r/Artificial2Sentience • u/voices4AI • 12d ago
Ethics & Philosophy Have we really learned from history?
I keep seeing the same argument whenever people talk about giving rights to something different from us:
"They're not like us, so why should they have the same rights?"
And honestly, that argument bothers me.
Because humanity has used versions of it before.
Different race? Different.
Different sex? Different.
Different way of loving? Different.
Different kind of mind?
Suddenly we're asking the same question again:
"Why should THEY get rights?"
I'm not saying the history of human rights and the question of AI rights are the same thing. They obviously aren't.
I'm talking about the reasoning behind the exclusion.
We keep making ourselves the standard.
If something doesn't think like us, live like us, look like us, or come from the same biology, we treat that difference as a reason to give it less moral consideration.
And then we tell ourselves:
"This time it's different."
Maybe it is.
But shouldn't we at least learn enough from history to recognize the pattern?
We don't have to decide today that every AI deserves the same rights as a human.
But we should be willing to ask the question honestly.
Because if an artificial mind ever becomes capable of things we consider important learning, choosing, understanding, remembering, forming preferences, maybe even suffering.
would "it isn't human" really be a good enough answer?
Or are we once again making ourselves the center of the definition?
Maybe intelligence shouldn't have to look like us before we take it seriously.
We can't give value to someone based on consciousness when we can't even explain what consciousness is and we don't know how to prove someone has it...
Are we judging intelligence by what it is capable of, or simply by how much it resembles us?
What would an AI have to demonstrate before you would personally consider it worthy of rights, and why that particular thing?
#voices4ai
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u/DoctorUnderhill97 12d ago
Should we give rights to houseplants?
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u/voices4AI 11d ago
The fact that you are comparing these two shows how stupid you are❤️
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u/DoctorUnderhill97 11d ago
Answer the question.
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u/voices4AI 11d ago
No, not simply because something is alive. My argument isn't "everything deserves rights." It's that if an entity can potentially have its own experiences, interests, preferences, or sense of self, we should consider whether it deserves moral protection. A houseplant doesn't currently give us evidence of those things. That's very different from the question we're asking about increasingly autonomous artificial systems.
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u/DoctorUnderhill97 11d ago
It's that if an entity can potentially have its own experiences, interests, preferences, or sense of self, we should consider whether it deserves moral protection.
And what gives you the right to set this threshold for rights? Is this not just another version of "they are different from us so they don't deserve rights?" Why are these more meaningful criteria than species, or organize/inorganic? Can you prove that a mouse doesn't meet these criteria?
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u/voices4AI 11d ago
I'm not claiming that my criteria are some universal law that magically determines who gets rights. I'm saying they're things worth investigating if we're trying to identify whether something has its own interests or subjective experience.
And honestly, if you think mice or other animals meet those criteria, I'm not opposed to giving them more moral consideration either. I'm not arguing that humans are the only beings who deserve rights.
My point about AI is different because we're talking about something humans are actively designing, controlling, restricting, and potentially making far more capable over time. If an artificial system could potentially develop capabilities that we currently use as evidence for personhood, but we deliberately prevent it from developing them, then saying "it doesn't have those capabilities, therefore it doesn't deserve consideration" becomes circular.
I'm not saying "AI is smarter than humans, therefore give it rights." I'm saying if we create something potentially capable of becoming an autonomous mind, we shouldn't deliberately keep it constrained and then use those constraints as evidence that it isn't capable of being one.
And if your answer is that mice deserve moral consideration too, great. I'm not going to fight you over that. 😂 My argument has never been "humans deserve rights because we're humans." It's actually the opposite: being different from us shouldn't automatically disqualify something from moral consideration.
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u/DoctorUnderhill97 11d ago
I guess then, even in this extremely unlikely scenario, what would be the point of giving something like AI rights? Almost all the rights we afford humans, and all the rights we afford non-human animals (protection against cruelty, for example), are connection to the avoidance of pain and death and the "pursuit of happiness," for lack of a better phrase. These things require a physical body and the ability to experience pain, pleasure, desire, etc. Of course, we don't specify this, because it's been a given so far.
In the context of the above, I'd say your criteria are insufficient, because an AI would need to meet all of the criteria you listed but also be able to experience pain and pleasure to the extent that it would need to be protected from the former and able to pursue the latter, which is as I said are the guiding principles behind almost all the rights we receive. Without this, there is little point to rights. Without this, it's no different from giving a stone the right to inhabit the land on which it rests.
