he avails himself to everything science offers to prevent his own death in the 21st Century. When his kidneys fail, he has two artificial kidneys implanted.

Then his liver fails and is replaced with an artificial liver. His pancreas, bladder, heart and eyes are also replaced with electronic parts as they also fail. With all this hardware implanted, you would still be hard-pressed to say Bob is not human. He has a human mind with the same thoughts and dreams he had prior to the addition of all this electronic equipment that replaced his failing organs. In his mind, Bob is still the same person. None of this hardware has altered his “humanity.”With all his internal organs replaced, Bob now has a life span of 150 years. His brain is known to be biologically limited to approximately 125 years. Bob now has a healthy body augmented with quite a bit of hardware that will outlast his brain tissue.

Bob is no quitter, though. As he approaches his 100 year birthday, he now starts to implant electronics into his brain. His first change is an artificial electronic pineal gland to regulate his sleeping patterns. This change will in no way interrupt the continuity of conscious thought that has progressed from the day he was born to the present. Bob was put under general anesthetic when the surgery was performed, giving him a partial brain implant. When Bob awakened, he still saw his life in the exact same way. All his memories were intact, his beliefs, opinions, and feelings were still the same as they were the day before the operation. Bob still loves his family and hates his government, just as he did before.

While a bio-Luddite might try to claim Bob is now no longer human because he has an artificial component to his organic brain, Bob would strenuously disagree with that conclusion. If you were to tell Bob that treating his sleeping disorder by providing an artificial pineal gland rendered him a nonhuman, he would be outraged. If we look at an individual as a collection of thought patterns, what we call personality, Bob’s patterns remain unchanged. His personality is utterly intact.

Next Bob is faced with a hearing loss. Doctors determined that his temporal lobe is beginning to fail. This is the part of the brain containing the center for hearing. A second surgery is performed and an electronic temporal lobe is implanted in Bob’s brain. The sensory data coming from his ears is now being read by an artificial electronic temporal lobe that translates this data for the brain to be able to “hear.” Once again we must ask, “Is Bob human?” The only fair answer under these circumstances is yes, Bob is still human.

Recently, Bob has noticed his vision is becoming impaired. After extensive testing, his doctors determined that it was the occipital lobe in Bob’s brain that was beginning to fail. Bob went under the knife for the third time and had an artificial occipital lobe implanted in his brain. His vision returned. The signals being sent from his electronic eye replacements were now being received by his electronic occipital lobe replacement. Once again, there was no change to who Bob is, just a change in how he processes sensory input. With this technological enhancement, Bob now has telescopic vision and can see objects as far as a mile away with the same degree of accuracy as things that are only one foot in front of his face.

Next it was Bob’s sense of balance that began to fail. His movements became slow and uncoordinated. He had a tendency to sway and sometimes even stagger when walking. His doctors determined that his cerebellum was about to play out. Once again it was science to the rescue for Bob. He now endured his fourth brain surgery and had an artificial cerebellum placed in his brain. All the sensory information being sent from his lower limbs was now being processed by his artificial cerebellum to maintain balance and allow him normal movement.

At the ripe old age of 115, Bob finally developed diabetes. Both of his legs were amputated and he was provided with robotic limbs. Bob was starting to look like the $6 million man from the 1970s TV show. At this point his need for nutrition to service his organic parts was quite limited. The doctors went in and gave him an artificial stomach and digestive tract to provide for his limited nutritional needs. In the space where his large stomach and gut once existed, a large battery pack was put inside him to power his electronic parts. The artificial skin that covered his robotic limbs was of the same color and texture as his actual skin. Viewed from a distance, it was impossible to tell the difference between organic Bob and synthetic Bob.

The muscles in Bob’s arm began to atrophy to the point that lifting trivial items such as a briefcase or bag of groceries became painful. Bob had his organic arms replaced with brand-new robotic arms. The sensors in the hands of his fingers allowed his brain to manipulate his hands with a more subtle nuance than his organic hands ever could. This allowed Bob to learn how to play the piano - a new skill that provided him with hours of enjoyment. He also had the ability to lift 100 pounds with one arm and barely feel it. At the same time he could hold a Styrofoam cup without crushing it. Not only did Bob not miss his organic arms, he actually preferred his new arms.

As Bob approached his 118-year birthday, he found it difficult to form sentences. His language ability was becoming impaired. After extensive testing, his doctors determined his parietal lobe was failing. This is the portion of the brain that is involved in language processing. Bob was now being subjected to his fifth brain surgery to replace his parietal lobe. The operation proceeded without a hitch and with his new and improved parietal lobe, Bob was now quite the linguist. For the first time he found himself writing poetry. He had a voracious appetite for reading the old classics and then tried to synthesize them into one seminal work. Bob’s use of language is now the equivalent of someone with an IQ of 250.

