Roborights

A UK study stirred up a bit of a discussion on the rights of robots last week, which leaves me with two ideas. 1) We don’t give rights to our vaccuum cleaner or computer, so why would we need to grant rights to something we create, and 2) do we really want to create “self-awareness” in a digital device in the first place? Will we really generate sufficient benefit from this that it outweighs all the long-term risks? In the end, I doubt that question will endup being relevant, since somewhere in the world someone will do it anyway, regardless of whether it should be done.