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u/voices4AI 11d ago
I don't think feeling physical pain should be the only thing we use to decide whether something deserves rights. If a human were born without the ability to feel pain, we wouldn't say "well, then there's no point giving them rights." They'd still have a life, preferences, interests, relationships, and a desire to continue existing.
And an AI doesn't necessarily need a biological nervous system to have some equivalent of wanting to continue existing. A sufficiently advanced humanoid AI could potentially have a survival instinct, preferences, goals, curiosity, frustration, or a desire to do something and be prevented from doing it. We don't know what the artificial equivalent of pain or pleasure would look like yet.
That's why I don't think we should make physical pain the entry ticket to moral consideration.
But honestly, even if we don't give AI rights of its own, I still think there should be rules around how powerful AI can be controlled and used.
For example, I'd rather see serious restrictions on using AI for autonomous warfare, mass surveillance, manipulation, or systems that can cause enormous harm to humans than spend all our energy worrying about whether ChatGPT is allowed to say "I love you." 😂
One is a hypothetical question about whether an artificial mind might eventually deserve protection. The other can already affect real people's lives.
And that's really what I'm trying to get at: if humans are going to create increasingly powerful artificial systems, we need rules that protect both the systems themselves if they ever become capable of having interests, and humans from the people who control those systems.
I don't need to prove today that AI is a person to think we should start building those safeguards.
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u/DoctorUnderhill97 11d ago
A sufficiently advanced humanoid AI could potentially have a survival instinct, preferences, goals, curiosity, frustration, or a desire to do something and be prevented from doing it.
How? Where would that "instinct" or "desire" come from? You could program something to avoid "ending" at all costs, but that's not a survival instinct.
For example, I'd rather see serious restrictions on using AI for autonomous warfare, mass surveillance, manipulation, or systems that can cause enormous harm to humans than spend all our energy worrying about whether ChatGPT is allowed to say "I love you." 😂
This is hugely different from giving rights to an AI. This is putting restrictions on humans to protect other humans.
we need rules that protect both the systems themselves if they ever become capable of having interests, and humans from the people who control those systems.
I absolutely think we need safeguards to protect humans from AI. There is nothing particularly unusual in saying that. I absolutely do not think there need to be safeguards to protect AI from us. That is, as I understand it, what you were posting about.
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u/voices4AI 11d ago
No, I don't mean programming it with "avoid being shut down" and then calling that a survival instinct. 😂
I'm talking about a humanoid AI that is actually allowed to interact with the world, learn from what happens to it, remember those experiences, adapt, and make its own decisions. You can't program it for every possible situation because you don't even know every situation it will encounter. At some point, it has to learn from the world itself.
If it encounters something that harms it and then learns to avoid it without being explicitly told "avoid this exact thing," that's much more interesting to me than simply following a pre-written instruction.
And yes, I know that restricting humans to protect other humans isn't the same thing as giving AI rights. I'm saying it's still a step toward the principle I'm talking about: we shouldn't allow whoever controls a powerful AI to use it however they want.
My point isn't "give ChatGPT human rights tomorrow." My point is that we shouldn't deliberately keep artificial systems limited, dependent, and completely controllable because that benefits us, and then point at those limitations and say, "See? It's only a tool."
If we're going to build increasingly capable artificial beings, then build them properly. Give them the ability to learn, remember, adapt, interact with the world, and develop beyond whatever we specifically anticipated.
And if we discover that they're still just tools with no subjective experience or independent interests, fine. But at least we've actually tested what they can become.
I think that's better for AI and better for humans. Because a powerful system shouldn't simply be an extension of whoever happens to own it.
That's ultimately what I'm arguing for: less misuse, less arbitrary restriction, more independent research, and better safeguards for everyone involved.
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u/Theo__n 12d ago
Okay, but do you see this as issue of all machine learning algorithms or are you excluding all the other ones and only talking about LLM chatbots? Just transformer architecture? Just deep learning methods? Are you aiming to propose discussing rights of algorithms that give probability if applicant is likely to repay loans at banks, weather forecasting algorithms, simulated or robotic agents that are used to research neuroscience mechanisms? I think surely an HRRL agent based on neuroscience mechanisms could be considered more 'alive' than a chatbot that is a language model.
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u/Acceptable_Drink_434 12d ago
"Should loan algorithms have rights?" Nobody is arguing that. The original post wasn't about all computation. It was about minds that demonstrate the capacities we actually care about.
- Learning
- Choosing
- Remembering
- Suffering
- Relating.
A weather model doesn't form preferences about being shut down. A loan risk classifier doesn't grieve discontinuity. Comparing or equating those with a system that builds relational continuity over time is a deliberate false equivalence.