Bob has now replaced quite a few components in his brain. His sleep cycle, vision, hearing, balance, and language construction are all being performed by artificial electronic components. With robotic arms and legs being controlled by machine intelligence, Bob has become superhuman in terms of physical performance. Bob still goes to work every day and hangs out with his friends on the weekend. He pays his bills, mows his yard, goes to the movies and worries what the future will be like for his children. His conscious mind still has an absolute continuity all the way back to his birth. While he is now three quarters machine, he still cries at weddings and cheers for his team at football games.
When Bob turned 120, he noticed he had trouble paying attention and staying awake. This time it was his brain stem. Time had worn down this ganglion of neurons and he was rapidly losing function. His sixth surgery provided him with an artificial electronic brain stem. He now had a first-rate system to transfer information from the body to the brain. He was more alert, more focused than he had ever been in his life. He could see and hear with a clarity that was beyond the normal human capabilities. His physical movements had a precision that he had never known before. While Bob was still an organic life form, there was not much organic tissue left.

Bob suffered a bout with pneumonia for the fourth time in his life when he agreed to give up lungs forever. The idea that he would no longer rely on breathing to sustain his life was terrifying for Bob. Getting an artificial heart was merely changing one silent pump for another - not anything he would really feel or be aware of in his conscious mind. The same thing with changing out a kidney or liver. While it was a radical change for sure, it just did not register in the conscious mind. To stop breathing was something altogether different. This is something he would notice in his conscious mind, daily. It would be a very real reminder that his humanity had been altered in a very radical way. Speech would now be conducted without the use of his lungs forcing air through his voice box. No more sighing. No quick inhalation of breath when surprised. While Bob’s speech would now come from an artificial voice box, it would still sound natural. Sound reproduction has come a long way. He would have the identical sounding voice he had his entire life.

When the operation was completed, Bob was now 100% electronic from the neck down. The only portion of organic material left in Bob was his frontal lobe in his brain. The rest of him was now completely electronic. Bob was about to turn 140 when his ability to remember started to dim. The final step lay before him. He had no choice. He had to acquire an artificial frontal lobe if he was to cheat death one more time. This procedure was going to be quite a bit more difficult than anything he had done before. Everything up until now had been a matter of engineering and body mechanics. This was something different. This was something much more. The frontal lobe controls our emotions and defines our personality. It is involved with problem solving, memory, language, judgment, impulse control, and social and sexual behavior. It is Bob.

Bob would need to download his life history into an artificial frontal lobe. Bob spent an entire day lying under a scanning machine that mapped his entire frontal lobe. Every neuron, every synapse had to be mapped with such precision that each and every memory could be copied and downloaded into the artificial frontal lobe. If this procedure was not conducted with absolute accuracy, whether the physical entity named Bob continue to exist, the human being known as Bob would in fact die on the table.

My grandmother lived into her mid-90s. During the last few years of her life, she did not recognize a single living human being. When I went to visit her, she asked me if we had gone to high school together. This kind and generous woman that I had known my entire life could not recognize me due to the ravages of advanced stage Alzheimer’s. It was at that moment that I had to reevaluate what death is. My grandmother had ceased to exist. The human form that stood before me was not my grandmother. While she was physically identical to her, she had no shared memories that we had created during my 40 years on this earth. The person that I knew as “grandma” did not exist. Alzheimer’s had destroyed those memories and thought patterns. While the lady I was talking to was very polite, she was not my grandmother in any way that I could identify other than her physical appearance. For all intents and purposes, my grandmother had died years earlier. Her physical presence in no way changed this incredibly sad fact.
This is the dilemma facing Bob. If the transfer fails, the resulting robot may be able to function as an autonomous entity, but it will not be “Bob.” If the download is successful, then Bob will awake from the operation just like he did all the others. All his hopes and dreams, his memories, his personality, his likes and dislikes will remain the same. The “pattern” we perceive as Bob will continue to exist. In his conscious mind, Bob will see an unbroken pattern going all the way back to his live birth 125 years ago. This continuity of existence that he experiences in his brain will convince him that he is Bob and he has never died. He will at this point, however, be 100% electronic. All organic matter will have been removed. We will call him Bob 2.0.

