@Seek If you cause something that is sentient and sapient to die, that is murder.
OK, let’s play with that notion a bit, how little or much sentient does it need to have to equal a live human, since we know you place it above an unborn human, to be worthy of not getting terminated no matter what? For instance, in the name of expedience only a very rudimentary program was placed in it, enough to know animals from humans, buildings from trees, etc. and the rest was planned to be learned and discovered through the learning algorithm. If the automaton was taking too long to get to projected gains and the maker decided he/she no longer wanted to wait at a $75 charge twice a month to keep the automaton’s energy topped off, terminating the project and the automaton equals a murder of a human?
@elbanditoroso Suppose that this sentient and sapient automaton is a clear danger to others. But the creator disagrees.
Does society have the authority – even the obligation – to destroy the automaton, even against the wishes of its creator?
If it is a danger the creator cannot control, then yes, society can had has done so in other areas, this would be no different, because it is still just a machine. If the maker wanted to spare its life he/she should take it and move to an area where people will not be in danger.
@Ltryptophan Yea. It’s a machine. Siri, on your phone can answer more q’s than humans in permanent vegetative states that are fully protected by law, but you could shut her off if she was a local program.
I tried as I may to come up with some logical reasoning against that, but I cannot. That would be to say you could not deactivate Big Blue because it can beat many people (if not all) at chess.
@ragingloli [..Children are created from the building blocks of their parents’ DNA. Are they property?”
Again, irrelevant, children might be created from the building blocks of DNA of the parents, that mean it took two, not one, an automaton can be created by one, however, parents might place the building blocks in play but they have no control over the process after that. Anyone creating an automaton had complete control over how it is made down to skin, eye, hair color, and other things.
@kritiper Only if they have exclusive rights to it’s ownership.
The only way that would happen if a corporation developed it, or it was a team of people who agreed to share in the creation, if that was the case, then something could be done to save it especially if only one of them had rights to the charging system.