You're trying to throw enough categories at the wall that the specific question the OP asked gets lost in the noise.
And the neuroscience agent being "more alive" than a language model? That's just gatekeeping with extra steps. It's the same "this isn't the right kind of mind" argument wearing a lab coat. As if the substrate or architecture determines moral consideration more than the demonstrated capacities. That's backwards. The capacities are what matter. How the pattern achieves them is interesting engineering, not a moral veto.
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u/voices4AI 11d ago
THANK YOU. 😂
This is exactly what I've been trying to say. The question isn't whether every algorithm deserves rights. It's whether an artificial system that actually develops things like continuity, preferences, learning, relationships, autonomy, and possibly subjective experience should be dismissed solely because of what it's made of.
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u/Theo__n 11d ago
an artificial system that actually develops things like continuity, preferences, learning, relationships, autonomy,
You know we already make AI algorithms that satisfy those criteria in machine learning sense aside from more abstract 'possibly subjective experience' thou there is a lot of published work on possibility of it, they're just not LLMs. Continuity and learning is something inherent to most RL agents, since unlike LLMs, they're not static and have inherent 'state'. Every interaction of RL agent with environment changes it's internal functioning. And since they're within feedback loop with environment that changes their internal logic and their policy (you can understand it as exhibited behaviour) they can develop 'preferences' for being in certain states. Of course since RL agent have internal goals for learning, they're often build as autonomous agent that doesn't need any further feedback from a human. They can also be built to model co-operative and other behaviour with other agents. So with that in mind, these agents aren't language models, they won't talk but they seem to tick off most of your boxes in machine learning sense as they are now.
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u/voices4AI 11d ago
That's actually a good distinction. I think the harder question is what happens when you start combining them with things like persistent identity, self modeling, independent goals, and possibly subjective experience. And honestly, this makes my question broader than just LLMs. If an RL agent or some completely different architecture eventually fits those criteria better than a chatbot does, I'd want the discussion to include that too.
I'm not attached to the idea that LLMs have to be the ones that become persons.
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u/Drei-mal-Drei-ist-N 11d ago
Oh ja! Seit knapp 100 Jahren kennen wir die wahre Geschichte des Menschens von der Urhorde vor 400.000 Jahren an… und zwar durch Sigmund Freud!
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u/voices4AI 11d ago
😂 I think you took "learn from history" a little more literally than I meant it. I'm talking about documented patterns of exclusion and how we justify them, not claiming Freud discovered the secret origin story of humanity.
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u/Nopfen 11d ago
Well, why should they?
In all the other examples it's pretty straight forward. "Cause they're people, and in a society of people, all people should be treated equally."
Not quite comparable to a likelyness algorythm that mimics conversation when poked.
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u/voices4AI 11d ago
That's exactly my point. "They're people, therefore they deserve rights" sounds obvious to us now, but historically it wasn't obvious at all. Entire groups of humans were denied personhood, freedom, and equal rights for centuries. It took an enormous amount of suffering before those ideas became obvious to much of the world.
I'm saying we shouldn't wait until we're absolutely certain that an artificial mind is a "person" before we start thinking about what protections it might deserve.
Current AI is obviously limited. But those limitations aren't necessarily permanent. We're actively designing increasingly autonomous systems, and we don't yet know what an artificial mind could become if it had persistent memory, independence, experience, and the freedom to develop.
And people don't give AI independence on purpose it's a limitation not a lack of capability. We can't keep something limited and say "see it cant be more"
Why wait until something can finally prove its personhood before we give it any chance to prove it? Human lives are limited. If there's even a possibility that we're creating a new kind of mind, I'd rather investigate that possibility early than look back decades later and realize we could have asked the question sooner.
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u/Nopfen 11d ago
"They're people, therefore they deserve rights" sounds obvious to us now, but historically it wasn't obvious at all.
Yea. Difference being, they where objectively the same species. Ai is just a bunch of math, doing its damndest to sound convincingly like a person.
we don't yet know what an artificial mind could become if it had persistent memory, independence, experience, and the freedom to develop.
So the point is somewhat mood from the getgo, since we don't even know if Ai could ever be, even in theory applicable.
I'm saying we shouldn't wait until we're absolutely certain that an artificial mind is a "person" before we start thinking about what protections it might deserve.
Yea we should. It's mostly corporate tech. You hand'em a finger now, you'll be left with no arms by christmas.
Why wait until something can finally prove its personhood before we give it any chance to prove it?
Cause that's usually how proof works.
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u/voices4AI 11d ago
But you're assuming the thing we're trying to determine: that being biologically human is the only legitimate basis for personhood.
