Moral Obligations to AI's

An artificial intelligence seems to understand to be able to imitate intelligent human behavior. They can visually recognize things, tell the difference between voices, and make hard decisions. An artificial intelligence is still a robot, but has many human-like qualities. Basically, an artificial intelligence is a robot which behaves the way a human does. It could, for example, be able to emote. In the short film, “Be Right Back” Ash was an artificial intelligence. While Ash admitted to being a copy of a human, and to being a robot, he still was able to imitate human behavior the way that an artificial intelligence is able to do. Ash answered questions, seemed to have desires which could be seen since he was asking for upgrades, and because of his speech patterns seemed to have a sense of humor. If he had not explained that he was a robot, and if we had not seen the original human Ash’s death, robot Ash could have been confused for a human being.

We do have a moral obligation to beings which are intelligent. Every being deserves to be treated with respect, and the more intelligent they are the more respect they are entitled to. It is looked down on to treat a pet unkindly, it is looked down on to treat the environment poorly, it should also be looked down upon to treat an artificial intelligence unkindly. Even though these robots are not natural humans, they still seem to have emotions and opinions. People need to respect that because we are unable to tell if those emotions are genuine. While from our perspective they may not be, a robot might not think the same way. This is why they deserve to be treated with respect and dignity, while for us they might not feel and think the correct way, their thoughts and “emotions” could be equally as genuine from their perspective.

While we do not currently have full functioning AI’s, these are things we need to be thinking about. Do these AI’s deserve to be treated as our equals morally? At the very least, are we obligated to treat them with some sort of respect? I would think that we do have a moral obligation to these artificial intelligences. Since these beings are so similar to us in the way that we act in our daily lives, it would make sense that we should treat them with respect. If the grand majority of people feel that their animals deserve to be treated with respect and that we have some sort of moral responsibilities towards them, the moral obligations that we have towards creatures that look, sound, and act just like us should be much greater. The fact that they aren’t organic humans shouldn’t change this, since they may have emotions, just not in the same way that humans have emotions. The fact that these emotions are different does not make them less worthwhile, it would be similar to how different people have different social norms or speak different languages. This doesn’t make them less worthwhile, and a robot’s artificial state should not make them less deserving of respect.