"Once the superintelligence thought-experiment is upgraded to an X-risk, lots of other thought experiments are sucked along in its wake. That's where "rights for robots" comes in, the idea that we should spend time thinking about whether chatbots should have human rights.
The best argument for this is that every time we extend rights to the nonhuman world, we end up treating each other better. Movements to extend moral consideration to animals raised uncomfortable questions about the treatment of humans: slaves, workers, poor people, women, children. The Rights for Nature movement, which seeks to extend legal and moral personhood to watersheds and forests, has been key to winning legal and moral victories to protect the environment, and thus the animals and people who depend on it.
But while extending rights to natural things produces positive spillovers for human thriving and rights, the opposite happened when we extended personhood to artificial constructs. Corporate personhood has been a catastrophe for human thriving, conjuring into existence a new race of immortal, pluripotent colony organisms we call "limited liability corporations" that use us as disposable, inconvenient gut flora even as they consume our environment, our political system, and our lives:"
https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/10/posthuman-as-in-no-humans/
@remixtures Human rights for chat bots and monkeys is a mental illness.
Human rights, first of all, do not exist. They are stories we tell each other. But, we insist, but at the end of the day, they are human rights.
In order to have rights and obligations, you also need self-awarness and a conscious mind. You need to understand them and how they apply to you and others. Absent that, extending rights is just b.s.
The best way to solve it is property rights. An animal is your proerty,
@remixtures and therefore your right to your property extends protection to the animal which you own. That's elegant, simple, and ethical, since it is fully compatible with a libertarian society, that is not built on violence (unlikes democracies, which are all built in violence and theft).