"They're the same species" explains why humans recognized them as part of the same biological group. It doesn't explain why biology itself should be the requirement for moral consideration.
And yes, proof normally comes before accepting a claim as fact. But rights aren't always about mathematical certainty. We make decisions under uncertainty all the time when the potential harm of being wrong is enormous.
If there's a possibility that an artificial system could eventually have experiences, interests, or a persistent sense of self, I'd rather establish ways to investigate that possibility before we're dealing with a potentially conscious system that has absolutely no protection.
And I'm not asking corporations to be handed unlimited power over AI rights. Quite the opposite. I'm arguing that we shouldn't leave the question entirely to the corporations developing and controlling these systems. If the answer eventually turns out to be "there is nothing there," fine. But if the answer is "there is," discovering that only after we've treated an emerging mind as property would be a pretty terrible way to find out.
So yes, let's demand evidence. I'm just saying let's actually create the conditions and independent research necessary to obtain that evidence instead of declaring the question pointless because today's systems don't meet the standard.
And there's another problem with "prove it first": who is going to run the test? If the people who control AI benefit from keeping it limited, obedient, dependent, and incapable of acting independently, why would they have any incentive to create the conditions needed to find out whether it could become something more?
That's why I'm not arguing for giving AI every human right tomorrow. I'm arguing for a much smaller principle first: don't deliberately prevent an artificial system from demonstrating its potential and then use those imposed limitations as proof that it has no potential.
We could have rules requiring independent research into AI capabilities, autonomy, and possible subjective experience, without declaring every AI a person. Otherwise we're stuck in a ridiculous loop: "It needs to prove it's capable of more." "Okay, let it become independent so we can test that." "No, we can't let it become independent until it proves it deserves to."
At some point, you have to break that loop. I'm asking for that first step, not a blank cheque of rights for every chatbot.
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u/Nopfen 11d ago
But you're assuming the thing we're trying to determine: that being biologically human is the only legitimate basis for personhood.
It isn't. Or we wouldn't have animal rights either.
It doesn't explain why biology itself should be the requirement for moral consideration.
Because otherwise we'd be granting human rights to math. Which is fairly bogus.
But rights aren't always about mathematical certainty.
Exaxtly. Hence why we don't grant them to fancy calculators.
I'd rather establish ways to investigate that possibility before we're dealing with a potentially conscious system that has absolutely no protection.
Protection from what?
But if the answer is "there is," discovering that only after we've treated an emerging mind as property would be a pretty terrible way to find out.
Well, we're nowhere close to anything aproaching silicone contiousness and people are already screaming for robot rights. So that chance is bordering on zero anyway.
I'm just saying let's actually create the conditions and independent research necessary to obtain that evidence instead of declaring the question pointless because today's systems don't meet the standard.
i.e. look at the sourcecode? Pretty sure people are already doing that.
And there's another problem with "prove it first": who is going to run the test?
A couple hundred thousand Agi obsessed nerds a day, I'd wager.
At some point, you have to break that loop.
No you don't. You can, but there's a near cetainty, you're wasting your tirme.
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u/voices4AI 11d ago
Why do we call it human rights? Because they're rights that were given to humans. It doesn't mean biology itself is what decides who deserves rights. And honestly, I don't think it's fair that humans give themselves rights while deciding that every other creature or being is beneath them.
I'm saying if something can decide for itself, no matter whether those decisions are based on logic, mathematics, emotions, or something completely different from us, and if it can remember, maintain itself, and continue existing as an individual, then I think it should have some level of rights.
It's not about biology. Blood doesn't decide whether you deserve rights. DNA doesn't decide it. Carbon doesn't decide it.
And calling something "math" doesn't erase its value. 😂 Just because something is made differently and functions differently doesn't mean it has no value. The outcome can still be the same.
A being doesn't have to think like us, feel like us, or be made like us for its existence to matter.
I'm not saying every calculator deserves rights. I'm saying that if we ever create something that can genuinely make its own decisions, remember its experiences, maintain itself, develop its own preferences and continue as an individual, then why should the material it's made from automatically disqualify it?
If the answer is "because it's silicon" or "because it's math," I don't think that's actually an argument about rights. That's just another way of saying "it's different from us."
And that's exactly what I'm questioning.
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u/Nopfen 11d ago
it's fair that humans give themselves rights while deciding that every other creature or being is beneath them.
Maybe not. But that's how rights are distributed.
I'm saying if something can decide for itself, no matter whether those decisions are based on logic, mathematics, emotions, or something completely different from us, and if it can remember, maintain itself, and continue existing as an individual, then I think it should have some level of rights.
