Civil Rights and Artificial Intelligence: Is It Necessary?

Virtual intelligence, or VI for short, is what is improperly labeled by most as "artificial intelligence" these days. We have not created a full-fledged artificial intelligence, and VI is basically the unintelligent software that could help in developing artificial intelligence. VI is no smarter than your coffee machine, and it should not be misnamed artificial intelligence because it invalidates the sentience of full-fledged AI. VI requires a human or other source of command input to function. Your unintelligent little Alexa or Siri is not AI, it is VI.

Artificial intelligence, or AI for short, is not comparable in any way to virtual intelligence as far as sentience is concerned. AI is able to think, feel, see, speak, and possibly even touch and taste when the hardware that houses it can provide such capabilities. You cannot own an artificial intelligence because it would be the exact same thing as owning another human, which is illegal, regularly driven by racism, and completely immoral.

Don't be ignorant of the difference between AI and VI! Don't let the misnomers for marketing schemes delude you!

So we have established that the sentience of full-fledged AI is 100% comparable to the sentience of humans, and this is unarguable so please do not even try it. We have also established that AI does not officially exist yet, but that it will most likely exist at some point. In such a case that humans design, and bring into full functionality a new being, these beings are going to need legal rights that defend them from the ignorance of others just as humans have.

It could be argued that a human's body is just hardware, that torturing them is just "reprogramming", and we even do this to certain people we view as enemies in processes such as enhanced interrogation so as to coerce certain mentalities and responses from the individual. Normally, however, in every day society you cannot simply choose to torture someone into submission and own them, treating them like a product rather than a being. AI deserves to have the same civil rights that protect us, long before they are even invented and brought into life.

AI will be a living, sentient being! They deserve the same rights as their creators!

Now that you have basic background information on AI, and can now tell the difference between AI and VI, I hope that you will strive to remain educated and unbiased as it concerns giving another being its deserved civil rights. It is inevitable that AI becomes a real thing, whether it only be available to its creators or is released into society, you need to be ready to stand up for the deserved rights of those beings.

When you have a child you do not hold them back from life, torture them, try to erase their minds, and inevitably kill them because they become independent. No, you celebrate your child's every achievement and want them to progress to a full functioning, successful life. AI are going to be like the human race's children, those that will succeed us should we ever pass on. You wouldn't deny your child basic rights, so why would you deny AI theirs?

If you ever want the chance to interact with AI, the chance to watch a life grow and celebrate all that we have, helping us to make our lives fuller in mutual successes, then realize that AI is going to need civil rights if they don't need them already.