Robot Sex

Nod. That brings up some fascinating concepts, of course. When does a robot become a person?

(Sagan was the one who brought up the idea to me that if someone killed an alien ambassador, we'd call it "murder" even though it wasn't the unlawful killing of a *human*. I think he may have used the notion of "person", but whether he did or didn't, that's the notion I use.)

We could make an amazing simulacrum of humanity with good responses and the right vocal timber and so forth. And we might find that it's "pleased" to "serve" by its programming, but when would its spirit be screaming to be free? (You can use spirit metaphorically or literally, as far as I'm concerned.)

When would we be engaging in the anthropomorphic fallacy - and when would we be denying essential personhood?

The question of sentience does bother me a lot. As a magic-worker, I do occasionally run into this question with magically constructed entities, which may have wills of their own, but which don't always count as people. To me, there are three capacities which define a person: Self-will or agency (can this entity make decisions for itself?); emotional ability (does this entity feel Love/empathy and pain/distress?); and growth capacity (can this entity increase its ability over time through its own efforts?). In the simplest form, a creature that can make speech and take responsibility for things by its own choice is effectively a person, and removing any of these three abilities (agency, emotion, growth) is a crime.

However, then we run into the question of limits. No thing should have unlimited growth without responsibility and acknowledgment of others' rights; the greater a being, the more it must be able to limit its power when interacting with fragile things. So we start off as children, weak but enthusiastic, and must learn how to control ourselves with grace and finesse as we grow. Those who continue to throw self-control out the window are in error in some way.

Basically, Asimov's robots were not moral beings if they didn't have the Three Laws to guide them, and any of them could run amok if given the wrong instruction or if they came to an erroneous conclusion. Yet his robot stories included robots that, even without human emotion, still felt distress or improvement based on their situation and memories, such as when thinking of an old friend.

Asimov also wrote of robots built to discover ways to have machines safe for humans that didn't need the Three Laws. The answer given was to limit them to activities, behaviors, and risks that humans need not fear, such as a robotic bird that eats mosquitos.