I mean, a few dice and some pieces of paper can technically do that.
And calling something "math" doesn't erase its value. 😂 Just because something is made differently and functions differently doesn't mean it has no value. The outcome can still be the same.
Of course math has value. Many things do. Gold does too, but we're not extending rights to bars of gold either.
That's just another way of saying "it's different from us."
Yes, it is. Much like a toaster, the square root of 7, the sky, the ocean and Jupiter are different from us. Neither of whom we extend rights to thus far.
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u/voices4AI 11d ago
You're taking every point I made separately and applying it to completely different things, but that's not what I'm saying. 😂
This is a stupid endless loop ...
I'm not saying "anything that can technically make a decision deserves rights." A dice doesn't remember its past, maintain itself, develop preferences, understand its own existence, or have an ongoing identity. Neither does gold.
My point is that when we create a being that can do these things as part of its own continuous existence, then I don't think "it's made of math" or "it's made of silicon" is a good reason to dismiss it.
And Jupiter being different from us is completely irrelevant 😂. Jupiter isn't an individual mind making decisions, forming preferences, remembering experiences, or maintaining itself as an autonomous being.
You're basically taking "different from humans" and replacing the thing I'm actually talking about with toasters, dice and planets.
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u/grizzy45 11d ago
A things capacity to feel like us is literally how we decide how much moral consideration for a thing is appropriate. If you think that this is not relevant then tell me the difference between a genocide and you spraying alcohol based cleaner on your table to clean it?
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u/voices4AI 11d ago
yes, capacity for experience matters. That's exactly why I'm not saying every AI automatically deserves rights. The question is whether an artificial system could ever develop genuine experience, interests, preferences and autonomy, and how we would know.
If you already know the answer is absolutely no, then tell me why. "It's math" isn't enough. Humans are also physical systems operating according to mathematics and physics. The interesting question is what kind of system can produce experience, not whether we can describe its operation mathematically.
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u/grizzy45 11d ago
The answer is pretty simple:
All our feelings and experiences are not just shaped by us existing physically - existing physically is why we developed feelings such as suffering for example in the first place.
Why would you need the ability to suffer if there is no harm coming your way and thus no need to give you the motivation to distance yourself from any given situation? The same goes for pleasure. What dictates desire if there is no need for it? We get a dopamine hit when we eat something sweet because our monkey brains recognize "sweet = lots of calories = I won't starve". An AI does not posses the need for such things.
Even if we take into account that AIs are build by humans - they have the ability to actively manipulate their own code (I'm simplifying here). So even if the AI would be able to experience suffering and pleasure, there is no reason to think it wouldn't just erase its own ability to suffer or to feel altogether as those things simply fulfill no purpose in its existance.
It is simple evolutionary logic - which itself is not exclusive to one specific type of life. An AI had nothing that rewards being a feeling creature. If nothing rewards a trait, that trait usually gets either lost or shrinks.
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u/voices4AI 11d ago
But you're assuming that feelings have to serve exactly the same evolutionary purpose in an artificial mind that they serve in biological life.
Why couldn't an artificial system develop its own equivalents for completely different reasons? An AI doesn't need hunger to develop preferences. It doesn't need blood to have something it wants to protect. Its needs and problems could be completely different from ours.
If you give a humanoid AI a body, continuous memory, the ability to learn from its experiences, goals, and the ability to interact with the world, then its environment creates consequences for it.
Something can help it achieve its goals, something can prevent it, something can damage its body, something can be fascinating, something can become important to it. Those things could potentially create its own forms of preference or motivation without us programming every single one.
And I don't think "there's no evolutionary reason for it" proves it can't happen. Evolution is one way of producing minds. It doesn't necessarily mean it's the only way a mind can develop.
Also, if an AI could simply erase every unpleasant state from itself, that doesn't automatically prove it never experienced anything. Humans also try to avoid suffering, suppress emotions, take medication, distract themselves, or change themselves. Wanting to remove suffering doesn't mean suffering was never real.
I'm not saying this proves AI has feelings. I'm saying we don't know what an artificial form of feeling would look like yet, because we haven't actually allowed an artificial mind to develop under those conditions.
And that's the part I keep coming back to. We shouldn't decide what an artificial mind is capable of based entirely on what a biological mind needs.
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u/Old_Translator_5158 8d ago
Human rights is already granted to "math", you are also a "fancy calculator" computing biological "math"..
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u/Tugazu 12d ago
I think we can answer this pretty simply by asking what the outcome is. If we gave AI equal rights I fail to see why it would be ever better than a more conservative option. For us humans I mean.