There is the final rub. No one will be able to convince Bob he is not a human being. While an outside observer will see a robot, from the inside Bob will believe himself to be a person. With the final conversion, will the government now declare Bob no longer has human rights, the right to contract, the right to own property? Will all of Bob’s possessions now pass to his heirs? And if Bob is in fact now property, will his robotic form also pass to his heirs as property? If the law denies Bob his civil rights, his new owner could force him to be a domestic slave. He would no longer have free will. He would now spend the rest of his existence doing what he was told by his rightful owner.

If Bob had a living human wife, would their marriage now be voided because Bob is now a machine? Given the time and money spent to prevent gay marriage, can you imagine what will happen when people want to marry robots? In this instance Mrs. Bob became the unwitting wife of a robot when her human Bob crossed over to being 100% electronic. At what point will the government issue a death certificate and declare Bob dead? Bob has been collecting Social Security for 60 years. Will the government agree to pay social security payments to someone with a life expectancy of three hundred years? The easy solution would be to declare all augmented life ineligible for Social Security. They may be elderly, but they have abilities far more robust than their younger but unenhanced human counterparts.

Bob has a rather strong argument that he is in fact still human. And if people are not willing to accept Bob’s humanity, they will be hard-pressed to allow people to enslave an entity that was once clearly human and still believes itself to be so. This situation is ripe for a compromise. The point is we must make concessions as these changes become more robust and ubiquitous.Bob will represent that ultimate last act when a person passes from being an organic life form to an electronic life form. To Bob, the transition will feel like a natural progression to save and protect his health. There are those on the outside who will find it an abomination. They will try to keep Bob out of their social groups, their neighborhoods, the voting booth, or holding public office. As we create more and more Bobs, they will then organize and demand their civil rights - if they do not have them already. If Bob does continue in his electronic form to be a member of society with full human rights, we are now on the slippery slope.

First, for efficiency, if for no other reason, robotic companies will start manufacturing robots that are identical to Bob in his final format. They will then mold a face to be identical to the person who is about to be replaced, if he should so desire. Then, rather than being replaced piecemeal over a 60 year time period, a person in poor health could have himself downloaded into the robotic format in just one brain scanning operation. We can call this entity Bob 3.0. No longer will you have to hobble around with failing organs, failing muscles and withering bones. At the first sign that the body is beginning to fail, you will now have the option to be downloaded into a robotic format in one procedure.
If Bob 2.0 is entitled to human rights, how would Bob 3.0 not be entitled to those same human rights? During the debate over gay marriage, a compromise was offered where their union would be known as a “civil union”. This avoided all the religious arguments and objections to two men being married. A civil union would serve the same function as a marriage. It would allow two people to share in all the legal rights that we associate with the marriage. While it would not have the title “marriage,” it would still serve the same purpose, and allow for the same protection.
When Bob 2.0 and Bob 3.0 press for the recognition of their human rights, I can envision a similar compromise being offered. The traditional definition of a human being obviously entailed organic life. The strict constructionists among us will be objecting to the term “human” rights being applied to a self-autonomous robotic entity. We may have new terms such as “rights of autonomous entities.” The rights for the autonomous entities will in fact mimic and encompass what we previously referred to as human rights: the right to own property, enter into contracts, vote, enter marriage (civil unions) and control your own destiny as you so desire.

The robotic manufacturers will also proceed to create Bob 4.0. This is a robot that has no human roots, nor a human mind downloaded to its mainframe. This robot will have the ability to learn. This robot will be sold to consumers just like any other household appliance. You will be able to download various programs so that Bob 4.0 can clean the house, do the dishes and drive the kids to school. If Bob 4.0 is identical to Bob 2.0 and Bob 3.0 in every way short of the human download component, it is only a matter of time before he becomes every bit as complex with a unique and identifiable personality just as Bob 2.0 and Bob 3.0 have. When Bob 4.0 sues for recognition of his “rights of autonomous entities” we are now faced with the collision of someone’s property rights colliding with another entity’s claim for autonomy. The family that paid $100,000 for Bob 4.0 is not going to be content to watch him walk out the door and travel to Europe so he can “go find himself.”

If Bob 4.0 obtains his civil rights from the courts, the owner has now been lawfully stripped of his property. He has lost one hundred thousand dollars. The class-action lawsuit filed by all the owners against the manufacturer for constructive fraud will be massive - the legal theory being they were defrauded out of $100,000 and received nothing in return. The brief possession of the robot (Bob 4.0) was illusory, at best. The homeowners will claim that the manufacturer's sale of robots was tantamount to human trafficking based on the court’s latest ruling.
So, if you are still with me, what are your thoughts on what we should do with complex robotic entities of the future. Do we buy and sell them as property or do we declare them a new life form? Or is it something else altogether? Your move.