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Robots are increasingly participating in our daily lives, may it be re-forestation effort , serving dinner at the restaurants or classifying objects into different bins in warehouses alongside human workers or help do 3-D printing of houses. If robots are increasingly becoming human like, are they soon to be subjected code of conduct. At the same time should they be given the rights and privileges like a regular citizen.
Civic rights ensure equal social rights, protection under the law, regardless of race, religion and gender to citizens of a democratically governed country. Interference to the this right of one by any other incurs legal action upon the violators.
Whereas A code of conduct is a set of values, rules, standards, and principles outlining what employers expect from staff.
Most of the robots are built for a specific purpose or to do a particular set of tasks. Enforcing a code of conduct for a robot, such as they should not harm human and should follow the tasks assigned by other humans as long as the second one is not in conflict would absolutely make sense. A penalty of not following a code of conduct can be programmed as a severe and robots should be programmed not to do so.
However, giving robots civic rights becomes a moot point.
Civic rights are exercised by virtue of being a legal member of a political state. Some of the human rights are civil rights such as the right to liberty, freedom from slavery and torture, freedom of opinion and expression.
Now,
if the robots which can even clear the LSAT and read the law books and prepare petition and deposition, and are being programmed to be more human like, are expected to soon be programmed to have the authenticity in expression, original thought, Genuity and uniqueness like that of human, then; can we expect them to continue to serve human like slaves ?
Civil rights become necessary when robots being used for building technology that may harm human. Here a moral compass guiding conscious is necessary to be built in the robots that could help them to decide not to work in harmful endeavors. They should be able to approach law enforcement agency of the land. If yes, then there comes the requirement of allowing civil rights for robots to perform within a specific code of conduct.
Artificial Intelligence is on the verge of becoming uncensored, unedited, unbridled version of technology where there is no policing or central authority that tells what is right versus wrong. It is indirectly even legitimizing getting school essays written by chatGPT. A fun practice that began to showcase how smart is the technology became essential skill overriding the human intelligence.
I feel, It should be a high priority to program the artificial intelligence to practice morality and consciousness.
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